Elizabeth Bradfield

Encountering the Oomingmak, a Conversation across Decades and through Silence

            My first sighting in the Tacoma zoo post-
renovation, pre-high school. Rolling hills. Their squat,
shaggy selves a paradox: so boring, so riveting.

I have often seen black dots on a white hillside and been undecided even with the aid of a good glass
as to whether they were boulders or musk-oxen.[1]

Later, on Devon, the same as Mac. Long
minutes on the bridge with binos, debating.

We shall go on leisurely killing muskoxen whenever possible for ourselves and our dogs[2]

            Leisurely.

…the practice of rubbing their heads on their legs puzzled me for some moments, until I concluded
that they were rubbing away the frost formed about their eyes by the condensation of their breath in cold weather.  They were thus able to see their assailants more clearly.[3]

Wrong. No trees so they mark the trunks
of their legs. Scent transferal. Territory. Mac was meant
to smell them and then run.

In 1917, apparently in response to the continuing destruction of muskoxen in Canada’s arctic by
MacMillan’s party, the government of Canada initiated conservation legislation to protect the species.[4]

I have to think he didn’t know. What don’t I know?

It is a shame that the boys in their excitement killed so many. [5]

Shame.

The little fellow, possibly a month old, faced out with the others….Later we captured him and slipped
on a dog harness….Later, we tied him to the body of the dead wolf.[6]

I think he loved the little one. There’s a photo:
Mac sitting on snow, hands deep in scruff,
for once not looking at the lens.

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[1] MacMillan, Etah and Beyond, 170
[2] MacMillan quoted 1914 in Muskox Land, 412
[3] MacMillan, National Geographic, July 1925, p. 706
[4] Muskox Land, p. 273
[5] MacMillan quoted 1914 in Muskox Land, 413
[6] MacMillan, Etah and Beyond, p. 175

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Writer/naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of Toward Antarctica, Once Removed, Approaching Ice, Interpretive Work and Theorem, a collaboration with artist Antonia Contro. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, West Branch, Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, Orion and elsewhere. Winner of the Audre Lorde Prize from the Publishing Triangle, finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, her awards also include a Stegner Fellowship, a Bread Loaf Scholarship and a residency at the Vermont Studio Center. Founder and editor-in-chief of Broadsided Press and a contributing editor at the Alaska Quarterly Review, she lives on Cape Cod with her partner and is Associate Professor and co-director of creative writing at Brandeis University.