Whatever the motive, our moose is done with this scene too, and he walks slowly, very slowly, across the meadow and disappears in two steps behind the curtain of brush. Maybe he's too tough to be scared of a cough, or to let anyone who may be watching him know that's the case. But he hasn't seen a cow either, or another bull to fight. I don't want to walk back to camp using a headlamp with Gorewinkle out there. He circles around, is lost in the brush, then comes back again for a while. Still, it's pretty exciting to be so close to that big moose, and hiding in plain sight, just above him. There is a gory scene from Spain's famous running of the bulls in it that I try not to think about. The book I finished just before "The Art Forger" was "The Paris Wife," about Hemingway's first wife. "But I could fire a shot to scare it." Instead, Chip makes grunting, bull-moose sounds, and the mad moose comes closer with those nasty spikes. If we talk won't he go away? "Can you shoot a moose in self defense?" I whisper. When my husband answers "maybe," I say, "Do we have a rope?" When he says no, I wonder why we are still whispering. "Will he knock down the ladder?" I ask as he snorts our way. He thinks we are another bull moose picking a fight. Snorting and grunting, even growling, as he swings towards us. He's banging into alders and pushing them down. The antlers are not 50 inches wide, the legal limit. "It has spikes like tusks," I whisper back. I duck behind the burlap hanging from the stand's railing. He's the size of an elephant, at least to me. Finally he appears on the edge of the meadow in full view. We watch and listen and wait on high alert. That's when we see alders shaking across the meadow and hear the guttural "unk-unk" sound the males make. Chip does his cow call again, but I say it's silly, as there are no moose out yet in the sun, and I open my book, "The Art Forger," about a stolen Degas in Boston. Crows and ravens flap over the fields, flocks of ducks V overhead. We crash around and talk at full voice and then about 4 p.m., climb up in the stand and wait for the evening to cool and the moose to move. Figuring no moose will be out 'till dusk, we do some trail work then cut a few alders blocking our view. We sit like that, sometimes standing up, sometimes shifting for about three hours, then we climb down and head to camp for a snack and a nap.īy the time we go back out, it's hot. A glacier calves way up high and it rumbles like thunder. An airboat runs up the river out of sight and far away, sounding like a small plane. A hawk hovers, and in the distance trumpeter swans honk. How can he do this with a straight face? Leaves drop. It makes me love the moose hunter in him. He pinches his nose and sort of sings out of it through his cupped hands. We don't speak except in whispers or sign language. Packs and rifles are hung on nails behind us. There's a narrow seat with a bar we pull over our heads once we are both in it, shoulder to shoulder. We climb up the ladder to a metal bench 14 feet up, one step at a time. There are moose trails in here, and it smells musky-moosey. You can see the weather moving all the way to Canada. It looks like a Virginia hayfield, except when the fog lifts there will be mountains on either side of a wide valley, some with glaciers - and no barns or houses. The tree stand is in a tall cottonwood on the edge of swampy meadow dotted with alder and willow islands and rimmed by brushy breaks of higher ground. We walked down a gravel bar where I stepped at the same time Chip did - making one crunch rather than two. The water climbed to two inches below the upturned cuff of my hip boots. There were soft muck, gravel and logs under there. We crossed a silty slough, feeling with our feet - it was that opaque. We tried not to crack dead branches, or trip, or snag the rifles. Underfoot it's rutted, riddled with blow downs, and the way is not clear. When we couldn't stand to wait another minute, we tiptoed through the woods to our tree stand - through alder and cottonwood, wild roses and cranberries, Devil's club, willow. We have until the first week of October - or until 25 or so have been shot.Ĭhip and I camped out on the river so we could be hunting at first light on opening day. So have the moose - near our sites, anyway. The first weekend of the Haines moose hunt is over, and we have survived. Updated: DecemPublished: September 24, 2013
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