Beaching ‘grind’ are not wasted in the Faroes

Press, 10 March 1984, Page 17

Beaching ‘grind’ are not wasted in the Faroes

By

SHEILA NATUSCH

“Grind!” It sounded like “grinned” as a Scot would say it, but it did grind us to a halt. The mini-van had attained the summit; below lay the sea, closed in by high, ridge-stepped volcanic islands, long grown cold. “GRRRIND!” repeated my Faroese seat companion, beside himself, pointing over the edge with shaking finger. Into the bay pranced a fleet of elegant clinker-built whaleboats, half-decked, clearly motorpowered, and steered by long, jointed ' tillers. Ahead of' them raced, somersaulting, a pack of — oh no! — surely cowfish, bottlenosed dolphins, exactly like those I’d had flaying about my dinghy in our lasf New Zealand'summer. By this time the village populace below Was wading — plunging waist-deep — into the no doubt icy Atlantic, bent on doing my dolphins to death, it seemed. By now the launches were in a half-circle, the dolphins' nearly ashore. One of those rare gleams of sunlight poured' 1 through a hole in the clouds. 5 Through blurring eyes I caught the flash of a knife — was the sea reddening? Then, reprieve, anticlimax!

“Ikki grind,” mourned our companion. "Ikki grind — sprungur.” The dolphin pack, delighted to be the wrong species, were smartly about-turned and chased back out of the bay. It would be anthropomorphic to say that their joy knew no bounds, but they certainly lost no time in bounding for the open sea. 1

A few evenings later we were drinking coffee chatting cosily with our new friend, Finn. By now I had schooled myself to accept the fact that the real grind — blackfish or pilot whales to us, caaing whales to the Scots — might just as well be eaten fresh by hungry Faroese as left to put themselves wastefully ashore, as they do, from time to time, on beaches all round the world. The room was warm, all was contentment and relaxation.

Suddenly in burst the young son of the house. “Grind!” he shouted. “Grindabod!”

Coffee mugs banged down, cakes were dropped — like lemmings we were swept along on a surge of common purpose, willy-nilly, out the door, into the car, down to the bay. Soon the hapless grind came into view, their somersaults slowmotion, gleaming brows bulging, blow-holes a-steam. Misidentifying the dolphins from low-wooded boats to the rear of them was understandable enough, I supposed. On came the grind, chivvied by small stones flung to steer them into shallow water. (Out at sea, the stones are attached to string for easy recovery). All went smoothly. Slaughter, on a given signal, was precise and efficient, and the flurries that followed can have been no worse for the whales than slow death by stranding. None the less, when Finn (who might well have been chestdeep in the red tide but for us) asked us to choose between witnessing the cutting up and sharing out on the cold wharf, or more cake and coffee in his warm house, we opted in. If the whaleboats made me think of the Gokstad Viking ship dug from ancient peat, small wonder, for the pilot whale hunt goes back centuries in song, dance and fact. Every boy’s one idea is to possess a grind knife, to join in the chase. . Formerly, news of a sighting was spread by headland bonfires and messengers on foot “bidding” all to the hunt. Nowdays, engine power and walkie-talkies have replaced oar, sail and the running ‘grindabod.” Faroese settlements today are agleam with modem equipment and technology; the old hard days are past. Yet when the cry “Grindabod!” rings out, fierce excitement prevails; the hunting instinct exerts its

ancient implacable force. Despite the shouting and tumult, the whales are persuaded rather than driven into shallowing water where they rest quietly, rising in turn for air, and fluting — “caaing” — to one another; for the pack must stay together, come hell or high water. “ 'And all the little oysters stood/And waited in a row’,” I quoted. “Are none allowed to escape, Finn — for another time?” “Nei!” came the reply, old as tradition, older than any “civilised” ecology. Faroese must live; there woula be meat in plenty, deep frozen or salted down, for many months — and such good meat! A predator feels no hatred. Grind are not raised, created almost, to be fattened and killed: they are hunted wild, and may hit back, in their struggles, with man- or boat-disa-bling flukes. A Faroese is very much part of the food chain, albeit the topmost part, and when a good catch as been made, and allotted according to strict rule and protocol, he sings and stamps in the ritual measures of the grindadansur chain.

Bloody but clean, it seemed to me, when I looked back on a childhood memory — a beach near my old home, littered with close on a hundred stranded blackfish. Fishermen tried their best to push them off, shoving, hauling, towing, but it was no good — back they persistently came. Were killer whales offshore, like a pack seen once by an observer on Little Barrier, apparently rounding up a school of blackfish? Had nature’s sonar equipmenyt failed in sandy and shoaling water? Was the whole pack playing a ghastly follow-my-leader, after the head of the group, into mass suicide? Little was known in the thirties of the whys and wherefores of cetacean strandings. What has been worked out and guessed at since may help avert — or exploit —

these tragedies. The old Maori regarded stranded whale as good kai. Iceland, which still serves whalemeat (like rich topside) as a tasty dish, recently made a successful “save” of a blackfish school, not for the table but for the free wide ocean. Were they refugees perhaps from brother-Vikings across the way?

World opinion will very likely see to it, some day, that the Faroese grind knife with its beautifully chased hilt and hand-ground blade is no more than an exhibit in the Fornminnissavn. It was in that museum that I read that murder is unknown in the Faroes, and violence rare — except in the grindslaying. Yet grind fever gripped the Orkneys in comparatively recent times: a man left his wife’s coffin (and she newly dead) to an assistant craftsman, who, by joining in the caaing whale hunt would have qualified for a share of the catch. Admonished by the meenister, Donald pointed out, reasonably, that he couldna be expectit to forgo both wifie and whale in the one day. Or so I read, later, in the Kirkwall library. “What became of the grind on your beach?” asked Finn, pouring me more coffee.

“They just lay there and rotted, something awful. Anything towed out to sea kept floating back, and the sharks came. The stench went from dismal to overpowering to sickening. We could smell them from school, a mile away. “They lay there and rotted!” Finn’s goodnatured face registered consternation; horror, in fact. Such criminal wastage of resources! New Zealand, then, could never have known hardship and hunger! Some New Zealanders might disagree. Nobody can say that violence and murder are unknown here. Nor are our social ills likely to be cured by adopting the grind hunt. But it at least keeps the Faroese out of other kinds of mischief!