46 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST17, 2020
cooked one for dinner. I had brought
the James Clavell novel “Shōgun,” and
I read to keep myself company as I
gnawed on salmon.
The next morning, I found myself
stalled by two blue dots on the map: a
small lake and a stretch of muskeg. I
skirted the lake, and cut up a tussocky
ridge. As I came over the top, I spied
large, dark shapes among
the hummocks, about a
mile away. With my binoc-
ulars, I saw that they were
musk oxen—a group of
them, resting.
As I made my way to-
ward them, one of the musk
oxen, a hulking bull, ap-
peared in my path. He was
clearly scouting for trouble,
and though he couldn’t see
me or smell me, he’d heard me, and he
was taking off fast back toward the oth-
ers. I moved cautiously, hopping from
tussock to tussock, keeping myself
downwind of the bull. By the time I
was sixty feet from the group, I was
close enough to see their sunstruck hair,
the qiviut sweeping off their massive
shoulders and into the wind. I waited,
hoping that they’d move, so that I could
check their resting spot. To rouse them,
I attempted some birdcalls: one that I
hoped would sound like a kookaburra,
and one like an owl. The oxen lay there,
oblivious. A stork on a nearby slope
strutted about scornfully.
At last, the bull got up, turned, and
stared straight at me. His horns were
sharply pointed, the size of a man’s fore-
arms. A bony plate between them made
his head look covered in armor. Male
musk oxen in rut are known to butt
heads for eight hours at a time, with a
speed and a force that no other animal
can match. The only advice I had heard
about being charged by a musk ox was
“run.” I braced for an attack, but the bull
just stood there, munching grass. Three
others got up, too, clustering together
with horns radiating out as a calf clam-
bered to the middle of the group. They
were, I realized, getting into a ring to
protect themselves from me.
When I popped my head over the
ridge, they all startled, then loped away,
as quick and graceful as gazelles. On
the flanks of a nearby hill, they returned
to their grazing and seemed to forget
about me. I crept up to the spot where
they had been resting, bag at the ready
for qiviut. There was nothing but grass.
“Nada!” I wrote in my journal. “I won-
der if I’ll find any. ”
To reach the summit of Musk Ox
Hill was a climb of only a few hundred
feet. “Windy at top,” I wrote. “Bleak,
bleak, bleak.” A geodetic marker, dated
1951, sat next to a reindeer
skull. To the south, I could
see the island’s highest
peak, Roberts Mountain,
and to the east, across the
Etolin Strait—the thirty-
mile stretch between Nuni-
vak and the mainland—I
could see the outlines of
Nelson Island, its shoulders
streaming ice. I’d heard har-
rowing stories about these
waters from Jobe, who hunted there.
One June, he told me, he and a friend
took a boat onto the strait to look for
seals. They stayed out for a few hours,
lingering to catch smelt roe and shoot
geese. By the time they turned back, a
fog had rolled in, and they drifted blindly
as the current carried them far north of
town and the ice closed around them.
For two days they were caught in
this limbo of fog and ice. Finally, they
decided to leave the boat and set out on
foot. At that time of year, the ice was
treacherous—thin and unpredictable.
To be as lightweight as possible, they
left everything behind in the boat. Even-
tually, picking their way step by step,
they made it back to land. Later, when
the fog lifted, they hiked back out to
retrieve the boat, but the ice was gone,
and so was the boat. “No doubt someone
in the Kamchatka Peninsula is happy,”
Jobe had told me, wistfully.
Scanning in all directions from the
summit, I could see no great herds of
musk ox. Below me, the small group
that I’d seen earlier had gathered on the
shore of a lake. They seemed to be play-
ing a game: the cow was running back
and forth, the calf hustling to keep up,
the bull giving chase but never catch-
ing them.B
ack in Mekoryuk, a young man
named Tom Nortuk introduced him-
self. He was about my age, a friendly
kid with wide cheekbones, straight black
hair, and a ruddy complexion. He’d heardI was trying to get to Nash Harbor, and
he and some friends happened to be
planning a sealing trip there by boat. I
was welcome to come, he said, if I helped
pay for gas.
With just one day to get ready, I made
a to-do list: “Sharpen knives, put second
snowseal on my boots, get water, see Jobe
Weston, take a spitbath, write postcards.”
I bought shells for the rifle and provi-
sions for myself—curry powder, soy sauce,
Spam, cigarettes—but decided to leave
most of my belongings in storage at the
post office, taking along only the qiviut
bags. We set off early on August 1st and
spent all day tracing the island’s north
coast, as Tom and his friends shot at seals
in the water and the seals dodged every
bullet—though there were, I noted in
my journal, “some almosts.”
At Nash Harbor, we unloaded our
gear from the boat and into a reindeer
herder’s hut. It was all that remained of
a once thriving Cup’ig settlement. A
census of Nunivak in 1880 had found
nine settlements on the island, with a
population of seven hundred and two.
Twenty years later, a flu-and-measles
epidemic had killed most of them, erad-
icating the community at Nash Harbor.
Now there was only Mekoryuk, a town
of fewer than two hundred people. On
a bluff near our cabin, I discovered some
rubble from the old settlement, partly
obscured beneath a thatch of bulrushes.
Using an old caribou antler, I started
digging through loose soil. “I found some
cutting edges, and two bone wood-split-
ting chisels, and a walrus forehead,” I
wrote. “All ancient!” Along the cliffs,
seals and birds were competing for fish.
When the seals surfaced with their prey,
the birds would dive-bomb them and
try to pry it away. The seals seemed to
be teasing them: I saw one creep up on
a swimming gull, then suddenly flip over,
slapping its tail and scaring the bird away.
Musk oxen traditionally shed qiviut
in the bushes that grow along cliff edges,
and even though their behavior had
changed since the hunting began, it
seemed worth a look. I had not gone
far before I found a clump of hair, which
looked at first like a dead rabbit. “Just
some of the white outer hairs (not sure
if it’s as valuable as the darker, which I
believe is the real qiviut) but it was an
exciting moment. Then, later, skirting
under a slanting cliff-face, I was climb-