*Musk ox, Wikimedia commons
Musk ox are seriously weird animals. They’re like something straight out of Star Wars. A skull-like plate wraps its broad head and sweeps out into a pair of curved horns, like a bony handlebar moustache. A motley brown shaggy coat seems roughly thrown over an animal that looks a bit like a buffalo. Their furry blanket-like coat is so wild that a colleague theorised that if one shaved a musk ox, he suspected that the animal beneath would be no bigger than a cat. And while I doubt that, they certainly are not quite what they seem. Though they look like a kind of buffalo, in fact musk oxen are related not to cattle, but to goats, which is evident from their adeptness on extremely steep ground, effortlessly negotiating terrain that I would not remotely contemplate.
My first encounter with a musk ox was exactly as I’d hoped. Camping in east Greenland, I was the first to rise in the early morning, crunching across gravelly ground to a stream running near our camp. Squatting over the frigid water, trickling past icy fringes, I was filling my water bottle, enjoying the crisp morning air, when a snort and a snuffle roused me. I looked up to the vision of a wild, hairy beast standing above me on a low rise, just a few metres away, the wind rustling his scraggy mane. He’d also come down for a drink, and had stopped in is tracks when he saw me. We were each still, holding the other’s gaze. And then he stamped and snuffled again, before turning and loping back the way he’d come.
Another colleague had an even more intimate first encounter. She’d also been camping in east Greenland and was sitting inside her tent with a colleague, making coffee. With the steam from the heating water filling and warming the tent, she’d unzipped the top of the entrance, just above where she was seated. Then she heard a snuffle and, wondering what it was, stood up from her chair out of the unzipped opening of the tent. She found herself literaly face-to-face with a musk ox that had silently ambled up to their camp and which was standing not even a metre away, looking headlong at her. Stunned, she sat back down again.
“I think there’s a musk ox out there,” she said.
