Of caribou and people

Outside the sun glints off fresh snow on fresh ice. No tracks out there. I'd like to go make some -- anything besides sit here and fight words. Last fall it took me six weeks to write a piece about Sarah Palin. I earned $75 for it. I had zero interest in writing about her and only did so because I care about my country. Now, with equal hesitation, I'm writing about dead caribou. I'm doing so only because I care about caribou -- beautiful, amazing, tough, tasty caribou -- not because anybody asked me, not for money.

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When I was a toddler my dad shot 60-80 caribou a year, mostly in the fall. I don't know what the law or the limit was. He didn't have fish-nets those first couple of years and needed to feed his family and dog team. Everybody did. He mostly hunted on foot. He tried to get most of the caribou before the first week of October when the big fat bulls went into rut and got "stink," as people called it.

I don't remember my dad shooting very many cows or calves. He didn't hunt caribou in the winter, when people traditionally shoot barren cows because they are the fattest. My parka was made of a calf skin, so he surely shot that one, and maybe a few others for leggings, but mostly he shot bulls. If he needed to shoot caribou in October he'd watch them to make sure they were eating, and not fighting, and he often shot teen-aged bulls to avoid the bad flavor of rut meat.

One year caribou wintered directly across the Kobuk River from our home. People came by snowmobile from upriver and downriver to hunt those caribou. Nearly all of the hunters stopped in for coffee and to eat, the way travelers used to do. Plenty of them spent the night. Some stayed a week or longer while they hunted. In the spring, there were a lot of dead caribou over there on the tundra. Hunters told us of big piles, and scattered dead caribou, too. Skinny ones. Gutshot ones. Not everybody wanted to haul a skinny and/or gutshot caribou all the way home when they had come so far for meat. People did worry about game wardens, but none showed up, warm weather came, ravens and foxes and bears feasted. Spring came, more caribou came from the south. The following fall caribou came again from the north. Seasons passed, bones whitened.

I grew up knowing those hunters, and other hunters, all with that powerful emphasis on getting fat meat. Fat was absolutely important, a many-thousand-year-old tradition shaped by survival.

My family ate a lot of fat. My mom served travelers that stopped in: frozen fish and dried fish and dried meat and seal oil and akutuq (made from rendered caribou fat). We didn't like skinny meat -- be it caribou, muskrat, goose, bear, trout, anything. We ate it if we had to; it was okay for drying and to make hamburger, or to feed to the dogs, but even the dogs needed fat to make it through the winter. (Yes, I know at some point feeding caribou to dogs became illegal.)

We worried way more about fat than about parasites. You could always cook the meat to kill parasites. I don't remember other people talking or worrying much about parasites in caribou and fish. People ate a lot of caribou and fish raw (frozen), or dried.

My parents had studied science -- including parasitology -- in the years before my dad was lured by the old Eskimo ways of living. When skinning caribou, my parents pointed out warbles and botflies, they cut around tapeworm cysts in the caribou livers, they pointed out the smaller tapeworm cysts in the muscle tissue -- before we cooked and ate it.

My parents mentioned brucellosis whenever we got a caribou with swollen joints or swollen testicles-and kept skinning. A man living upriver once claimed he had caught brucellosis, but I don't know. Maybe his testicles were swollen for other reasons.

In caribou the only parasite that my parents firmly warned us kids about was echinococcus cysts in caribou's lungs. We never ate the lungs. My parents said humans couldn't catch echinococcus from caribou, but our dogs could catch it from eating the lungs, and we then might catch it from the dogs. They warned that we also could catch echinococcus from skinning foxes and other carnivorous animals -- from the feces.