by Pete Fromm
I had my rifle turned around and ready by the time it was gone. I had figured elk, because that’s all I had seen. The word moose was just working its way forward in my mind when I saw it sidehilling along the opposite bluff—an animal finally larger than a grouse and actually in range. Lining up my sights as I had at targets hundreds of times before, I fired.
In my head I wasn’t yet shooting at anything alive. It was a target, and when it broke back into a run after the shot I reloaded frantically, spilling black powder out of the buffalo powder horn I’d made. I ran on my side of the river, paralleling the moose’s path until I saw it again. I dropped down and fired. I may as well have been shooting into the sky for all the effect the shots seemed to have.
I was up and spilling more gun powder and ramming another round lead ball down the barrel and the moose was running again. Then it stopped and looked at me and lay down, its head raised normally, looking at me. It didn’t seem worried enough about the whole affair.
It was full dusk by this time, nearly dark, and I had to align the sights on the snow and then lower them to the black rectangle of the bedded down moose. I fired a third time, and the moose got up and trotted into another group of trees.
It was too dark to really fire any more and my target was gone. I looked down the bluff at the green ice of the river, finally starting to think. I wondered how I was going to cross the river, how I was going to look for a moose in the dark.
I ran back to my tent, getting snowshoes and rope and locking Boone into the truck, which had been buried by snow the week before. If I’d wounded the moose I didn’t want Boone trotting up to it. I’d become a pretty good shot with the rifle, but I didn’t even know if I’d hit the huge animal. When I shot a squirrel or grouse they died instantly and absolutely or they escaped rapidly. This thing hadn’t seemed to do either.
Back at the river I slid down the bank and studied the soggy-looking green ice. No place looked any better than another and I held my breath as I began to snowshoe across. The greenish layer of slush oozed through the webbing of my shoes and stuck on top of the cold rawhide. I pictured myself breaking through, my wool clothes soaking up pounds and pounds of water, the cold stinging the breath out of me, being swept downstream beneath the ice. I couldn’t believe I wasn’t falling through and I tried unsuccessfully to come up with a plan of action if I did plunge suddenly into the river.
The ice held and I crept up the opposite bank, thinking I was downstream of where I had last seen the moose and that I would cross its track soon. And I did. It was in the heavy timber and I turned on the headlamp I’d barely remembered to grab. Snow started to fall; fat, heavy flakes flashing white as they darted through the light’s beam.
The tracks were enormous in the knee-deep snow. There was nothing odd about them, nothing to indicate that a gun had been fired, and fired again, and again. I crept on, not noiselessly on my snowshoes, but close, with the falling snow muffling everything.
Then, caught in the flashlight’s beam, a long crimson streak stained the snow—two, actually—one on each side of the moose’s track, three or four inches wide, two feet long. I swallowed and put the rifle on half cock, that much closer to firing again. I wondered how stupid it really was to be out in the dark with a wounded moose.
The footprints went on as if the blood wasn’t streaked along every few feet. I came across a bed, a flattened spot six feet long, the bottom slushy, brilliant red, more blood than I’d ever seen. The new snowflakes melted when they touched the red. My flashlight swept through the trees around me, lighting only trunks, showing more clearly the complete blackness beyond.
With little idea of what else to do, I continued to follow the tracks, poking the rifle barrel in front of me, really wondering now where the moose was. I was looking up, not wanting to be surprised by the moose’s charge, and when I glanced back down I was surprised instead by the end of the tracks. Downhill from the last footprints a long drag mark started. I followed it with the light and at the end, ten yards or so down the hill, was stretched the moose, brought up short against the large, red trunk of a ponderosa pine.
I stood still a moment, watching. The body was much larger than I’d guessed, than I could have imagined. I closed in some, then hesitated. Finally I squatted down, wondering what to do.
Standing up again, ready to run, I lobbed a snowball at it. It thunked solidly into the ribs, drawing no reaction. I moved a little closer, rounding toward its head. I threw another snowball, harder this time. I had never seen anything this big dead. I wondered if it really was dead. I broke off a willow branch and shuffled closer. In one of my old books I’d read that if something didn’t blink when touched in the eye it was dead. I tried, reaching the willow stick as far as I could away from my body. It touched the large, round, open, black eye and the eye did not blink. I let out my breath and took a step closer, poking the moose in the eye again.
I moved through the snow the rest of the way and touched the side of the huge body, with my hand. Nothing moved and I knew I had killed it. I sat down on the moose.
I thought of cleaning a snowshoe hare: the precise layout of neatly coiled intestines, the chunkier blocks of stomach and liver, then, sealed off in their own compartment, the bellows of the lungs pillowing the tiny jewel of a heart. A hare was the biggest thing I had ever cleaned and I couldn’t imagine the same layout magnified a hundred times or more.
I got off the moose and looked at it once more before trying to roll it onto its back. But it was pinned against the tree and it wouldn’t roll. I grabbed one hind leg and pushed and pulled and sweated and swore. Finally I took a rope and tied the leg off to another tree. I was glad no one was with me to see this.
With the leg tied tightly to the tree, I took a deep breath and squatted between the animal’s legs. I began to hem and haw with my knife, slicing off globs of hair before I grew impatient and finally cut through the belly. As the hole grew the insides bulged out, blocking my path, getting in the way. I’d read and reread about this: warnings not to cut the guts, not to spill the juices on the insides, not to spoil the meat, and I cut as carefully as I could, and made a mess.
Before I was done I’d stripped off my jacket and shirts down to my union suit. My hair stuck to my head with sweat. I was blood up to my elbows and the snow kept falling, thicker than ever. No wonder they call this butchery, I thought.
Finally the insides lay in a pile outside the empty carcass. I separated the heart and liver. The liver was the size of a six-inch-thick cafeteria tray, the heart as big as my head.
I skinned the moose then, holding my breath with each tentative stroke of the knife, sure I was going to cut a hole, ruining the huge, warm robe I could already feel myself sleeping toastily under. As I skinned I found the path of two of the balls I’d fired, through the ribs behind the shoulder. One had clipped the aorta, only an inch or two above the heart. I found the flattened ball under the skin on the opposite shoulder and put it in my pocket. When I slid the skin out from under the moose and hefted it onto my shoulder I couldn’t believe the weight of the wet, black-haired hide. I was exhausted.
I wrapped the hide around my neck, like an enormous towel, and I pinched the heart and liver against my chest with one arm and carried my rifle with the other, and with my headlamp fading I struggled back to the river. By the time I reached it I’d thought of coyotes. What a feast they’d have. I trudged back up to the carcass and peed around it, wondering if that could possibly do any good.
Thinking of the thin green ice, I ferried the pieces over in two trips, growing more frightened each time. On my side of the river I staggered back to my tent. Boone bounded out of the truck, after her first imprisoning since she was a tiny pup. She sniffed suspiciously at the hide and steered clear of it.
I gave her some of the enormous liver for dinner but, with a thousand-pound supply of fresh meat, I was too tired to eat.
The next day, after chopping the thickening ice out of the channel’s end, I shuffled back
to the kill. The snow had been falling steadily, slowly, and my pee holes were covered. But the moose itself stood out clean, starkly red and white, still warm enough to keep snow from piling on it.
Following the directions I’d read one more time over morning coffee, I cut the moose into quarters, using an ax and a carpenter’s saw. I staggered with the quarters to the river, only able to carry the unwieldy weights fifty or sixty feet at a time. Not daring to be on the ice at the same time as the meat, I crossed the river first, then, safely on shore, dragged each piece across with a rope. The technique meant eight crossings of the groaning ice, holding my breath each time.
Once across I found I couldn’t carry the pieces and negotiate the steep, snow covered bank at the same time so I tugged them up at the end of the rope. The last quarter hung up in a nest of willows, and instead of sliding back down the bank long enough to clear it, as I should have, I swore and grabbed an extra loop and tugged and yanked like a madman. The quarter bulled through the brush and something gave in my hand, the rope squeezing like a vise around my mittens. In the fifteen-degree air, sweat dripped into my eyes and off my nose and I shouted every swear word I knew, slashing at the rope with my other hand, the rope taut enough to sing.
Not until I had all the pieces on top of the bank on my side of the river did I realize I had to think about this, that brute strength wasn’t going to be the answer. I took an hour off to build a sled and I pulled the meat on that, a quarter at a time, about half a mile, down a path I knew dead-ended at a sheer rock face. Sweat still dripped off my face though I was stripped nearly to bare skin for the first time in months, but with the sled the task at least seemed possible. I thought again of Scott trudging across Antarctica, manhauling all his gear.
At the rock face I stretched a meat pole between two trees. The only access to this cul-de-sac was up Indian Creek. Thick willow and cottonwood saplings formed a wall from that direction, while the cliff blocked every other line of sight. I’d picked this spot a long time ago, thinking of the warden’s advice to keep any hunting invisible.
It was when I tried to hoist the meat that I had an idea of its true weight. After taking the slack out of the rope I hefted mightily, and found myself in the air, the meat unmoved, still solidly on the ground. In my winter wool I weighed about two hundred pounds. And the meat didn’t budge when I dangled from the rope. If I hadn’t been so tired I could have climbed up and down that rope all day.
My books had repeatedly advised freezing meat in the largest pieces possible, discouraging freezer burn, so I struggled all the way with these four enormous quarters. I tried again, running with the rope, trying to jerk the pieces off the ground. But I was like a dog hitting the end of its leash. I stood over the quarters, knowing I’d have to cut them into eighths, just to make them lighter than I was, so I could lift them into the air. I wasn’t quite ready to face that.
I peed in a circle around the pile of meat again and shuffled off to bed, with something pulled in my stomach that made it hard to sit up after lying down. For the second straight night, I skipped dinner. The feast I’d planned would just have to wait.
I finished the job the next day, finally ending up with eight pieces of meat hanging from the pole. It was frozen now and I stood and looked at the dangling pieces a moment before cutting the inaugural meal. I sawed off a round steak the size of a manhole cover and just as hard. Tucking it under my arm, I slapped at one of the pieces and watched it swing. I laughed.
The steak looked like something out of a Flintstones cartoon—a brontosaurus steak. When my dad and Paul came in they would hardly believe their eyes. I ran my hands down the tenderloins, cuts I’d saved on purpose, since the first night, for the feed I’d put on when they skied into my meadow. We would feast and feast.
In the tent I set the steak next to the stove to thaw and I began to cook. I made a rice pudding that day, and two loaves of bread. Tomorrow was Christmas Eve. I would not let this holiday slip away as I had Thanksgiving. I was going to have a feast all my own. And I was too tired to do anything but cook for the rest of the day.
The steak, propped against the table leg, seemed like an enormous accomplishment. I walked out in the evening with my pipe and before long I wound up at the meat pole. I couldn’t stop smiling. Though the actual hunt had been ridiculously unplanned and accidental, maybe now I was a mountain man. I had gotten my own food. Even though it’d taken two months, things seemed awfully easy.
10
The thick snow that had been falling all during the moose days gave way to rain on Christmas Eve. Rain made the inside of my tent nearly as damp as outside so there was little point staying cooped up. I carried the moose hide to an open area by the river and stretched it out as widely as I could. It was longer than I was tall, over six feet wide. After cutting four lodgepole pines about ten feet long, I lashed and nailed them into a frame. The timing would be tight, but if at all possible I wanted to have the huge robe tanned and ready for my bed before my brother and father skied in.
I centered the hide in the frame and sat down beside it with a huge ball of string. Taking my Green River mountain man knife, I began punching holes along the hide’s border, using a stick of firewood as backing for the knife. I stitched the hide into the frame as I went, my pamphlet on Brain Tanning the Sioux Way propped up in the snow next to me. I chuckled over the advice on how much brain to use: “Each animal has enough brains to tan itself.”
“Yeah, but what about the tanner?” I wondered.
The point of the knife wore out before I was half done and I continued on with my Buck knife. It wore out before I finished, but it was close, and I tried to make it last. Finally I was pounding on the knife with another stick of firewood, trying to drive it through the tough hide. I was nearly done and I didn’t want to take a sharpening break. I’d been cooking Christmas treats like bread and coffee cake all day, and with those steady interruptions it was already nearly dark.
Finally the Buck knife wouldn’t do it anymore. I was getting sick of this project, of constantly stopping to retighten all the strings, wanting the hide drum-head tight, of my wool clothes growing thicker and heavier with the rain. I pulled my Swiss army knife from my pocket and its sharply pointed blade went through as if greased. I smiled, thinking I should have been using it all along instead of the large, round-tipped knives.
Its point dulled quickly though and with only a few holes left I was leaning into the knife, putting my weight against it to drive it through. I was kneeling up over the little knife, pressing as hard as I could when I over-balanced and the blade folded back into its closed position, just as it was supposed to, right over my middle finger.
I leapt up in pain and surprise, still holding the knife. I opened my hand but the knife held itself on my finger. When I pulled it away there was a moment of hesitation, the blade gripping bone.
I stomped up to my tent, more mad than hurt, mad that I couldn’t have seen that coming, that I’d been such an imbecile. But by the time I reached the tent the amount of blood was a little alarming and I wrapped it tightly and held it in the air awhile. That seemed to do the trick and I went back out to finish the hide. As soon as I dropped my hand back down it began to bleed again.
That night, four hours after I’d crushed the blade into my finger, it was still bleeding. I unwrapped it and saw the edges of the cut puckered, pulled away from each other, and knew I should have stitches. I wasn’t too excited about giving them to myself, and I wondered if I could if I had to. As a next-to-last resort I used a butterfly bandage to draw the edges together. I finished the bandaging and tied it tight enough to throb.
With the drizzle finally turned to thick, heavy snow, my radio worked well and I held my hand up all evening, checking the finger while I fiddled with the radio. The bleeding really had stopped, I decided, relieved to be able to put away the idea of giving myself stitches.
Soon I picked up a reading of A Christmas Carol by Lionel Barrymore and I listened with rapt attention
to a story I thought was too tired to ever be interesting again. It really was almost Christmas.
During the night, sometime after I turned off the radio, the sky cleared. When I woke the temperature was zero, my breath forming great steaming clouds while I was still in bed. I whispered, “Merry Christmas.”
But the cold made my finger hurt more, and worst yet, once I was out and about, I discovered it had frozen the hide into one gigantic board, supple as a sheet of plywood. I stood staring at it, a day’s work gone into stretching it, realizing that it would be impossible to tan with the temperature below freezing. I knew I’d have to cut it down and thaw it, and salt and roll it and bury it in my food cache. I wouldn’t have the huge robe until spring, right when I wouldn’t need it. And by then I’d no longer have the moose’s brain, the essential ingredient in the tanning process. I couldn’t imagine a way to save the brain that long.
I started the quick process of taking the hide out of the frame, mad at my heavy mittens for being so hard to work with, mad at having ever stretched it in the first place, mad at everything. When I was trying to haul the frozen hide up the hill to my tent it kept slipping out of my hands and in disgust I pulled off my mittens so I could get a real grip with my bare hands.
By the time I manhandled the hide through the front flap of the tent my fingers had gone through pain to numbness and I stuck them into my armpits and stood beside the stove, having taken just enough time to see that blood had soaked through my new bandage.
When I quit dancing around beside the stove I saw that the finger tips of my right hand were paper white. They stayed that way for a long time. I sat down to read over the first aid for frostbite, wondering if I could manage to pull any more moronic stunts in the next few hours, or if I’d exhausted even my abilities. It was shaping up to be a hell of a Christmas.
That afternoon, after I thawed my fingers and the hide, and I’d finished salting and storing it, I hiked up to the top of Indian Ridge. Three thousand feet above my tent I was able to see the sun again. I took several deep breaths, trying to relax, trying to put the rush of the moose kill and the foolishness of the robe behind me.