Meat market

WARNING - This is one of those posts that contain potentially disturbing images, both of myself and of dismembered wildlife; you have been warned!

After a beautiful first week weather-wise, the weekend was pretty grey, and as I write on Monday afternoon it's simply pouring down with rain. I spent most of the weekend at school going through the thirty boxes of classroom books and supplies that were flown up from Inukjuak for me, half of which were sent in error (unless I want to run a course in Business Accounting, in French). These boxes now have to be repackaged and sent back down, a laborious and costly task, but as with the Light Brigade, mine is not to reason why.

On a more interesting note, I was taken to the community freezer on Saturday (I guess this would replace 'community chest' on an Inuit Monopoly board), which is not something that the Quallunaat (white people) are normally allowed to do. When any hunters return to the village, their excess catch is placed in the freezer to be shared amongst the population at large, and at the moment there is an excess of caribou in storage, hence us being allowed some. As you can see though, the meat does not come neatly packaged in Styrofoam trays and plastic wrap:

It's very much a case of work out which piece of the animal you're looking at then take what you need, or vice-versa perhaps, depending on how fussy you are. I now have a couple of hefty slabs of caribou meat in my freezer at home, although quite what part of the animal they came from I'm not sure. They don't have any hooves or antlers attached though; I wouldn't have liked that.

I don't think the caribou would have cared too much though.