Arctic Dreams, page 7
To leave the story here, with the herds recovered and the hunting excesses of the Copper Eskimo a part of the past, would serve a sense of restitution. We could imagine that the muskoxen had been killed out by rough and thoughtless people, preoccupied with retrieving the wealth at Mercy Bay. An isolated incident. But a parallel with incidents at Pond’s Bay suggests itself; and something else about man and nature and extinction, much older, flows here.
Fatal human involvement with wild animals is biologically and economically complicated. In the 1940s and 1950s, Banks Island Eskimos all but wiped out the wolf population at the southern end of the island in an effort to protect their arctic fox trap lines from scavenging. In 1981 and 1982, they brought heavy hunting pressure to bear against muskoxen in the southern portion of the island, to protect the caribou herds upon which they are dependent for food, which, in their view, compete poorly with muskoxen for the same forage. (The northeastern end of the island, the Thomsen River country, the Eskimos regard as an oasis, an endlessly productive landscape from which animals pour forth to satisfy the many needs of mankind for flesh and hides, bones, sinews, and furs. They neither hunt nor trap there.)
Hunting wild animals to the point of extinction is a very old story. Aleut hunters, for example, apparently wiped out populations of sea otter in the vicinity of Amchitka Island in the Aleutians 2500 years ago. New Zealand’s moas were killed off by Maori hunters about 800 years ago. And zoogeographers working in the Hawaiian Islands discovered recently that more than half of the indigenous bird life there was killed off by native residents before the arrival of the first Europeans in 1778. (The motivations of the hunters involved are unknown to us. Nor do we know whether they understood the consequences of their acts. Nor, if they did, whether they would have behaved differently. Some anthropologists caution, too, that the apparent incidents of slaughter of bison at buffalo jumps in North America and of caribou at river crossings in historic and prehistoric times were ethical in context and consistent with a native understanding of natural history and principles of conservation.)
Man’s ability to destroy whole wildlife populations goes back even farther than this, however. Arthur Jelinek, a vertebrate paleontologist, has referred to early man in North America in very harsh terms, calling him a predator “against whom no [naturally] evolved defense systems were available” and “a source of profound changes” in the ecosystems of North America at the beginning of the Holocene. This was “an extremely efficient and rapidly expanding predator group,” Jelinek writes, with “a formidable potential for disruption.”
The specific events on which Jelinek bases these judgments are the catastrophic die-offs of large mammals that began about 18,000 years ago in North America and in which he believes man played the crucial role. Collectively the events are known as the Pleistocene extinction.
We are used to thinking of the North American plains as a place that teemed with life before the arrival of Europeans—60 million buffalo and millions of pronghorn antelope, elk, and deer, and grizzly bears and wolves. Oddly, however, this was only the remnant of an aggregation of animals the likes and numbers of which were truly staggering. By comparison with the late Pleistocene, eighteenth-century North America was an impoverished world, one “from which all the hugest, the fiercest, and strangest forms had recently disappeared.” Giant armadillo, ground sloths that stood as tall on their hind legs as modern giraffes, the North American cheetah, saber-toothed cats, mammoths, fleet horses and camels, and close relatives of the muskox as well—all were gone, both species and populations. And the land itself had changed radically. Where the eighteenth-century traveler saw deserts there had once been lush grasslands, and great herds of browsers and grazers and their attendant predators and scavengers.
There are sharply differing explanations of why all these animals died out at or near the end of the Pleistocene, but there is some general agreement that it was for one of two reasons. Either the climate changed swiftly and radically and the animals couldn’t adapt, or they were hunted to extinction by man. Some scientists are quick to discount human hunting as a factor. They find the idea that this “intelligent” predator was a waster of meat untenable (though evidence to the contrary is overwhelming in early as well as modern times). And they are skeptical about the killing efficiency of the weapons and hunting techniques involved. They also believe there were too few human beings by far to account for the sheer numbers of animals killed. A climatic explanation alone, they suggest, might suffice. The land, according to this argument, dried up, and the composition and distribution of plant life changed radically. The large herbivorous mammals most dependent on these plants died out, along with their predators and scavengers. In this model the predatory efficiency of man is sometimes regarded as the final blow to the ecosystem at a time of extreme environmental stress.
Intricate, cogent, and forceful arguments have been made in support of both explanations. That man played a significant, if not decisive, role, however, seems inescapable. His capacity to do so is clear and, to judge from the fate of the plains buffalo, the passenger pigeon, the great auk, and the bowhead whale, he can be lethally and extensively efficient. The pattern, some would argue, is still with us, and the extinctions are about to increase again, because of the exponential destruction of natural habitat attendant upon the expansion of human numbers.
We lament the passing of the Eskimo curlew, the sea mink, the Labrador duck, Pallas’ cormorant, and Steller’s sea cow. Their lives are now beyond our inquiry. Our reluctance to accept direct responsibility for these losses, however, is sound if somewhat complicated biological thinking, rooted in a belief that there is nothing innately wrong with us as a species and in our belief that we are not solely responsible for every extinction. (The California condor, for example, is perhaps doomed on its own ecological account.) Our recent biological heritage has been exactly this, to sharply reduce the populations of other species or eliminate them entirely and occupy their niches in the food web whenever we had need or desire. It is not denigrating, not even criticizing from a certain point of view, to so understand ourselves. The cold view to take of our future is that we are therefore headed for extinction in a universe of impersonal chemical, physical, and biological laws. A more productive, certainly more engaging view, is that we have the intelligence to grasp what is happening, the composure not to be intimidated by its complexity, and the courage to take steps that may bear no fruit in our lifetimes.
Squatting over the detritus at the Kuptana site on a June evening, picking at the earth between two willow runners with a muskox rib, one cannot blame the Copper Eskimo who killed the muskoxen here. Perhaps they even understood, at some level in the human makeup now irretrievable to us, that the muskoxen would come back, even if it seemed they had killed them all. Nor can one blame the modern Eskimo hunters on the island for wanting to get rid of wolves to protect the cash income from their trap lines, or to get rid of muskoxen to ensure a good supply of caribou meat. They are trying to adapt to an unorthodox, for them, economics. But we could help each other. Their traditional philosophy is insistent on the issue of ethical behavior toward animals. Within the spirit of this tradition and within the European concept of compassionate regard may lie the threads of a modern realignment with animals. We need an attitude of enlightened respect which will make both races feel more ethically at ease with animals, more certain of following a dignified course in the years ahead, when the animals will still be without a defense against us.
Here in the dirt, pushing past the desiccated winter pellets of muskoxen with my rib bone, past the fresher pellets of arctic hare, past windblown tufts of shed caribou hair, and a layer of dry, curled leaves from willows and saxifrage, I find a damp and precious mud. A foundation. Whatever their moral predilections may have been, the Kanghiryuakmiut and Kanghiryuachiakmiut ate the flesh of the muskoxen who browsed these willows. They made ladles from their horns, tools from their bones, and slept through the first, freezing storms of autumn on the thick insulation of their hides. And they survived. In the long history of man, before and after the coming of the glaciers, this counts for more than one can properly say.
When I stand up and look out over the valley I can feel the tremendous depth of time: myself at this 100-year-old campsite, before a valley the scientists say was never touched by glacial ice, and which the modern Eskimo say is and has been a sacred precinct. The muskoxen graze out there as though I were of no more importance than a stone. The skulls of their ancestors lie in the sun at my feet, and cool winds come down the Kuptana slope and ride up over my bare head.
The first muskoxen I ever saw were on a research farm outside Fairbanks, Alaska. It was summer, a pleasant day when the light air, the cleared fields beyond, and the surrounding hills seemed innocent. A lone animal emerged from tall, dry grasses at the foot of a slope below me. The grasses rolled in his wake, until he stood stolid on open ground, his long flank hair falling still with the stilling grass. In that moment I was struck by qualities of the animal that have stayed with me the longest: the movement was Oriental, and the pose one of meditation. The animal seemed to quiver with attention before he lowered his massive head and moved on, with the most deliberate step I have ever seen a large animal take. The shaft of a dark horn came into view, forward of the high shoulders and the full collar of his distinctive mane. The muskox settled then in my mind as a Buddhist monk, a samurai warrior. In the months after, these characterizations proved impetuous; but like many unbidden insights they served, and I retain them.
I entered that six-acre enclosure with the animals’ caretaker, a Danish student at the University of Alaska named Poul Henrichsen. The animals had moved into a patch of spruce trees, and Henrichsen warned me to be alert, to stay near the fence and be ready to climb it. We came upon them from below the crest of a hill, with only their backs visible, and I was struck by how easily in this view the animal, with its shoulder hump and the tawny saddle behind its withers, could be confused with a grizzly bear. We came closer. I was surprised by how small they were. And, as we drew nearer still, by how adroitly they moved in the trees, and, as they moved, how close to each other they remained, hip to flank, flank to flank, even in that confining picket of spruce trees.
We did not press them further, but retreated toward the fence and watched in silence. Occasionally I would ask a question in low tones, and Henrichsen would reply. The animals regarded us warily, testing the cool air in the trees with the flared nostrils of their broad black noses, rolling their large, golden-brown eyes as though we were two figures caught in a light they could not quite fathom.
Later, walking across a pasture in which caribou grazed (in comparison with the muskoxen they seemed high-strung and confused in their movements), I told Henrichsen of my Oriental impression of the muskox.
“But you know where they come from?”
“Yes,” I said, smiling, “but I had forgotten.”
They came from the high plains of northern China, where their evolutionary ancestors adapted in sheeplike and cattlelike ways to alpine and tundra life. Richard Harington, a Canadian vertebrate paleontologist, believes the genus Ovibos itself emerged about 2 million years ago on the steppes of central Siberia, finding its expression in several species. One, Ovibos pallantis, a Eurasian muskox hunted by Cro-Magnon people, may have survived into modern times on the Taimyr Peninsula in Russia. Ovibos moschatus, the modern North American animal, migrated across the Bering land bridge about 125,000 years ago, at the end of the Illinoian ice advance, or perhaps earlier. It was probably preceded by its own ancestors and relatives, including Symbos cavifrons, a taller, more slender animal and the dominant muskox in North America during the Pleistocene; Praeovibus, also larger, longer-legged, and more slender; Bootherium, a small woodland muskox; and Euceratherium, an alpine-adapted muskox. All these animals died out at the end of the Pleistocene, along with several species of Ovibos itself—O. yukonensis and O. proximus. Remains of the only one of this group to survive, O. moschatus, the modern animal, have been found as far south as New Jersey and Nebraska, where they lived during the height of the last, or Wisconsin, ice age.
When the Wisconsin ice began to retreat about 18,000 years ago, a current theory goes, muskoxen living in what is now the central and eastern United States began moving north. Their very distant offspring—the animals found today south of Queen Maud Gulf, north of Great Bear Lake, and along the Thelon River—are called barren ground or mainland Canadian muskoxen. A second group of muskoxen, which moved south from high arctic refugia after the retreat of the ice, down the east coast of Greenland and onto Ellesmere, Devon, and Melville islands, are called high arctic or Greenland muskoxen.2
The muskox has a single living relative, the takin of northern Tibet, a calflike animal of ponderous build with a bulging snout like a saiga antelope’s, short, stout legs, and small, swept-back horns, showing the same montane sheep/goat ancestry in its conformation and movements as the modern muskox. (The thick golden fleece Jason sailed in quest of was that of the takin.)
Early observers were confused about the muskox’s heredity. Because of its heavy head and shoulders, Ernest Thompson Seton thought it was related to the buffalo. Stefansson thought it was related to the highland cattle of Europe, and Otto Sverdrup, a Norwegian explorer, called the animals “polar oxen.” Distant relatives all. The muskox’s nearest relatives after the takin include the Japanese serow, the chamois, the Rocky Mountain goat, and the Barbary sheep.
In the end its scientific name, O. moschatus, the “sheeplike cow with a musky smell,” as well as its popular name, is ill-fitting. The animal has no musk glands. During their rut muskoxen bulls secrete a substance in their urine that is evident on their breath and even in the flesh of a carefully butchered animal. The late John Teal, an American muskox researcher, characterized the smell as “pungent and faintly sweetish.” Another biologist has called it “a muskily sweet scent, resembling that of a gorilla.” Because the odor, in Teal’s judgment, is less rank than that of other ruminants, it is odd that the name “muskox” stuck. One explanation is that in the seventeenth century, when the animals were first seen by Europeans on the western shores of Hudson Bay, their exotic appearance and the smells of bulls in rut led entrepreneurs to believe an association with musk deer of the Orient might exist. The wishful confusion of the riches of the Orient with those of North America was common at the time, and the illusion of a trade base was not discouraged by seventeenth-century traders.
The long, glossy skirt of its guard hair is, initially, the muskox’s most striking feature, particularly if the animal is moving. (The Eskimo word for the animal, oomingmaq, means “the animal with skin like a beard.”) It is not so wild an affair as Nicolas Jérémie maintained in Relation de détroit de la baye de Hudson (1720), when he wrote that one could not tell “at a short distance which end the head was on.” The pelage is an orderly arrangement of several sorts of hair, which appeared in disarray to Jérémie and others because they saw the animals only in the summer, when they are shedding. An extremely dense underfur of fine, woolly hairs, about two inches long, lies close to the skin and covers all of the animal but its hooves and horns and a patch of skin between its nostrils and lips. Its rump, belly, flanks, and throat are covered as well by a dense layer of long, coarse guard hair that hangs down skirtlike and that melds across the shoulders with a layer of thick but less coarse hairs which come up over the shoulders from low on the neck to form a mane. Behind the withers these hairs fade into an area of woolly underfur without guard hairs called the saddle.
The longest guard hairs—25 inches or more—grow down from the throat. The hairs of the skirt, which are replaced continuously, become more prominent with age and are most lustrous in rutting bulls. The underfur is shed in patches and streamers from late May to mid-July, though this strong, extremely light fleece continues to work its way out through the guard hairs until August, giving the animal a primordial appearance. This inelastic underfur, eight times warmer than sheep’s wool by weight, is as soft as the pashm of Kashmir goats or the wool of the vicuña. A single muskox might carry ten pounds of it, enough, in the estimation of one diligent observer, to make a single forty-strand thread 150 miles long.
Calves are born with a short coat of natal underfur and a fine layer of cinnamon-colored overfur. These are replaced toward the end of the first summer by thicker underfur and longer overfur. Coarse guard hairs don’t begin to appear until the second year.
The underfur in the saddle area is white to tawny yellow, and elsewhere light brown, with shadings of cinnamon. The overlying guard hairs are black on the rump and flanks, shading to blackish browns with auburn highlights on the forequarters. The legs below the “knee” (the heel, actually) are white. Among certain populations (and with some individuals) white hairs are prominent on the face, muzzle, and back of the head, behind the horn boss, and between the horns of females. An unusual strain of muskoxen with cream-colored guard hairs is known to Eskimos living in the Queen Maud Gulf region and has recently been described for the first time by scientists. (British sailors reported seeing an albino muskox cow with a dark calf near Cape Smyth, Melville Island, in June 1853.)
The great thickness of their hair—short, roundly pointed ears are almost hidden in the ruff of hair forward of the neck, as is a short tail at the other end—makes muskoxen seem larger than they are. Their weights vary widely, depending on sex, the season, and their diets. An “average” mature male might weigh 650 pounds, a female 400 pounds. An adult male might stand 55 inches at the shoulder and measure 90 inches from nose to rump, with a female measuring 48 inches and 75 inches, respectively.
