さあ！諸君！捕鯨問題だ！

"You have all these people who say, 'I'm a vegetarian,' and they get up here and complain about cold feet and cold hands and we're not even 10 minutes outside the door," he said. "A T-bone steak will only last an hour and a half, and then you're hungry again. This stuff sticks to your ribs for a while."

Under the aboriginal provisions of the international whaling treaty, Alaskan and Siberian Eskimos since 1978 have shared a subsistence quota that, in recent years, has allowed them to harpoon 67 whales a year -- mostly in Alaska. Because part of the quota can carry over from one year to the next, this year's limit is 75 whales.

The current five-year authorization expires after this fall's hunt. But when the U.S. moved to renew it at last month's meeting of the whaling commission, the Japanese delegation balked. Approval requires a three-fourths majority of the 48 member countries. The vote fell one short, thanks to Japan winning the support of delegates from Norway, the Solomon Islands, Mongolia and several Caribbean nations.

The real issue was not Alaska whaling, but Japan's long-unsuccessful petition to conduct its own aboriginal whaling of 50 minke whales. (Japan already takes about 560 whales a year for what is described as a scientific program.) The U.S. has been influential in opposing that proposal, saying it is an apparent attempt to conduct commercial whaling under the guise of aboriginal whaling. The move against the Alaska quota, U.S. officials believe, was an attempt at counter-pressure from Japan.

Japan admitted as much.

"Our coastal whaling bid has been rejected for 15 years. The United States ought to feel the same pain," Masayuki Komatsu, a senior official of Japan's Fisheries Agency, told the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun."It's really tragic what's occurred," Rolland Schmitten, the head of the U.S. delegation, said in an interview. "Because the [Alaska whalers] are truly the IWC's model organization for aboriginal subsistence hunting. They have collected more science than likely all the nations involved in the IWC, they have observed the rules, they've played exactly the game that the IWC has asked of them for 25 years. So for them to be caught up in a political issue is grossly unfair."

The Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission has gathered a wealth of scientific data in recent years demonstrating that the bowhead population, considered endangered around the world, actually is growing in the seas near Siberia and Alaska by 3.2% a year -- a rate that could sustain as many as 102 strikes annually. Last year, a total of 75 whales were struck and 49 were landed, all but one of them in Alaska. The number of calves passing by Point Barrow -- the long spit of sand that represents the northernmost spot in America -- was 9,860 in 2001, about twice the number counted in 1993.

Oil money from nearby Prudhoe Bay has made Barrow one of Alaska's richest native communities -- Ahmaogak drives around town in a Hummer, and big, new pickups are parked in many driveways. But whaling remains a crucial economic and cultural asset.

Later this month, natives from all over northern Alaska will travel here -- along with planeloads of tourists -- for Barrow's annual whale harvest festival. Many of them will pay Joe Schults $60 for a 4-wheel drive excursion out to Point Barrow to see the piles of discarded whale bones -- rising like low, sculptured mountains on the horizon -- a favorite grazing spot for polar bears. Then they'll probably stop for lunch at the restaurant he runs with his mother, Pepe's North of the Border, billed as the northernmost Mexican restaurant in the U.S.

But today, Schults' T-shirt seems to reflect the sense of unease that has settled over town. "Due to budget cuts," it says, "the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off."