42 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST17, 2020
journal, “Can’t wait for the reply!” It
didn’t come.
My dilemma was unexpectedly re-
solved when I met Mick Hoare, the son
of a friend of Uncle Warren’s. Mick was
a few years older than I was—a rangy
guy, with black hair and startlingly blue
eyes, who had served in the Special
Forces and was studying geophysics at
Stanford. He was planning to drive to
Anchorage for the summer. Did I want
to come along, in exchange for chip-
ping in gas money?
On June 21st, we left Woodside in
Mick’s Datsun pickup truck. Two days
later, at a campsite in McLeese Lake,
British Columbia, I wrote in my jour-
nal, “A frontier air—miles of forest—un-
dulating seas of it. Many lakes and mead-
ows that look like good moose haunts.
Our journey began on the Solstice, so it
seems full of portents. Good ones, I hope.
Maybe I’ll make my fortune in Alaska.”
T
he Alaskan economy was boom-
ing, but the commodity was oil,
not fur; the Trans-Alaska Pipeline had
been finished the year before. When
we reached Anchorage, after a week on
the road, it looked like any other small
American city: drab modern buildings
that clashed with the wild surroundings,
and ticky-tacky suburbs spreading to
accommodate newcomers. “The town
is raw,” I wrote. “Go-go girls and fur-
riers. Gold plated prospecting pans and
gold nugget jewelry.” A statewide fund
had been established to use oil revenues
to benefit locals—a kind
of payoff for the environ-
mental destruction—but it
didn’t stop them from re-
senting the oilmen and the
culture they had brought.
A bumper sticker on cars
around town read “Happi-
ness is a Texan leaving with
an Okie on his back.”
Even so, wages were ex-
ceptionally high in Alaska;
construction was thriving, and that was
what had attracted Mick, who was
looking to earn money to pay for col-
lege. He also had a place to stay, a
wooden shack that his older brother
owned in Girdwood, a township forty
miles south of Anchorage, at the edge
of the Kenai Peninsula.
Girdwood was more like it: a few
dozen log cabins in a forested valley,
with a general store, a gas station, and
an old-fashioned bar that turned into a
rowdy disco on weekends. Glacier-cov-
ered mountains ringed the valley, and,
from the road into town, ghost-white
beluga whales could be seen frolicking
in the water; Dall sheep stood on rocky
outcroppings on the other side.
Mick, a skilled carpenter, quickly got
a job framing houses on an Anchorage
construction site. Unlike Mick, I had
no skills to speak of, but I rode into
town with him most days to find a job
for myself. On July 1st, I summed up
my progress: “I called and went by some
of the caterers—no dice. No dice with
the railroads & so on, either.”
My heart wasn’t in any of these jobs;
the point was to earn enough to finance
an adventure. I’d sketched an itinerary
for one “reasonable plan”: travelling by
canoe down the Arctic Red River to Tuk-
toyaktuk, on the Arctic Ocean. “Some
navigation might be necessary as the
river course is thru swamp,” I wrote. “The
idea would be then to live with Eskimos
in their villages along Arctic Sea and
winter with them, in an attempt to learn
all can about hunting, living and travel-
ling on ice.” After my father wrote to say
that he had accepted a job in Sumatra,
I concocted another plan, to meet him
there. For the first stage of the journey,
I decided, I’d build an outrigger canoe
and paddle along the Aleutian Islands
to Japan. Finally, I gave it up as imprac-
tical. “Ach, just another idea,” I wrote. “I
am always agitating, plan-
ning, never settling.”
It was Mick who told me
about musk-ox wool. His
father had done some geol-
ogy work on Nunivak Is-
land, in the Bering Sea,
where musk oxen roam wild.
In warm weather, they shed
their winter coats, called qi-
viut—the finest wool in the
world, eight times warmer
than lamb’s wool and softer than cash-
mere. Not long after Mick mentioned
this, I visited an Alaska Native coöper-
ative in Anchorage, which sold qiviut
garments for vertiginous prices. Diana
Vreeland, the editor of Vogue, had pro-
nounced musk-ox wool “the ultimate in
luxury.” Because of its scarcity, it was said
to be literally worth its weight in gold.There is little in the appearance of
musk oxen that suggests luxury. They
have survived largely unchanged from
the last Ice Age—huge beasts that re-
semble bison, with ponderous heads and
swooping horns, but have a bone struc-
ture more closely related to that of goats.
They can grow to nine hundred pounds,
gorging on nearly any edible vegetation
that survives on the tundra. In the win-
ter, they use their hooves to kick through
the snow to expose plants trapped un-
derneath. Often led by females, the herds
defend against predators by forming a
defensive circle—a tactic that works well
against wolves but poorly against men
with rifles. Musk oxen once ranged across
the far north, but by the early twenti-
eth century the Alaskan herd had been
hunted to extinction. The coöperative
obtained its qiviut from an experimen-
tal breeding farm in Unalakleet, in west-
ern Alaska. But there were many more
living wild on Nunivak, the descendants
of captive animals brought from Green-
land in the early thirties.
I got the rest of my information from
a slim book, “Oomingmak”—the word
that Nunivak’s Cup’ig Eskimo people
use for musk ox, which translates liter-
ally as “bearded one.” It was by Peter
Matthiessen, the explorer and author,
who had joined a University of Alaska
expedition to Nunivak in 1964 aimed at
capturing some of its musk oxen and
transporting them to the mainland for
breeding. On the cover was a photo-
graph showing two oxen, squared off
like tanks in a defensive posture, and
another showing an expedition mem-
ber with his feet dangling rakishly from
an open-sided helicopter. I was en-
thralled. Matthiessen had something in
common with the explorers and natu-
ralists I admired as a boy, but unlike
them he left no damage behind. His
sentences had the sound of someone
who loved words, though not as much
as he loved experience.
The book had grown out of an ar-
ticle, “Ovibos Moschatus,” that Mat-
thiessen wrote for The New Yorker in- (Ovibos moschatus, I learned, is the
Latin name for musk ox, meaning
“musky sheepcow.”) The opening was
tantalizing: “At Nunivak Island, lost in
the cold ocean mists of the Bering Sea,
wind and rain give way rapidly to each
other. The sun rarely penetrates the