Great Moose Hunting Story (Not Mine)

[guppie9]

Great article in today's Fairbank's newspaper. This story really captures what a moose hunt in Alaska is like. Although I read a comment from a guy who said, if you want to know what moose hunting in Alaska is like, stand in a cold shower and rip up $100 bills...it is the same thing.

http://newsminer.com/news/2009/oct/01/hunting-and-gathering/

Hunting and gathering in the season of the moose hunt
By Sam Bishop
Published Thursday, October 1, 2009

FAIRBANKS — The smell of moose meat, potatoes and cabbage cooked with an onion and some parsley filled our kitchen Monday night. I’d placed these ingredients in a Crock-Pot earlier that day. As I worked at the office, I imagined that smell. When I arrived home, it didn’t disappoint.

The meat, the central character here, was a roast cut from the upper hind leg of a moose I’d shot two weeks earlier. After simmering in the pot all day, it was tender enough to fall apart at the push of a serving spoon’s edge. My 17-year-old daughter, Nell, had already sampled it by the time I arrived, and, while she liked it, she described it as a little “dry.” That description applies to most meat on a moose and, in this case, conveyed not a lack of water but rather a lack of the marbled fat that lubricates beef in our mouths.

Monday’s dinner was the culmination of efforts dating back to late winter, when my wife, Suzanne, planted the parsley and cabbage seeds under lights in our garage. She later moved them to gardens next to our house. The potatoes and onions were planted in late May and June. All were harvested during the past few weeks, along with that central character, the moose.

Hunting, gathering and growing one’s own food has received a great deal of attention across the nation in recent years. The interest seems similar to that which I vaguely recall from my childhood. The back-to-the-land movement captured a small corner of the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and my family sometimes sat in that corner. A mish-mash of motivations, ranging from a desire for cheaper, healthier food to a interest in polluting less, were behind it then, and I think the same is true today.

I suspect those benefits could be attributed to our Monday night meal. But I know it’s not simple. With all the gasoline we burn and the equipment we need to hunt, gather and grow, I can’t say this path always is cheaper or less polluting than shopping at the grocery store, which sits at the pinnacle of an extremely efficient system. I do know that what we did this year is more satisfying and interesting than pushing a cart to the meat section.

Three green harvest tickets for moose sit in my file folder titled “hunting.” The oldest ticket, about a quarter-inch longer and a little grayer than the other two, is notched to indicate Sept. 12, 1988. On the back, I wrote “Tanana Flats, 8 a.m.” That was the first moose I killed. On Sept. 10, I killed my third. Tanana Flats, 6 p.m.

I’ve helped clean and pack many more moose, but between the first and third to drop by my bullets were two decades, just one other moose and too many Septembers spent not hunting at all.

I have a moderately defensible excuse for nine of those years, the past nine. My family and I lived in Arlington, Va. That state has many white-tailed deer, but I had no success hunting them. I tried a few times, in November, on a friend’s farm on the northern peninsula that juts into Chesapeake Bay. But I don’t know white-tailed deer, and I couldn’t spend enough time in the woods there to change that.

Given my mixed success hunting in Alaska, I can’t claim to know moose either, but I have a much closer acquaintance. This fall, more than a year since returning to Fairbanks, I renewed that acquaintance with the help of my parents and, for a few days, my nephew. On Sept. 5, after obtaining the state licenses and tags and a military land access permit, we launched two riverboats on the Tanana River and headed for the flats.

We didn’t know exactly where we were going, so it took us a few days to find out. When I first turned my boat up the small slough that eventually captured our interest, it didn’t look encouraging. Thick brush lined high banks, making a moose sighting unlikely. The brush opened at a burn, but the jackstraw carpet of dead spruce trapped us in one spot. A fallen tree blocked the channel. My Ouachita riverboat slips into many places, using a steel propeller-adorned 30-horsepower Honda outboard on an old-fashioned, hand-levered lift. But we had no saw to clear the branches that day, so we turned back to camp.

This outdoor grocery aisle and the others we explored during the following week proved full of curiosities, if not always moose. As I let the quiet, four-stroke motor idle up the slough that first day, we spotted a lynx crouched on a fallen log. It gazed at us, showing no sign of concern. We were the first to move on.

Behind our camp along the Tanana, ruffed grouse picked rosehips along the banks of a semi-dry slough we used for quiet walking; one morning, I rounded a corner to find five before me in the sedges. By then accustomed to our passage, they stalked off rather than flying. Hairy woodpeckers chirped and hammered. Red squirrels, mostly absent near our house outside Fairbanks this year, scolded regularly from the white spruce stands. A red-backed vole scurried up a log, stopped at my knee, gazed at me and reversed course. Cranes flew over from the west, calling. Great horned owls hooted and coyotes cried at night. Mostly, though, the forest was so quiet that the sound of cottonwood leaves dropping through their brethren would catch my ear and draw my glance.

My dad watched a cow moose and its calf one morning. Another, I heard a bull rattle its antlers. Two moose, we think, thrashed through the water behind our camp one night. But nothing appeared that was both legal to shoot and carrying enough meat for the year ahead. Picking lingonberries in the cool moss of a black spruce flat was the best use of the sunny afternoons.

On Wednesday, early afternoon, I returned to camp and re-opened the book that Suzanne had given me some time ago — Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” I’d finished a chapter before sleeping the night before. The new chapter title was “Hunting,” which seemed auspicious.

Pollan’s book is about that dilemma. When we can eat a wide variety of foods, what do we choose? For most of our history, the answer depended upon what was immediately safe, i.e., not rotten or poisonous. Today, we also wonder about the ethics of eating foods, given their long-term consequences and the way they are produced.

For example, my 14-year-old daughter, Louise, has been a vegetarian since she was seven, a choice that Suzanne and I have supported. We marveled at her resolve at such a young age.

Pollan, a prominent writer on the subject of food, decided he needed to try hunting so he could better understand such diverse ideas. So he pursued and eventually bagged a wild pig outside San Francisco. Such behavior is easily mocked, he observed. “Irony — the outside perspective — easily withers everything about hunting, shrinks it to the proportions of boy’s play or atavism,” he wrote. He’d considered much of the writing about such activity, from Ernest Hemingway to Ortega y Gasset, as “hunter porn” — the “straight-faced reveling in primitivism, the barely concealed bloodlust, the whole macho conceit that the most authentic encounter with nature is the one that comes through the sight of a gun. ...”

Then he found himself writing something awfully similar. “I am not by nature much of a noticer, yet here, now, my attention to everything around me, and deafness to everything else, is complete,” he wrote of his first hunt. “Nothing in my experience (with the possible exception of certain intoxicants) has prepared me for the quality of this attention. ... I am the alert man.”

These words mirrored an observation that a dedicated trapper once made to my wife, who is more gatherer than hunter. Nothing teaches a person about the woods like trapping, he explained, because you observe everything so keenly.

To be continued....it is too long to put into one post.

 

[guppie9]

Part 2 of the story

That’s how I felt a few hours later as I idled up the slough again with my parents in the front of the boat. My dad had trimmed enough branches from the fallen tree so we could slide the boat underneath.

As we moved up the slough, the banks gradually grew less steep and the brush opened up. We reached an area of rich habitat for moose and other wildlife. Floods had distributed silt across a broad marsh, fertilizing a new cover of willows, sedges and grasses. Beavers had dammed up a branch of the slough, making a place for the pond weed that moose enjoy in mid to late summer. Animal tracks — wolf, bear, coyote, beaver, otter, moose, geese, ducks — trampled the banks. I couldn’t stop smiling as we boated through this Shangri-La.

That first evening, we saw two cow moose and a calf on the slough. The next evening, we watched a cow, calf and small bull a mile away across the meadows for about a half-hour. Then my dad spotted a large bull crossing a narrow open spot about three-quarters of a mile away. I immediately began thrashing nearby willows with a dry moose shoulder blade, trying to imitate the sound of a bull’s antlers. The moose seemed to turn and listen for a moment before disappearing into the brush.

My mom suggested I walk out toward it, continuing to beat the willows. I did so. After a quarter-mile, as I entered a small meadow, I heard the bull rattle its antlers directly in front of me. I ran back into the brush and rattled back. Nothing. After 15 minutes of occasional thrashing, I decided I needed to advance again. I moved slightly to the right.

As I approached the next meadow, I stopped and scraped a small birch. Immediately on my left, about 40 yards away, the bull rattled back from the cover of head-high dwarf birch. I remained still and scraped again. Back and forth we talked. Seeing no movement from me, he slowly walked to the center of the meadow. His right antler had three brow tines, making him legal to shoot in the area.

I rested the barrel of my .30-06-caliber rifle on the small birch to compensate for adrenaline and a beating heart, which kicked in after I counted the three tines and realized I was about to shoot this moose. I put the scope’s cross-hairs on the center of his lung cavity and fired. The moose twirled, ran a few yards and paused. I fired again and he fell down. I heard him die as I walked toward him.

Tanana Flats, 6 p.m.

The next week was hard work. I told a friend that shooting a moose is like having a cow land in your boat while camping. We were able to gut and skin the top part of the moose the first evening. We returned the next day and finished the job. My parents skinned, cleaned and cut up the moose. It’s nice to have such experts — my dad has probably done this more than 40 times, and my mom has been with him for most of those. My job was to pack the pieces through the half-mile of meadows and brush to the slough. I’ve never been more willing to grind myself into exhaustion.

We ate various small pieces, the tongue and some of the liver in the first few days. Back at home in Fairbanks, I boiled the nose and jellied it with sage, thyme and parsley from our herb garden; the concoction has provided meat for my sandwiches this past week, while my daughters and Suzanne politely decline. The rest of the moose is cut up and in family freezers now, waiting for the next meal. That’s on our family menu for Friday, where I’m very glad to see it.

 

[noharleyyet]

Mr. Bishop is quite the wordsmith. Not a bad read.

...moosenose sammich...yum!