muskoxen
butt the sparkling crust
furrowed to sastrugi : sharp crescents of cold
ingrained in snow crystals
that melted, froze, remelted and refroze
on windward slopes of snow dunes heaped here by the blizzards
then eroded to anvils pointing upwind
to meet more wind – gravity winds –
by late March geometries and hunger become more abrupt
recrystallized grain clusters swallow sunrays
squat muskoxen swallow saliva
hunters and their dogs swallow shame
muskoxen push their horned heads
towards the air pooled under the slab snow
propped by bent-over spikelets of Arctic
wheatgrass promising other ground-hugging plants :
crowberry dwarf birch beach rye grass
soft to the squared-off warty laminae of their lips
they inspect their daily portion of two kilometres
they amble between feeding grounds where frozen shallow water doesn’t allow a whirl yet
they cross the polar desert towards the barren plateaus frequented by high winds
which sweep the snow off the edges of cliffs
muskoxen remember last spring
the cliffs welcomed – briefly – nesting birds
the guano fertilized succulent green
now swallowed by the starving white
the hungry polar cattle
whose long brown shaggy coats
repel the wind and rain and snow
and keep the warm winter secret of every long-bearded one
(here hunters call a muskox umimmaat)
: qiviut
cashmerelike underwool
fine down feathers of little auks
calling alle alle under the coarse guard hairs
while on slippery slopes muskoxen splay their two-toed hooves
dead keratin in the dead of winter
– where no warm blood runs
no heat is lost –
in their firm contact with the firn
if this densified snow has survived one melt season
they too can survive : they will paw their small eating craters
to reach the matted roots
of the only woody plant that can grow beyond
the treeline on this dry dwarf shrub heath
Salix arctica
in the short spring its oval leaves will offer more vitamin C than oranges
the violet of its catkins will carry more warmth than the surrounding plateaus
so its seeds and pollen may quicken and attract insects
just as the Arctic willow attracts muskoxen
like muskoxen it grows
long fluffy hair
on its silvery leaves to protect
the warmth
so precious in this land
Greenland
where refugia mean survival for this species
of sheep oxen
counted in late winter while their dark
coats are still
spotted against the white
when the fixed-wing aircraft overhead
makes them clump:
rumps together
horns outwards
in a tight circle
or a crescent of defence
that withstands Arctic wolves
but invites firearms
when the quota
– and the hunger –
cannot be negotiated
the colony’s Manager writes in Muskox Daybook (entry 3, 1932):
Hunter Niels Arke, Kap Hope, reported taking a musk ox. I killed an animal because we had nothing to eat, and because
my dogs were very exhausted by too little food. I had passed the animal, but turned back as I found it necessary to kill
it. Hunter Niels, who has ten children, could not pay immediately, but was fined 10 kroner, which he was to pay when
he was able to.
Notes:
*The italicised quotations come from Stories from Scoresbysund: Photographs, Colonization and Mapping by the Greenlandic-Danish visual artist Pia Arke (Pia Arke Selskabet & Kuratorisk Aktion, 2010) 65-66.
** Umimmaat (‘long-bearded one’) – the Greenlandic name for muskox used in Arke’s book; dialectal variants include: Umimmak, Umingmak, Omingmak, Oomingmak. In 1816, Blainville coined ‘Ovibos Moschatus’ (also a chapter title in Stories from Scoresbysund), combining ‘sheep’ and ‘ox’ in a mistaken belief that muskox had only two teats. In the 1920’s Arctic explorer Stefansson objected to ‘muskox’, since the animal has no musk glands; Stefansson preferred ‘polar cattle’ to promote the domestication of muskoxen.
*** Little Auk, a bird species otherwise known as Dovekie (Alle alle), arrives at its Greenland breeding colonies in early May and abandons them in August.
