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January/February 1999 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Editor’s Notebook Inside Story Feature: Nunavut - On the land Mapping migrations

When the muskox calves at the University of Saskatchewan go for a walk around campus, the whole place stops to gawk. What are these shaggy, brown, not-quite-sheepdogs, not-quite-sheep that tow their minders along the paved paths? And, once that’s been settled, what are they doing here, a good 3,000 kilometres south of their native tundra?

The best person to answer these questions is Peter Flood, custodian of the only captive research herd of muskoxen in Canada. A professor of anatomy at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine in Saskatoon, the genial, flannel-shirted Flood made his first intimate acquaintance with Ovibos moschatus in the spring of 1982, when four large wooden crates arrived by air from Sachs Harbour, N.W.T. Snuggled inside were 13 muskox calves, refugees from a licensed harvest held just days before on Banks Island, the most westerly isle of the Arctic chain.

At home only in northern Canada and Greenland, muskoxen occupy a landscape most creatures Þnd uninhabitable. Three months in almost total darkness. Seven months of sub-zero cold. Frigid, drying winds that scour down from the pole. Yet muskoxen pragmatically accept the good with the bad, luxuriating in the lush but momentary summer, then plodding doggedly through the all-but-unending snow. In their approach to climatic adversity, they seem intrinsically Canadian, much more so than our over- achieving national rodent.

Sadly, neither ecological excellence nor symbolic aptness was enough to protect muskoxen from overhunting in the 19th century. Having exhausted the supply of bison robes on the Great Plains, the Hudson’s Bay Company and other fur buyers shifted their gaze northward to the woolly muskox, whose silky underhair, known as qiviut, is said to be the warmest of all natural fibres. By 1916, more than 22,000 of these magnificent hides had been brought to market. This unregulated slaughter, together with catastrophic ice storms, reduced the Canadian population to around 1,500 that year.

To prevent total loss and to assert Canadian ownership of its Arctic livestock, the federal government banned all muskox hunting in 1917. Thanks to this protection, the herds grew to an encouraging 75,000 by the early 1980s, enough to permit the harvest that gave rise to the Saskatoon project. Today, the Canadian population is about 120,000 — 20,000 or so on the mainland and the rest on the Arctic islands.

Humans have some right to take pride in this success, but the kudos really belong to the animals themselves. And no one is quicker to point this out than Flood, whose research on the Banks Island refugees, the last of whom died a year ago, and their descendants — currently 18 in number — now spans the better part of two decades. As he and his colleague Jan Adamczewski have discovered, muskoxen don’t merely contend with adversity, they thrive on it. Faced with starvation rations in winter, muskoxen respond by reducing their demands. "If there’s less to eat, eat less" is their Zen-like discipline. Not only do they reprogram their digestive systems to obtain maximum beneÞt from every mouthful, they also turn down some of their bodily functions to conserve energy. Liver and kidneys, for example, are reduced in weight by half. As a result of this austerity program, a pregnant cow will generally make it through the winter with a healthy reserve of fat, enough to support several weeks of milk production before the tundra greens up again. It is all, in Flood’s understated phrase, "faintly amazing."

But if muskoxen are superbly acclimatized to the winter’s worst excesses, they are less able to cope with unseasonably "good" weather. A mid-winter thaw that glazes the land with ice can encase their already limited food supply. Heavy snowfalls and ice storms can cause mass starvations. Ominously, these are just the impacts predicted for global warming and exactly what has occurred during the last three winters on Bathurst and Melville islands, where heavy snows and warm temperatures caused a major die-off of muskoxen. Recent losses are also known or suspected for Banks Island, Melville Peninsula, islands in the Queen Maud Gulf and along the Thelon River, although the causes are unknown.

Eighty percent of the world’s muskoxen are found in Canada, and by choosing these arpents de neige as our home, we have thrown in our lot with them. Geography singles us out as the citizens of winter and guardians of winter’s beasts. Weather and wildlife are threatened not only by our emissions but also by the hot air spewing forth from our leadership. The human consequences of climate change may be obscured in this fog, but the probable outcome for muskoxen are not. We don’t all like it hot.

Candace Savage is a Saskatoon-based writer and author of 18 books on wildlife, environmental issues and other subjects. Her latest is a history of beauty pageants, entitled Beauty Queens.

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