There have been 14 moose taken in the hunt so far (at least as of last night according to the white board in the window of the Fish & Game office). We didn’t get one of them, but, as Chip says, we shot one last year, and so can’t complain, “The odds are against it it.” (And there’s still a few more weeks, hopefully.)As you can see by my moose stand reading, it’s a tad tricky to determine if a moose is legal. You have to take a really good look at their very large heads. That means you have to get quite close, and to be able to see out of your binoculars, which when they are wet and steamy is a challenge.
And it was really wet. Rain fell from the sky and water bubbled up from the ground. Our foot prints filled up and boots were sucked into the muck. The dry washes became little rivers deep enough for skiffs to plane through. There were no banks to walk on, rather we pushed through the alder thickets (full of wet leaves, still) to peek into the meadows. We had to boat everywhere as the water around our island camp was higher than hip boots. I watched the measure stick on the edge of the rising river closely. At one point we only had about 7 inches of freeboard in front of our tent, but by the time we headed home, the river had dropped again, more than a foot.
So we came in for a few days and will hunt closer to home, and head back out later in the week. Here is something to ponder:
Just before we left, we celebrated Silvia Rose’s 3rd birthday, and I bought some presents to stay at our house for all the little kids to play with. Ivy (4) picked out the castle at the bookstore, and we purchased an extra package of wooden and felt people and horses so they wouldn’t have to fight over who will be the princess or the queen or the knight. When we came home from camp, this is what we found in our room:
Pearl had carried all the little figures upstairs. She didn’t chew any. Their tiny felt clothes weren’t even matted. When I brought them back downstairs, she was not pleased. (You will see that she too, is wet. I took a walk with her as soon as we came home… first things first.)
Don’t you wish you could hear what dogs are saying or know what animals think? When we were sitting in that tree stand in the rain, watching the hawks, and a slow cow moose and her calf, the swans over head, and a fat vole scurry under the leaves, I thought there is another language spoken here, that I wish I knew better. I’ve heard whispers, caught a phrase perhaps, recognized a warning shout, but mostly, it’s foreign. For now it’s enough to be immersed in the wild, for a few days, or a few hours a week. That’s the best part of hunting– isn’t it? And to come home to Pearl, who everyday is communicating with me, and I with her, in our own animal way.
