In the Scottish Borders, where particularly heavy storms forced a severe flood warning of "serious danger to life and property" being issued across the Teviot Valley , a 76-year-old lorry driver from Newcastle was killed when his vehicle overturned on the A68 near Ancrum.At least five people were rescued in Hawick after part of the town was deluged by floodwater 4ft deep. "We so look forward to this time of year," she said.That night, walking back through the dark freezing streets of Barrow, the communal nature of the whale hunt was plain to see. Pick-up trucks were stopping off at what seemed like every other house, delivering a share of the kill. Young men would walk inside with bags containing chunks of meat and pieces of blubber taken that very afternoon from the whale Everyone looked very happy.. But she insisted that it was historically also an essential way of providing food to the people. One local woman told me it was ready to eat when it started to bubble.Like many other Inupiat in Barrow, Mrs Aamadt said the twice-yearly whale hunt fulfilled an important tradition, a culture-affirming endeavour that remained at the heart of the native community here and elsewhere in Alaska.
She also prepared pieces of blubber and skin, or muktuk, that had been simply boiled.The latter is considered a delicacy, though not as much as mimakiaq, a fearful-sounding combination of whale-meat, blubber, blood and pieces of tongue stirred together in a bucket and left to ferment. Mrs Aamadt had spent much of her childhood in Barrow, studied at Harvard University, and returned to be school superintendent. She combined the ability to run a Western-style education administration with the know-how to sew traditional parkas from caribou skin and to cut up and prepare wild animals ranging from walrus to Arctic fox.That evening, she prepared a meal of whale meat stir-fried with pieces of the blubber and skin, a mixture that somehow tasted both gamey and fishy. "I like to travel and I like to hunt whales," he said with a smile. "I eat a lot of raw food."Just as there are customs about the hunting of the whale, there are equally strong traditions about how it is divided. The tavsi, a 12in ring around the belt of the animal, is set aside for the captain of the boat; the ningiq, the area from below the belly-button to the tail of the whale, is divided among the boats who helped tow the whale to the shore and the people who helped butcher it.
This year, their target was 796.Simeon Patkotak, the well-weathered other co-captain, looked up at the hungry, screaming seabirds wheeling low overhead as the whale was butchered "It's politics," he said. Though 73, that morning he had been among the crew hunting the bowhead. They draw a clear distinction between subsistence hunting, which feeds an entire community, and commercial whaling that could result in hundreds or even thousands of whales being killed.Norway, the one country the IWC says that still operates a commercial hunt despite IWC objections - last year killed 544 minke whales. Britain supports limited whaling by the Inupiat, having accepted their "subsistence needs" but it is adamantly opposed to the resumption of commercial hunting by Japan.A spokeswoman for the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), said: "Even if agreement were reached on a robust, revised management scheme to control commercial whaling such that catch limits were never exceeded, and Japan were offering to trade cessation of scientific whaling off against a commercial quota, the UK would probably not wish to be seen to support the resumption of commercial whaling."The Inupiat hunters of Barrow - so far north that in mid-winter there are 67 consecutive days when the sun does not rise - fear they have become "pawns" in a broader dispute focused on Japan's whaling ambitions.
