Saturday, August 4, 2007

Tutu Part Two and Weekend Confessions

After our last crazy caribou experience, we weren't sure if the hunting gig was really for us. I wasn't sure if I could handle the "acquired taste" for wild game steak, but WOW! The cow we scavenged was fantastic eating! The meat was so clean and tender and with a little steak sauce, there wasn't any real gamey flavor. With the price of beef up here, we decided hunting could work out pretty good for us.

We sent Li'l One to a sitter’s, borrowed a four wheeler and headed out onto the tundra for yet another exciting adventure. We left town at about 1:30, found a herd of about 800 by 2:30, and by 2:45, everyone in our party had a kill (except me of course, who readily accepted Hubby’s “catch” as enough for our family).

It took us three hours to figure out how to get everything strapped onto the four wheelers, and I will spare you the details of that gory mess, but there was one situation that is too good to omit. There came a point in the process where we realized that we would have to remove our caribou’s head for reasonable transport, and a more experienced hunter explained how this was to be done. Just as he was finishing his aggressive instructions, I removed my coat, rolled up my sleeves and grabbed the biggest knife I could find.

As the only woman on the trip, and possibly any trip that these guys have ever been on, all eyes were one me. As I moved forward, one of the guys dropped his jaw to the ground and said:

“By god if you rip the head off that animal, it will be the sexiest damn thing I’ve ever seen!”

I just stopped in my tracks to play that sentence back in my mind and flip through my rolodex of appropriate responses only to find... uhhh...NOTHING! Hubby chimes in with “Hey! I’m right here man!”, as if it was some kind of a come on, and I knew right then that I was definitely out of my element. However, it does bring up another Weekend Confession:

There is something primal about taking the life of an animal for survival. I'm not sure "sexy" is the right term, but I definitely felt curiosity, exhilaration and empowerment... three elements I personally enjoy about sex. Does that make me twisted and cruel, or am I just naughty?

In case you are wondering, I did take its head and even helped wrestle the carcass onto the front of the wheeler. Let’s just say… not so sexy. Once all that chaos was under control, the guys were getting nervous about their wives pitching fits for them being out past curfew. Apparently, they were all supposed to be back by 5:30.

As it was fast approaching 6:00, they were desperate for a shortcut. Little red flags were going up in my head, but I thought I would let the boys be boys and see what happened. After consulting the GPS and looking out for “landmarks” (landmarks on the tundra? Yah, right!), they decided to head back a different way from which we came.

I voiced my hesitation, but was quickly overruled. To no surprise, that ruling led us directly into meandering rivers, boggy marshes and impassible bodies of water that only brought us further from that little gray line on my GPS that identified where we needed to be.

What should have been a 45 minute easy track back on what in retrospect was the Arctic superhighway, ended up a 3-hour "short-cut" with a steaming carcass strapped to the front of my rig and a 1/2 dozen more bouncing around in a trailer! I didn’t want to state the obvious, so I just kept the “I told you sos” to myself. By the time we finally made it back into town, we were covered in mud, dust and glory.

Yet another Weekend Confession:
Not only do I have 2 mangled caribou hides spread out under my front porch, but a severed head of antlers on my doorstep, and a carcass full of meat soon to be dismembered and crammed into my freezer. Am I psychotic, or just officially Alaskan? Maybe it's not so sexy, but I just doesn't get more rugged than this!

1 comment:

NicciN said...

Wow. I am impressed by the adventures you are having, and have sometimes wondered if I had to kill my own meat would I be able to do it or would I have to go vegetarian!

Even though he had a not so great way of saying it, I think the guy was appreciating your strength and fearlessness and desire for adventure. Many women would not have been out there at all, let alone fully participate.

Inappropriate statements gave me a flashback of when I was 9 months pregnant with Owen scheduling my last meting before I left. I got an email with this -- "Sounds great. Let us hope there is not tremendous migrations of humans from your abdominal regions until then!!" Some things are just not meant to be said -- this from someone I had not even met in person yet.