Musk ox

Musk oxen are among the recurring animals through which the novel gives shape to Augustine Lofthouse and Iris’s life in the Arctic. They graze in a nearby valley as daylight returns, disappear for a time, and later appear again at Lake Hazen. For Augustine, they are at once living neighbors, a possible source of food, and a measure of time that does not depend on human schedules. Iris’s close attention to the herd repeatedly draws him out of abstraction and into the shared act of watching.

Appearance and Arctic Setting

The first sustained observations come as the Sun returns. Augustine and Iris walk beyond the outbuildings to watch the light rise and fall, and in a nearby valley they see a herd returning daily to nose through snow-covered ground. The grass they eat cannot be seen from the pair’s vantage point. Augustine imagines strawlike stalks pushing up beneath the snow, a small sign of life concealed under the wintry surface.

The animals appear massive beside the open tundra. Their shaggy coats hang in thick locks, nearly brushing the ground, and their long, curved horns point upward. Augustine sees them as almost prehistoric: creatures that were present before humans walked upright and might remain after human cities had crumbled. That scale of time belongs to his interpretation, but the herd’s ordinary acts of grazing and returning make the thought concrete. Their lives continue in the landscape without reference to the fate of human settlements.

Iris and the Herd

Iris is transfixed by the animals and gradually persuades Augustine to sit closer. She does so by silently tugging him forward, a small, repeated gesture that changes where he places himself and what he attends to. The herd becomes something they observe together rather than merely a feature of the view. Its presence gives their days a recurring point of focus as the Sun begins to linger for longer stretches.

Later, when Augustine finds Iris sitting outside in the cold without her parka, she directs his attention to the same herd. The animals have been away for a week or two, apparently grazing elsewhere, and Augustine had barely registered their absence. Iris has noticed. Her excitement at their return shifts his attention from alarm to the animals’ familiar activity: they are again searching beneath the snow for grass. He watches with her, then draws Iris onto his lap and holds her. In this moment, the herd’s return is both a fact about the landscape and the occasion for a quiet renewal of their closeness.

Food and the Limits of Survival

The herd also makes the practical demands of survival impossible for Augustine to ignore. As daylight lasts for several hours, he thinks of the observatory’s unused shotguns and imagines the animals as a source of fresh meat. He has been eating food that seems timeless and tasteless, and he knows their supplies will eventually diminish. Yet he cannot bring himself to imagine killing and preparing one of the animals. The prospect exposes a gap between recognizing what survival might require and being able to carry it out.

His reluctance is bound up with his fear of the responsibility for Iris. He tries to picture her future in the Arctic and feels hopeless, useless, tired, and angry that her care has fallen to him. He is also angry because he does care, despite trying not to. The herd does not resolve these pressures, but it makes them tangible: a living presence can be contemplated as food, yet Augustine’s attention to it has already become more than calculation. His inability to regard the animals as an easy resource complicates the starkness of survival.

Lake Hazen and Seasonal Return

At Lake Hazen, the herd remains part of the daily world the two build together. The basin is warmer in the Sun, and Augustine sees Arctic hares on a small island; elsewhere across the lake, the animals appear at the shore. After a meal of baked char, canned peas, and powdered mashed potatoes, he wakes in an Adirondack chair to find eight of them drinking across the water, with a ninth—a small calf—partly hidden in its mother’s thick coat.

The calf’s impatience makes the scene particular rather than emblematic. It brays, scuffs a hoof, and nudges its mother while she continues drinking. Augustine murmurs Umingmak, the Inuit word for musk oxen, which he remembers without knowing where he learned it. The word draws his attention briefly to his own beard and hair, but the scene remains grounded in the herd’s behavior: the mother drinks, and the calf waits for her.

The animals also belong to the changing abundance of summer. As wildflowers spread through the tundra and Augustine and Iris venture farther from camp, musk oxen and caribou graze there, eating the small plants. The herd is not confined to the couple’s moments of observation; it is part of a larger living landscape, moving and feeding beyond their immediate needs.

Narrative Significance

The Musk ox’s importance rests in this balance between human meaning and animal presence. Augustine sees the herd through questions of food, endurance, and the possible future of civilization, but the animals are not only answers to those questions. They graze, drink, return after an absence, and tend to a calf. Iris notices their movements when Augustine does not, and her attentiveness helps make the animals’ lives visible to him again.

Their recurrence also gives the Arctic a rhythm distinct from radio silence and human uncertainty. As the Sun returns, the herd can be watched in the valley; later it appears again by the lake, while the seasons alter the landscape around it. The animals’ apparent indifference to the cities Augustine imagines falling into ruin enlarges his sense of time beyond the human world. At the same time, the intimate scenes of watching prevent that thought from remaining remote: survival and care unfold beside creatures whose continued life cannot be reduced to either metaphor or provision.