About the Book

How could one explain why an animal threatening to charge and annihilate a man one minute would walk up to him when he had stretched out full length on the straw outside her pen, and lie down as close to him as the rails separating them would allow?

The Musk Oxen of Gango is a unique true story about "the wildest, most dangerous of all Arctic mammals," and a man who had the courage to try and flesh out a dream against unsurmountable odds. It is about his winning the complete trust and friendship of animals sometimes thought of as prehistoric survivors of the last ice age. It is about their personalities, their intelligence, their sense of humour. There is no other book quite like it.

About the Author As a college student Mary (Kennedy) Burpee was encouraged by her English teacher to pursue writing but she was too busy. Twenty-five years later when she and her husband Clarence Burpee were raising three children plus cattle, grains, forage seed and Arabian horses on an Alberta farm, she was hardly less busy. However, when the editor of what was then Canada´s national farm magazine, The Family Herald, asked her to write about her life on the farm, she wrote her first article, published in 1960. Since then her articles and travelogues have appeared in various papers and periodicals. Two full-length works of historical fiction remain unpublished, more articles continue to be added to her work-in-progress file. Now at age 84 she is justifiably pleased with the publication of her first book, Musk Oxen of Gango.