Dog Food

The Inuit we are with, when they hunt narwhal, are mostly after the tusk and the muktuk, which is the skin. The meat itself, on the first one they caught, they just left behind. But we tried it and thought it was delicious. Way better than the muktuk. They say that the older people eat that stuff, but they don't really eat it any more themselves. Although perhaps different families have different tastes, because we did hear that the people at the next cabin were eating the meat too. In any case, we thought it was too good to waste, so Sanjay and Scott got permission to go down and carve off a few steaks to fry up later for ourselves.

Sam Omik, our boat captain, then killed another narwhal, and he took all the meat off that one. He's an older guy, we figured perhaps he still had a taste for it, but no - it turns out he eats the muktuk, and feeds the meat to his sled dogs. So when we started eating our narwhal steaks, there was a lot of laughing going on, because basically we were eating dog food. A few people tried it, Sam had a piece for example, but when his wife saw what we were up to she looked like she had seen someone picking their nose in public, and quickly went into her tent.
The next morning, Michael Kusugak, a storyteller and writer we brought along for this journey, told us about how when he was small, his father would bring a big sack of oatmeal along with them when they went out with the dog team in winter. Not to eat, but to fix the sled. If a piece of the runner broke you would mix up some oatmeal and pat it into place to freeze. In a few minutes, you had nice new runners ready to go.

But if times were tough, if the hunting was bad, if you didn't have enough walrus meat or whatever to keep your sled team going, guess what you would do with the oatmeal. Feed it to the dogs.
At that point one of the two scientists was having a nice big bowl of oatmeal for breakfast. Yep, dog food again.
Crazy white people.