Tastes Real Good

I often get the chance to learn more about subsistence food when I travel, sometimes from people I see every day in the office.  They are different when they come home.  At dinner in the fancy restaurant tonight I had a view of the Sound.  The tide was high and I kept thinking I could see something bobbing or floating in the water and wishing I had worn my glasses and gotten a table right next to a window.  My first guess was that it was some kind of buoy or net float, but I couldn’t tell if it was disappearing in the waves or dropping below the water surface somehow.  A co-worker from Town sat at the table next to me, joining her Mom and said hi to me as she passed.  **A couple notes here - sometimes I see people who I know I recognize and they see me, but they chose not to acknowledge me.  I have learned it’s really nothing personal, there are just a lot of political strings, kind of like a web, surrounding me.  Also, sometimes relations are not what we expect.  For example, people often have several moms.  I asked about it once and nearly got dizzy in the explanation.  This has generally been the result for everyone I ask.  In this particular case they did look similar so it could have actually been her mom in a sense that is familiar to me.

When I was done stuffing myself stupid I stopped to say hello to my co-worker.  She commented on the view out the window.  Sometimes I am so white.  I had not even noticed the birds.  Or how wide spread the dark things on the surface were.  They were seals.  Lots of seals.  Tons of seals.  Seals everywhere.  Feeding.  Duh.  That explains why I thought it was Tatonka when I first saw it out of the corner of my eye.  They were even going for the birds when they ventured too close.  It was amazing and no picture could do it justice.  I went outside in the nearly freezing wind without a jacket just so I could stand there and see it up close after I talked to her.  Not for the first time when I have been admiring a beautiful animal in the arctic, she told me they taste real good and that they are the black meat in the seal oil.  But that you can only dry the meat in the fall.  I confirmed that she meant air dried.  Some day I will get someone to explain to me how you dry the meat in the fall when you kill the animal in the spring.  Or maybe they will tell me I got that backwards or that you kill these animals in the fall.  Either way, I can’t quite get the logic worked out on my own.