I spent a couple weeks at the Marks Center in Alexandria, VA up on a scaffold painting this lovely mural.  My favorite part of doing this mural besides getting to know the awesome people at Bowhead, was the story behind the photos I had been supplied as reference.  The Inupiat tribe of Barrow, Alaska, owners of the company, are subsistence hunters of the Bowhead whale.  I read a book written by one of the elders of the tribe, whose expertise in tracking the whales helped environmental scientists in the 90’s to discover their estimation of the population of these whales was far too low, because the whales stay beneath the ice most of the time.  The book was called, The Whales: They Give Themselves.  I should say actually that he didn’t write the book, but rather the book was written from the stories he told.  He told of how connected to the spirit of the whale their tribe is- how a little piece of the hunter dies with the whale when it is killed.  Last year, I ate pickled whale bacon for the first time ever… it was amazing.