Plucking Ducks for Graduate Credit

To my SLC Cohort people on Nicenet (if any of you guys read this crapola): I apologize for the duplicate entry.

For an introductory activity for our monthly new teacher inservice/college course, our instructor (who is one of my coworker's moms, interestingly enough) had us perform activities that those who live the subsistence lifestyle out here do every day... namely gutting salmon and plucking birds (ptarmigan, duck, and something else I couldn't quite identify). Let's just say that for all my education, there are some things that I am just not very good at... and plucking ducks appears to be one of them. There're enough fish in my area of the Delta to have done the whole salmon-gutting thing (very poorly, I might add), so I chose the bird activity.

Well, if school is as foreign to my susbsistence-living students as subsistence living is to my pasty kass'uq self, I totally understand why they have trouble in school. I'd never plucked anything before. My grandma will be so proud... or wonder what the hell this world is coming to when a 25 year-old woman can get to that age without ever having plucked a bird.

However, I did get two (very tiny) ducks out of the deal. One of our assignments for next month (in addition to a literature review and an interview of a village elder) is to cook what we brought back and share the recipe with the other new teachers. Sooooo... tomorrow I'm making wild duck soup. There were carrots and celery left over after the retreat, so I baggied them up and took them back to Quinhagak. I also bought a bag of onions while in Bethel. This soup will have fresh veggies, not canned or frozen (and then thawed, and then refrozen, and then thawed, and then refrozen)! A big deal... the store hasn't had fresh veggies (even onions! or potatoes!) since I first got here... and the weather hasn't even interrupted plane service yet! This could be disastrous or really good. I'm going to be cautious and prepare for disaster, but hope for culinary success. Tomorrow I'm going to the store to buy a big new soup pot!