Read Online Sixty Degrees North by Malachy Tallack - Free Book Online
Authors: Malachy Tallack
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them, they seemed confused.
âWhy wouldnât you eat them?â the woman enquired.
I did not have a good answer. I thought, perhaps, that an abundance of fish might have made seal meat superfluous in the past, but that didnât seem very plausible. I wondered also whether superstition might have played a part. Stories of selkie folk â seal people â were widespread in Shetland as they were elsewhere in northern Scotland, and perhaps this notion that seals were somehow too human to be eaten, that they might have souls, was the real problem. I wasnât sure, and I am still not sure. The young woman seemed dissatisfied with my answer, and I was not surprised. The idea that a seal might have a soul did not seem, to her, a good reason for it not to be eaten.
A shaman once explained to the explorer and anthropologist Knud Rasmussen that âthe greatest peril lies in the fact that to kill and eat, all that we strike down and destroy ⦠have souls as we have, souls that do not perish with the body, and therefore must be propitiated lest they revenge themselves.â For the traditional Inuit, souls are not the exclusive property of human beings, they are widespread and take many forms. Propitiation is achieved by following certain cultural traditions and, at all times, by showing respect towards the animal that is killed. It is both atonement and thanksgiving. In our own culture, meat has been increasingly divorced, for most of its consumers, from the death that makes it possible and the life that it once held. Because of this, there is a kind of thankfulness and humility that we no longer know how to feel, and a grace we have forgotten how to say.
Fat grey clouds tumbled heavily around the mountains, punctured and crushed between the peaks, rolling, blowing and inflating, from slate to black, turning over in the wind. There was rain there, on the slopes. It had not reachedthe town yet, but it was coming. I was stranded inside the cabin. Flu had struck me on my second day in Nanortalik, and had worsened until I felt unable to leave the warmth of the building. I was hot and shivering, my nose was blocked and sinuses throbbing; my throat was raw and my muscles ached. I felt dreadful, and sat on the sofa next to the fire looking out of the window. Hours passed slowly. I read, but found it difficult to concentrate for long. I turned on the television, but switched it off again when I saw what was there.
Outside, the ice shifted, clearing then clotting the dark water again, as the wind dragged from east to south to southwesterly. I watched its steady migration back and forth across the bay, and something inside me moved as it moved. My thoughts drifted from the island where I sat, to my own island 1,500 miles east along the parallel. I thought about the people in this town, and I thought about the great space that lay between their lives and my own. I thought, too, about my father, who seemed as close to me then as the ice outside, or the warmth within the room, but as distant and unreachable as the ravens across the bay, their black lives pinpricked against the sky.
Above the water, glaucous and Iceland gulls bustled their way between the bergs, camouflaged on the ice. As they lifted up to shift to another place now and then, they shone bright white in the grey air. Rain wrapped itself around the town then, and I opened the window a little to listen to it falling. Inland, a thick fog was slumped around the mountains, but out to sea, from where the breeze was blowing, the sky was bright. It was an illusion â the reflection of the sea ice on the clouds above â but it was welcome nonetheless, and added to the ever-present promise of change. Gretel Ehrlich has written that âArctic beauty resides in its gestures of transience. Up here, planes of light and darkness are swords that cut away illusions of permanenceâ. In Greenland, that transienceis impossible to ignore; it permeates each
âWhy wouldnât you eat them?â the woman enquired.
I did not have a good answer. I thought, perhaps, that an abundance of fish might have made seal meat superfluous in the past, but that didnât seem very plausible. I wondered also whether superstition might have played a part. Stories of selkie folk â seal people â were widespread in Shetland as they were elsewhere in northern Scotland, and perhaps this notion that seals were somehow too human to be eaten, that they might have souls, was the real problem. I wasnât sure, and I am still not sure. The young woman seemed dissatisfied with my answer, and I was not surprised. The idea that a seal might have a soul did not seem, to her, a good reason for it not to be eaten.
A shaman once explained to the explorer and anthropologist Knud Rasmussen that âthe greatest peril lies in the fact that to kill and eat, all that we strike down and destroy ⦠have souls as we have, souls that do not perish with the body, and therefore must be propitiated lest they revenge themselves.â For the traditional Inuit, souls are not the exclusive property of human beings, they are widespread and take many forms. Propitiation is achieved by following certain cultural traditions and, at all times, by showing respect towards the animal that is killed. It is both atonement and thanksgiving. In our own culture, meat has been increasingly divorced, for most of its consumers, from the death that makes it possible and the life that it once held. Because of this, there is a kind of thankfulness and humility that we no longer know how to feel, and a grace we have forgotten how to say.
Fat grey clouds tumbled heavily around the mountains, punctured and crushed between the peaks, rolling, blowing and inflating, from slate to black, turning over in the wind. There was rain there, on the slopes. It had not reachedthe town yet, but it was coming. I was stranded inside the cabin. Flu had struck me on my second day in Nanortalik, and had worsened until I felt unable to leave the warmth of the building. I was hot and shivering, my nose was blocked and sinuses throbbing; my throat was raw and my muscles ached. I felt dreadful, and sat on the sofa next to the fire looking out of the window. Hours passed slowly. I read, but found it difficult to concentrate for long. I turned on the television, but switched it off again when I saw what was there.
Outside, the ice shifted, clearing then clotting the dark water again, as the wind dragged from east to south to southwesterly. I watched its steady migration back and forth across the bay, and something inside me moved as it moved. My thoughts drifted from the island where I sat, to my own island 1,500 miles east along the parallel. I thought about the people in this town, and I thought about the great space that lay between their lives and my own. I thought, too, about my father, who seemed as close to me then as the ice outside, or the warmth within the room, but as distant and unreachable as the ravens across the bay, their black lives pinpricked against the sky.
Above the water, glaucous and Iceland gulls bustled their way between the bergs, camouflaged on the ice. As they lifted up to shift to another place now and then, they shone bright white in the grey air. Rain wrapped itself around the town then, and I opened the window a little to listen to it falling. Inland, a thick fog was slumped around the mountains, but out to sea, from where the breeze was blowing, the sky was bright. It was an illusion â the reflection of the sea ice on the clouds above â but it was welcome nonetheless, and added to the ever-present promise of change. Gretel Ehrlich has written that âArctic beauty resides in its gestures of transience. Up here, planes of light and darkness are swords that cut away illusions of permanenceâ. In Greenland, that transienceis impossible to ignore; it permeates each
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