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". . .After Worland’s death, Melanie Bahnke of Kawerak wrote an open letter to policymakers and game managers, asking for further action to protect the community. “Our Tribal Leaders and elders traditionally were the ones who made decisions about the take of fish and game in our region and what is reasonable and allowable and what measures to take to protect our people,” she wrote. “I guarantee this situation would not be as out of hand as it is now if that authority had not been replaced by the current management regimes that are woefully inadequate considering the fish crashes and the current threat to humans posed by musk ox.”
“I can have discussions all day long with folks about what they need to do, and they just come back and say, ‘Well, we never wanted them here in the first place.’”
- They’re good eating, and in winter they have unusually lightweight but super-warm underwool, called qiviut, that can be spun into yarn and is far more valuable than cashmere.
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Learning to live with musk oxen
The species were introduced to Alaska’s Seward Peninsula decades ago, without local consent. Now they pose danger to life and property.
Feb. 1, 2024From the print edition
Worland was a court services officer for the Alaska State Troopers, a job that involved prisoner transport and court security. At the kennel, though, he had other obligations. Keeping a dog lot anywhere requires a constant loop of chores: feeding dogs, running dogs, scooping up dog poop. But keeping one in Nome comes with additional responsibilities: monitoring threats from musk oxen, stubborn, shaggy animals with formidable horns and a record of attacking dogs. During his decade as a musher, Worland, 36, had seen Nome’s musk oxen problems increase. He shared the dog lot with his wife and their friends, and about once a week, when musk oxen got too close, he took on the task of keeping them away. On Dec. 13, he was on a snowmachine, trying to scare off a herd that had come within a quarter-mile of the lot. No one else witnessed what happened, but one of the animals charged him. Worland received a fatal laceration to his femoral artery, and by the time emergency responders arrived, he had bled out.
The portrait that the Alaska State Troopers released in their announcement of his death shows a serious-looking man in a uniform and a fur hat. But in the slideshow during his memorial service at the local recreation center, Worland is often wearing an open-mouthed smile, or tearing it up on a dance floor. Sudden deaths are painful in any small town — Nome has around 3,700 people — and Worland was a well-liked member of the community, remembered for his adventurous spirit and love of hunting and the outdoors.
Worland was also Nome’s first musk ox-related human fatality.
On the Monday afternoon following his death, nearly 20 residents crowded into a small conference room at the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus in Nome. The Northern Norton Sound Fish and Game Advisory Committee was meeting for its biannual discussion of policy recommendations for state decision-makers. It’s the kind of meeting that rarely excites the public, but this one turned into an impromptu hearing on the town’s musk oxen problem. A dozen locals either called in or showed up in person, with several testifying to frequent run-ins and fears of more encounters. Mushers said that dogs were getting gored and it was getting harder to protect their kennels — but they were worried that any deterrence efforts would lead to accusations of wildlife harassment.
- “What happened to Curtis was the final straw for me,” she said.
- “We understand that musk oxen are here and that they will not go away, but we feel that they have been mismanaged and that we don’t have the right to protect ourselves and our property without risk of us being prosecuted for defending ourselves.”
ONE IÑUPIAQ WORD for musk ox is umiŋmak, a term that refers to the animal’s beard-like coat.
The word’s existence speaks to the Iñupiat’s long relationship with musk oxen, which once roamed the Arctic. Their decline is often attributed to climatic changes after the last ice age, along with predation and hunting. Around Nome, few if any Indigenous stories about the animals survive.
MaryJane Litchard, an Iñupiaq artist and healer who grew up in Lost River, Teller, Anchorage and Nome, told me that she never heard stories about musk oxen growing up, “not even (from) my granduncle when he told me true ancient stories.” Elders told her that people sometimes saw creatures that were extinct, like mastodons. As a teenager in the 1960s, Litchard heard someone describe seeing a blue-colored musk ox and asking an elder if they’d seen a ghost.
Records from early European settlers suggest that by the time they arrived, the animals were already rare in the region, mostly restricted to far northeastern Greenland and Northern Canada. “Epidemic disease associated with exploration and colonization — 1837 smallpox, 1900 measles, 1917 influenza — caused massive culture disruption,” said Jim Magdanz, who worked for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s Division of Subsistence from 1981 to 2012 and has searched for stories about musk oxen. “In some villages, only children survived. Indigenous histories of musk ox use either died in the epidemics or were rarely recorded when oral histories were written by explorers and settlers.”
Worland’s death wasn’t a freak accident; it was an indictment of the region’s musk oxen management and the century of decisions that brought them here.
