another travellin' song: April 2005

leaving barrow, one way or another.

the team returning with part of the whale--sonny, ron and myself. nearly the entire village will receive a portion of this whale. we felt lucky to receive what we did.

view from the back of the sled towing our load of whale meat and blubber back in...

this is the head of the whale--it will be thrown back into the ocean with the belief that another whale will return to that spot next year. another whaling crew in the water in the background.

the leftovers after butchering the whale...the crew is in the back, the blood in the front. the ribcage is off to the left, near the wooden sled.

whale guts--about 5x5 feet in dimensions.

while we were out on the ice another crew landed a whale--which you can see spouting from its blowhole here...they fired about 8 shoulder gun rounds into it before finally bringing it ashore.

flipper and baleen. for our "help" we received a portion of the flipper (skin and blubber). eaten raw it is called "muktuk". um, chewy.

this is the camp where the whale was pulled onto the ice. it's about 3.5 miles out on the icepack. the whale was a short, fat bowhead.

towing mishap on the way out...

about 2 miles out on the icepack over the arctic ocean. still about a mile from open water.

heading out onto the ice to help out a whaling crew...sonny on sled, ron driving.

joe's museum: opens at about 11pm when joe gets off work at pepe's mexican restaurant. full of stuff he found on the beach and that the smithsonian, apparently, covets. i held a 600 year old caribou antler and stone hammer here.