GO TO Alaska in tourist season and someone might ask “wanna buy some qiviut?” They’re not trying to sell you something that will make the tundra appear full of purple poppies; what you are being offered is the wool of the musk ox.
What makes qiviut (pronounced “kiv-ee-ute”) special? The musk ox (which isn’t actually an ox, and is most closely related to goats and sheep) may not look particularly soft and fluffy, but appearances are deceptive. To survive the harsh Arctic winters it grows a layer of fine underfur. With a diameter of around 20 micrometres, the hairs of this under-layer are among the finest of any mammal. Most qiviut products are made by the Oomingmak Cooperative, an Inuit knitting association made up of women from Alaskan coastal villages.
If it appeared in the official Scrabble dictionary, qiviut would be a great word to hit a triple-word score, and the real thing is even more valuable. Qiviut is warm, very soft, and doesn’t shrink when washed. It is gathered every spring when musk oxen shed their insulating inner coat. Local people gather the wool directly from the more placid animals or collect it from objects that the less obliging ones have brushed against. It’s a laborious business, but well worth it for the 2 to 3 kilograms of qiviut that an adult musk ox provides each year.
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The musk ox is not the only animal sought after for its underfur. Qiviut shares a luxury niche with other wool products from grazing animals that have become adapted to one or other inhospitable part of the globe. There is shantoosh, provided by the Tibetan antelope, one of the world’s rarest animals and one that has never been domesticated. It takes the underfur from three adult antelopes to make a shantoosh shawl, and though the finished article can fetch up to $5000, no one wants to go to the trouble of hunting down the annual sheddings. Consequently poaching is rife, further endangering the species. In the high Andes the guanaco, a relative of the wild camel, is equally resistant to domestication and has also been hunted to near extinction for its underfur.
“A musk ox provides 2 to 3 kilograms of qiviut every year”
The vicuña and alpaca, two relatives of the camel from Peru’s high dry deserts, are faring better, as is the Kashmir goat – the producer of cashmere. All three had the good sense to allow themselves to be domesticated, and the annual production of cashmere now runs at 15,000 to 20,000 tonnes. These, together with the angora-producing rabbit and the mohair-producing Angora goat, show that domestication, coupled with having something that humans want, can be a fast track to long-term survival, while remaining wild can lead to a brisk oblivion. The musk ox is just making the transition: 60 years ago many of the region’s Inuit were hunting the animals for their fat-rich meat, rather than knitting their underfur.
