Gyrfalcons

Gyrfalcons are Greenland’s swift birds of prey and a recurring presence in Smilla’s memories of hunting with her mother. Their sudden appearance above auks brings a startling transformation of the landscape; their hunted bodies, stuffed and presented as gifts, become instruments in her mother’s dealings with outsiders. The birds thus connect practical knowledge of the Arctic to a quieter contest over who gets to define Greenlandic life and what can be taken from European contact.

Appearance and place in the hunt

When Smilla and her mother hunted auks, gyrfalcons sometimes appeared as two tiny points on the horizon. As the birds drew nearer, the mountain seemed to dissolve and rise into the sky. Then a million auks could take flight at once, darkening space as if winter had returned in a flash. The gyrfalcons enter this scene not as isolated specimens but as part of a sudden, immense movement between sky, mountain, and flock.

The falcons’ speed makes that movement concrete: a gyrfalcon dives at 125 miles per hour. Smilla’s mother would shoot at them and usually hit. Her small-caliber, nickel-plated bullet could pass through one eye and lodge in the other, leaving a dead bird with a bright, piercing stare. The image turns the hunter’s skill into an unsettling encounter with the animal’s gaze: the falcon is killed, yet its eyes seem to return the look.

Hunting and the law

The gyrfalcons’ protection gave their capture a legal and commercial significance beyond the hunt itself. A taxidermist at Thule Air Base stuffed the birds for Smilla’s mother, though gyrfalcons were a protected species. A baby falcon could reportedly bring $50,000 on the black market in Germany or the United States, where it would be bred for hunting. Yet no one dared believe that Smilla’s mother had violated the ban. Her hunting remained difficult for outsiders to see plainly, even when the stuffed birds were displayed before them.

She did not sell the falcons. Instead, she gave them away: to Smilla’s father, to an ethnographer who sought her out because she was a woman hunter, and to an officer from the base. The distinction matters. Their value is not realized through a direct sale but through a gift that creates an obligation, allowing the giver to ask for something in return without reducing the exchange to a stated price.

Gifts and reciprocal obligation

The stuffed falcons were both gruesome and dazzling gifts. Smilla’s mother presented them ceremoniously, with an apparent generosity, and then let her needs be understood: she might require a pair of tailor’s shears, eighty yards of nylon rope, or two pairs of thermal underwear for the children. She received what she asked for. The gift made its recipient part of a web of fierce, mutually obligating courtesy.

That courtesy was a practiced response to European culture. Smilla remembers feeling ashamed of her mother’s maneuvering and loving her for it. Her mother opened herself to outsiders, but not passively: she accepted contact while enclosing it, taking from it what could be used. The falcon’s stuffed body was therefore more than a trophy or a commodity. It helped her convert the attention of ethnographers and base personnel into useful goods for her household.

Cultural meaning

The birds’ place in these memories clarifies the difference between living practice and the idealized image outsiders project onto Greenland. Ethnographers, Smilla observes, cast North Greenland as a world of innocence, populated by bowlegged, drum-dancing, legend-telling figures like the images imagined by early explorers south of Qaanaaq. Her mother answered that fantasy with an actual dead bird and an exchange that made the visitors buy half the store for her.

The falcon gifts belong to a life that joins inherited skill with selective use of imported things. Smilla’s mother paddled a kayak made according to a seventeenth-century method, from a tradition of kayak-building that had disappeared from North Greenland, while using a sealed plastic container as her hunting float. The juxtaposition refuses the notion that cultural life must be either untouched tradition or imitation of Europe. In the same way, the gyrfalcons become part of an encounter her mother controls: their beauty and rarity draw outsiders in, while the exchange serves needs they might otherwise overlook.