ZECO TRAVEL TALK

Last July travelers on our Fire & Ice: Kamchatka to Alaska voyage had the unexpected opportunity to witness a remarkable event in a subsistence community on the eastern edge of the Asian continent. Zegrahm naturalist, Mark Brazil, was on this trip, and reminds us that these spontaneous “expedition moments” are what true travel experiences are made of. He wrote about the scene at Lorino Village in his regular Japan Times column, and offered us the story for excerpts.

“…I am writing from the Clipper Odyssey as we cross Russia’s Gulf of Anadyr. Along the way we have been treated to extraordinary concentrations of wildlife including viewing 17 brown bears in one day.

Visitors to the outlying Bering Sea communities are rare, and the welcome is warm. Walking around, you never quite know what to expect. One constant, though, is the presence of animal bones. These are largely subsistence communities, and with agriculture quite impossible in this Arctic area, survival means hunting.

The intensity of our experience at Lorino Village was extreme, and in some ways I am still processing what I witnessed, although it was over in less than three hours. From our Zodiacs, we noticed something in the water tethered to the shore and quickly realized that the village had had a successful whale hunt—part of their annual 47-animal quota allowed under International Whaling Commission agreements.

Few of us strayed from the spectacle on the beach as a tractor was hitched to a hawser and the whale was hauled ashore, the aqua-dynamic shape revealed in a way impossible to appreciate at sea. A brief ceremony was performed, symbolically feeding the whale tundra plants, bread and chocolate, and even proffering a cigarette.

The whale was measured and officially recorded, and flensing began—on a scale I had never previously imagined. First the blubber, then the meat, then the internal organs were all stripped away by two skilled men with long-handled flensing knives, a team of pullers with hooks to maintain tension, and ultimately dozens of locals each armed with an ulu knife and a bucket or bag to take away their portion.

A huge trailer was loaded with the larger pieces to be hauled off for freezing. Some adults were chewing slivers of muktuk (blubber or skin), while children savored pieces of baleen. I watched one man excavate the ossicles (ear bones) for later carving. It would be easy to call it a grisly process, but only because the preparation of meat in our own diets has become so remote.

What impressed me was how little was left on the beach at the end of it all: blood stains on the gravel, the skull, some scraps of innards and blubber… and the whale was gone.”

To read the full column go to: Lives and a Death