Baffin Hunter (Sold)

This carving is a stylized depiction of the peregrine Falcon, a common bird of prey in the Arctic tundra.  The “Falcon” was carved from the “shovel” of a Caribou antler. The shovel is the lower part of the antler that comes up near the animal’s eyes, resembling the blinders once used on plow horses. The overall height of the entire antler that held this particular shovel was approximately 5 feet. As with deer, caribou grow and then drop a set of antlers each year. However, they differ from deer, in that both male and female caribou have antlers. The shovel was collected in the midst of a drizzle in downtown Nuuk, the Capital city. My colleague and I followed the sound of a table saw to its source and discovered a man sawing antlers into fist-sized pieces and tossing them into a full sized dumpster. When asked, “What are you doing?” He told us, “I sell these antler pieces to a Korean guy who grinds them into powder and sells them in Asia as an aphrodisiac!” Fortunately, the caribou were not taken for the purpose of obtaining their antlers. Instead, they were purchased from individual Greenlanders after the annual Fall sustenance hunt.