To start reading from the beginning, go to May 11, 2008.
I sat one morning behind the store counter working on an intricate rose pattern needlepoint I'd ordered through a catalog. A gaze out the window across the frozen bay broke my concentration In the white distance I saw a cloud of snow rolling over the ice. I first associated it with something like a sandstorm -- sudden boiling wind pushing a wall of sand across the desert. I thought I was viewing a rare natural phenomenon until Maggie explained it was reindeer. My imagination then switched to scenes from a western movie where wild cattle stampeded campsites, fallen cowboys . . . everything in their path. I imagined a thundering heard of reindeer storming through Golovin right past the window I stared through. I hadn't yet seen a reindeer and I was going to see them now in all their glory.
It wasn't an uncontrolled stampede, however; the cloud of snow rising above the horizon was due in part to a couple of men on snow machines herding the cluster of deer toward Golovin to be slaughtered. As I write this many years later and some 3,000+ miles away in a cozy tree lined bucolic neighborhood, I feel a ping of grief for the deer. At the time, however, sustenance indigenous to my relatives and ancestors was racing to the village -- it was exhilarating.
I don't remember, and probably didn't ask, how they were killed. If the 30 some deer were shot, I don't remember hearing the gunshots. Late afternoon Maggie sent Sister and I to the slaughter area. The ice was red and pink with a pile of reindeer heads and guts the only remaining evidence of that wild herd hours earlier. I assumed the meat and furs were distributed among the villagers. Sister and I were on an errand to get some "books". "Books", if I remember correctly were a grisly part of the esophagus that did look something like a floppy bundle of pages. Maggie boiled them for dinner and we had a rather noisy meal of slurping and sucking. She fixed another meal of tongue and reindeer brains -- the tongue was fine for me to eat but the brains were one of the few meals I just couldn't eat.
At dinner Mating mentioned that the reindeer heads made good seat covers. It took awhile before I understood he was talking about the fur skinned from the skull that made just the right size for a warm seat cover. I wasn't in need of a warm reindeer head seat cover but there was a pile of heads out there on the ice and the challenge was irresistible. The following evening I had a reindeer head on the kitchen table while Maggie, relaxing on the black vinyl living room couch and Martin in the lounger, talked me through the skinning process. I was happy to have another opportunity to use the ulu she gave me months earlier to skin squirrels. Later that winter, while living and working in Nome, I purchased a Honda Odyssey ATV. My reindeer head served as a warm seat cover. Tragically, one night, I forgot to bring the seat cover into the house and dogs must have carried it away.
However, I still have and display the rose pattern needlepoint pillow I made behind the store counter in Golovin.
(to be continued) copyright Tamara Ann Burgh, all rights reserved
I wish I'd picked up some antlers.
The Honda Odyssey I had in Nome.
The needlepoint pillow I made in Golovin.
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