Ottawa-based wildlife photographer Michelle Valberg tells this story of when she was in search of the wild muskoxen known to roam the frozen tundra of Banks Island in the Northwest Territories.
She spent days driving a snowmobile in -50C temperatures, expecting to come across the shaggy-haired mammals, whose numbers can run in the tens of thousands.
The flat lighting conditions made it difficult to decipher the contours of the vast land, but Valberg remained hopeful each time her sled came over a crest that the herds would finally appear. They never did.
“We saw, in three and a half days, four ptarmigan and one dead muskox,” she said, flatly, before getting to the kicker: “We got to the airport the next day to leave and the plane couldn’t land because there were three muskox on the runway.”