Thule 1600 - The Musk Ox Herders
The Arctic Islands of the Canadian Archipelago are a frozen dry desert. The Thule were masters at growing crops in some of the most forbidding wastelands on Earth, but here they tried and failed. The land is simply too poor, too dry to sustain intensive agriculture.
The Musk Ox Herders are the descendants of the hunters and gatherers of the original Thule culture, before they started farming. In most places elsewhere, the hunter/gatherers were overwhelmed by Agriculture. Either they started farming themselves, or farmers pushed them out. The farmers came here to the islands, a long time ago. But farming proved difficult and the hunter-gatherers pushed back. In the end, the farmers withdrew, leaving a thin legacy of works. But the hunter-gatherers had by that time adapted, building a lifestyle around an animal that thrived in this empty desert land.
The land use of the Musk Ox herders still draws on the agricultural legacy, however. The elaborate technologies of microclimate engineering, careful landscaping, mound building, collecting water, breaking the winds, conserving heat, carefully replenishing and rebuilding soil are in use. It all take place on an immensely slow scale, accumulating over centuries, the population of draft animals is thin, the human population thinner still. But the labour of draft animals is there, it’s simply a matter of how to deploy it, how to slowly and carefully sculpt this fragile landscape. They’ve been doing it for centuries, left to themselves, they may spend another thousand years and more, turning a desert into a landscape of gardens.
The exquisitely careful, slow incremental reshaping of land is not to feed humans directly for the most part. It’s to feed the musk ox that the herders rely upon, to ensure that each year, there’s just a little more forage, that it’s just a little easier to find, to ensure that good years get better, and bad years aren’t quite so harsh.
The Herders are a people apart. Moving from place to place with their herds in communal bands. They are milk drinkers, they practice a little horticulture, they gather a bit, hunt a bit, they’re wool (qviat spinners), their material culture is sparse as befits nomads, every item, every pound of weight considered carefully, the plenties and pitfalls of vast landscapes are memorized like the back of their hands. Their lives are the rhythms of the beasts, of the seasons of the vast landscape that they move through, of careful changes and works that might take years to see results, generations to pay off fully. It’s a harsh life, but milk and meat are good foundations to build a body on, and constant wandering toughens it. The Herders are known as a large people, stoic, tireless appallingly strong.
And perhaps a little bit stupid, according to the reputation. Their culture is one of small groups, of occasional contacts and meetings, of elaborate politeness and custom, slow and mannered. There’s a patience and a diffidence that is maddening. Those who deal with them learn to tolerate their ways, because while slow to act on offense, their vengeance grinds exceedingly fine.
It’s not clear how many of the Herders there are in their islands. They don’t really see the point of a census. By guesses, there may be a few hundred thousand musk ox. Of the herders, some say fifty thousand, some say one hundred thousand, no one really knows. For the herders, their focus is the ability of the land, will it sustain the animals, will it sustain the men and women.
Population density is managed by sending the young men south to seek their fortunes, usually accompanied by a chosen and well domesticated musk ox or two, and whatever tools they’ve been able to make, or gifts they’ve earned.
Not the daughters though. They stay behind, are married to elders, or perhaps to favoured sons, the ones who will not be set upon the road, or traded to other clans. Among the herders, a man isn’t really a man unless he has two or three wives. A half dozen wives are merely respectable. There are folk tales of a man with a hundred wives, each producing sons and daughters. Many heroes of folklore are attributed as his wandering sons.
It is a well respected tradition, and in spring, the lands are trod by the young men and their beasts, welcome guests in every clan and tribe they visit on their travels, so long as they don’t stay, until finally they make their way to the mainland, a steady trickle of bumpkins and heroes, fortune seekers and wanderers, naive yet gifted.
Their domesticate, the Musk Ox has spread with them, through the McKenzie basin, into Alaska and Hudson Bay, to Siberia and Baffin Island. Generally, they’re seen as inferior to Caribou, but they’ve found their niches among the poor or in harsh regions. This is their great contribution to Thule civilization - heroes and shaggy beasts.
For a long time, the Herders were among the poorest Thule. They never met a Norseman, but the skill and technology of weaving slowly made its way to them. And with that came the first trappings of wealth. Woven qviat came into demand in the south. The Herders had a trade good, something they could use to procure bronze tools, fine wood, leathers, objects practical and magical, to obtain amenities and luxuries. Trade brought more contact, more ideas, considered and percolated slowly through the slow process of the Islands, accepted or rejected or adapted. Literacy proved to be useful, and all over the landscape, rock faces sheltered from the elements are awash with graffiti - instructions, observations, recipes, announcements and warnings. Despite their slow ways, the Herders are cleverer than they appear. This is a thing that only really becomes apparent to their hasty southern cousins once its too late.
Life just keeps getting better. Their qviat, after Roseroot, is the most sought after trade good for the Europeans. Even at the end of their long trading chain, it just gets more and more profitable every year as demand mounts up, as the trading chain eventually starts to grow shorter. The value of the goods they trade, the complexity, will continue to grow. The Herders will not change their lifestyles, but will count themselves as wealthier, accumulating guns and powder, spyglasses and lenses, iron pots and steel knives.
The European plagues and epidemics will have little effect on them. Their population density is thin and their numbers are scattered, which will make transmission difficult. They’re a healthy well fed population, well suited to ride out a pandemic. Their society is one of harems, with lots of breeding females, and eager young males ready to step into the gap. They will be lightly touched and quick to recover. At the worst, in some years, there just won’t be as many young heroes and bumpkins heading south, riding their shaggy beasts.
Their land is harsh, and while they’ve learned to live on it, it’s not welcoming for anyone else. There’s nothing that they have that can be easily taken from them, or that they can be easily displaced from. Like all societies, they have vulnerabilities. But the truth is, that they’re very hard to get too, and all too self sufficient.
The Herders have little regard for politics. If someone comes along, from Hudson Bay, or Coppermine, or Alaska or even France or England, and says ‘now you are part of our Empire’ that’s fine, so long as the visitors come with sufficient gifts, mind their manners, behave like polite guests and don’t become rude in their demands.
If not, well, there’s a sickness that the Herders know well, it’s when an unpleasant person is sleeping and some artery spontaneously opens up and they bleed out without ever waking up. It’s a mysterious thing, the herders acknowledge, best not to dwell on it. A positive attitude is the key to a healthy happy life.
For the Herders, life will keep getting better and better, despite occasional bumps and hiccups. Perhaps in a thousand years we’ll look in on them, living their patient wandering lives, reshaping their lands.