How Now, Brown Cow?

The musk ox is a hard animal to describe--it looks somewhat like a cross between a buffalo and an English sheep dog, has downward-curving horns and a morose expression. It is even harder to know. Though it once roamed as far south as Kentucky, it never learned to duck when hunters began shooting; now all but extinct, the musk ox lives on the fringe of the Arctic, where it munches lichen and other inferior fodder, and apparently spends a great deal of time watching it snow.

Despite its anti-social attitude, however, the musk ox has at least one wildly enthusiastic human admirer. John J. Teal, a husky, Arctic-roving anthropologist, finds it almost as gifted a beast as the shmoo; last week in Manhattan, he announced that he considered musk oxen the hope of New England, and said that he looked forward to the day when hairy herds of them would crop contentedly on the stony hillsides of New Hampshire and Vermont.

The musk ox, first of all, is not an ox. Its true name: ovibos (literally, sheep-ox). Also, it has no musk sacs. It gives tasty milk, produces one of the softest wools known to man, and yields meat (though only if killed) which tastes like a combination of mutton and beef. Teal plans to lead an expedition to Ellesmere Island in the Canadian archipelago next autumn (when this year's crop of musk-ox calves will have reached the size of police dogs), snatch eight of the small fry from their mothers, and bring them back to his Vermont farm.

Since he has promised the Canadian government that no adult musk ox will be killed in the process, the job of oxnapping promises rich yields in exercise and excitement. At the moment, Teal plans to release a set of dogs to scatter the musk-ox herd. Expert ropers will then try to lasso and tie up the adults, and after that a group of strong young men will run down, hog-tie and crate the eight lucky calves.

But even when (and if) the eight musk oxen grow to maturity in Vermont, a few problems will remain to be settled. Nobody milks musk oxen, since the beast regards any man, with or without a bucket in his hand, as a mortal enemy. So far, milk has been obtained from them by the simple process of shooting the cow before milking --a practice probably too expensive in the long run for thrifty New England. Nobody clips them, either, but fortunately the animal sheds some of his hair in the spring, and anyone patient enough to follow him around and pick it up can eventually gather quite a bit of it.

On top of all this, the ox only produces one calf a year and seldom more than three in a lifetime, and will not be a common sight in Vermont for some time. This is probably just as well. The musk ox, which likes to lick lichen from snow-covered rocks, should react well to New England grazing. But it is a little harder to tell just how New England will react to the musk ox.

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