Gear Box
BY LAWRENCE MILLMAN
Every Arctic explorer has his own favorite item of gear. One might swear by his bearskin boots, another might tell you that he can’t travel anywhere without the right type of sledge, and yet another might say that neoprene vapor-barrier socks are his personal sine qua non. I even know someone who would give pride of place to Tabasco sauce, because it enlivens the dull flavor of Arctic camp cuisine. As for myself, I would never leave home for the Arctic without my qiviut (pronounced kiv-ee-yut) cap and mittens. Whenever I’m wearing them, my body turns into a veritable furnace, and I feel like I can venture naked into the most inhospitable cold, except for my qiviut garb. Fortunately, I’ve never acted on this impulse.
To me, qiviut—the underfur of the musk-ox—is a miracle material, infinitely more so than, for instance, Gore-Tex. It has an exceptionally high warmth-to-weight ratio, with each fiber seldom more than 18 microns in diameter. More significantly, it’s eight times warmer than sheep’s wool, as well as considerably softer than cashmere wool (in Europe, it’s known as “the cashmere of the north”). In fact, qiviut might be the warmest natural material on the entire planet. The musk-ox is a creature that has no problem with temperatures as low as -75°F, and only the very warmest fur could accommodate it in such bone-shattering cold.
So how do you acquire some of this miracle material? You could pluck it directly from the musk-ox, although I wouldn’t recommend it: you could end up impaled unceremoniously on its horns. Or you could purchase it on the Internet, although I wouldn’t recommend that, either. Qiviut is very pricey, with some retailers selling it for as much as $750 per pound. If you’re like me, your pockets are extremely shallow, and you’re better off gathering it yourself.
I’ve gathered qiviut in places as diverse as Wrangel Island in the Siberian Arctic, Akpatok Island in Ungava Bay, and Scoresbysund in East Greenland. When collecting it, I always make certain that I remove the random pellets of muskox and lemming scat that usually adhere to it before putting a clump in my bag.
The musk-ox begins shedding its qiviut in the spring, and by the end of the summer, each musk-ox has shed approximately seven pounds, much of which seems to end up adorning various Arctic plants—especially the dwarf birch (Betula glandulosa), whose serrated leaves trap it. So I search for dwarf birch trees, and invariably I’m rewarded with some qiviut.
After I’ve gathered a quantity of it, I seek out an Inuit woman, who—for a relatively low price—will knit it into a garment. This is how I acquired my state-of-the-Inuit-art cap and mittens, in fact. Often, however, the Inuit woman in question will take a portion of the qiviut instead of money, for her people have known about the value of qiviut for a long time, much longer than they’ve known about money.