Facing the Hunter by David Adams Richards Read Free Book Online Page B

know this in a second. Anyway, I had scouted out a place near one of the lakes up on the Renous, and I took him in there Monday morning, to set camp, do a bit of scouting, and get acquainted with where he would be. I had a tree stand set up along a good spot. There were moose there for sure. By Monday night everything was fine. We had a good camp and had some solid signs of more than one bull—I had my three-wheeler and rope, an axe and pulley, and we had sighted in his .306 rifle, before we got to the area, because he had just bought a new scope.
    “‘This is the place to be,’” he said, beaming in delight.
    “‘Yes,’” I told him, “‘I think we’ll luck out in here.’”
    “By Tuesday morning he was telling me how he had heard that there were great moose on the Bartibog. Yes, I told him, there were great moose on the Bartibog—and it was a fine and wild place to hunt, but we were here, and this was a great place as well. By supper hour that night he was obsessed with seeing the Bartibog.
    “‘I would just like to have a look at it,’ he said. I told him we were about fifty miles away, and what was the use of going all the way downriver to the Bartibog where other hunters already were? We should concentrate on hunting where we were. But that did not convince him, and by Wednesday afternoon we had pulled up stakes and gone down to the Bartibog River, and on the last day before the hunt tried to find a place to set camp far in behindthe Gum Road. The next two days we wandered about the Bartibog region fromthe Gum Road to Oyster River looking for moose, while hearing shots far away. By Friday night he was certain he would like to go back to our original spot. Now that we had wasted two days and four tanks of gas. So back we went the next morning. Two bulls had been taken fifteen minutes from our campsite, but as you might guess neither one by us.”
    I have been hunting moose since I was twenty. When I was young, and heard the stories of great deer hunts, I thought that deer hunting was the finest hunting achievement. But after my first moose hunt I changed my mind. For the most part, large moose have no natural predators in the woods here. Of course wolverines did at one time range this far south, and there are stories of wolverines climbing trees and ambushing moose by jumping on their backs. There is an increase in coyote now, and a full-grown male black bear is nothing to fool with. Still, a large, healthy bull moose is pretty formidable. It is wrong-headed to say they are stupid just because they are big enough to ignore you. In fact, many people speak about the moose having an instinct that surpasses that of deer. And if you are in close proximity to a bull moose in rut, they are as dangerous as any animal.
    Unlike the caribou, that moved out and were slaughtered away with the encroachment of man, moose show a familiarity with us that allows them a closer proximity.
    My good friend Peter McGrath touched a cow moose with the tip of his rod to get it to move along out of a pool, and David Savage touched one with the butt of his gun, when hunting deer.
    Although this is true, they are still a very dangerous animal during the rut, which starts at hunting season. Myyoungest brother, when he was about seventeen, was followed for two miles by a bull moose when he was hunting partridge. The moose stayed parallel to him, just off the woods road, snorting and tossing its head. Finally, as he got close to the camp, the moose broke off at a run, its huge rack tossing up as he crashed back into the woods.
    Sometimes one thinks of them as almost human.
    In Alden Nowlan’s poem “The Great Bull Moose,” the moose takes on the quality of humanity, or a Christ figure, or, as some say, Nowlan himself, who at times had a right to feel persecuted. The old bull moose comes down from “the purple mist of trees on the mountain” and is a gigantic solitary figure among the puny mortals who surround and eventually kill