I hunted muskox in 2007 and put a thread on here about my hunt - search "great white north" and my name. Unfortunately photobucket stole the picks from the thread. Wasn't "white"....I did the August hunt. It was an adventure for sure, I hunted Victoria Island, out of Uluhoktok (Holman) booked thru BSC. I'd book thru a consultant on this hunt that has a travel side too to help with air travel arrangement. They are a really neat animal, budget for a full mount, mounting the head and throwing away the body hide is like mounting a deer head, but cutting off all the tines!
Try to arrange to be with at least one older guide that will talk with you about traditional Inuit (they call each other Eskimos, but I was told that's an insult) lifestyle.
Tell them you don't want to chase the animals on a machine to bay them before shooting.... this is illegal for non-subsistence hunters but the vast majority are killed this way. You don't need to chase.... there are areas with rocks or cut up little creeks to stalk in. My guides had never seen a traditional bow before and were skeptical... it took two days instead of the normal one with a rifle, but we found a stalkable herd.
Killing a bull is pretty much a given and is secondary to being in a place few non-natives get to visit. Enjoy the whole trip for the adventure. The highlight of mine was when the older guide... I think he was 65 which us really old for folks up there... helped me working on fleshing my hide and told me polar bear, seal, and whale hunting stories.
They are a large, stout animal. I used a 65 lb recurve and arrows around 650-670 gr if I remember right. Big Snuffer of course. Arrow sounded like it hit a sheet of plywood, penetration to the cresting. The meat tasted like beef to me, though very lean and tough. My guides called it "Old people food" and said they boil it till it falls to nothing like soup and people without teeth can eat it. They salvaged the meat, you'd pay thru the nose twice at airfare rates to get any home.
There is a book titled "Muskoxen and Their Hunters" that I picked up somewhere that is worth trying to find and read before you go. It is pretty heavy reading: part biology, cultural anthropology, and part history. Tells all about these little understood animals, the people of the North, and the population trends of muskox. In many areas that they were introduced or reintroduced they are outcompeting caribou and causing issues with native flora, they are real survivors and a very interesting case study in the ecology of the Arctic.
R
Topic: Muskox (Read 951 times)
