Memoirs of a Worldly Guy
I suppose sleeping in as I had done the morning following the fruitless sheep shooting incident may have started a trend. When I slept late Gunner slept late. This led to a continuous series of attempts on the part of Bert to rouse us from our 'fart sacks' (sleeping bags).
Vern was normally sent over to pull back the tent flap and make some unbelievable pronouncement that was designed to activate us but we had learned to ignore him. One morning it was Bert himself who pulled back the tent flap and made an announcement.
'If you boys want to shoot yerselves a moose you'll never get a better chance than right now!' he stated.
'Yeah, yeah!' I said sleepily.
'Mmmph!' Gunner grunted. A few momens later there was a thunderous explosion from the front of our tent as Bert's rifle discharged.
'Shit! There's no limit to his cute pranks,' I said, sitting up at last. Bert stuck his head back into the tent.
'He was standing right where the stream bends, about a hundred yards downstream, you wanna take a look?' If this is part of a prank he's carrying it out to the bitter end, I thought as I dressed hastily and followed him down the stream. We soon came to the dead moose, lying half in and half out of the stream.
'Scrawny old bastard, isn't he?' I said. He was so thin his hip and shoulder bones were protruding. 'And what the hell is that?' I pointed to a large wound twice the size of
my fist and just back of his shoulder. It was crawling with live maggots!
'Coulda been he bumped into a jagged bit of deadwood but I reckon that's unlikely. Most likely a wound he got fighting with some other bull over his sweetheart.'
'Those maggots must be driving him right around the bend with all the itching,' I said.
'Probably accounts for his sluggish behaviour.' Bert said. Gunner had walked up in the meantime with a sheepish look on his face.
'Jeez Bert, I thought you were just crying 'Wolf!' or I would have come out right away!'
'Don't worry about it,' Bert said with a straight face. I knew he was secretly enjoying his 'I told you so!' triumph. We broke camp later that day and moved on up to our last camp; I think it was St. Mary's. We left the dead moose where it lay. The scavengers would clean it up in a week or less.
Bert was still grousing and grumbling about the scarcity of mountain sheep and how they 'must have moved over to the other basin'. It was decided that he and Vern would take the glasses and scout up to the end of the stream and scour the mountains for the missing sheep. Gunner and I angled downstream then up a gently sloping mountainside that had open meadows scattered amongst tall fir trees. The plan was to move slowly and quietly along the edge of the trees in the hope of surprising a fat buck deer. We saw an occasional spruce grouse but, tempting though it was, we stayed silent in hope of bigger game. Nevertheless, the only big game we saw was the rear end of a cow elk moving swiftly in the opposite direction and disappearing into the trees.
We sat on some fallen logs and ate the cheese sandwiches we had made for lunch as we rationalized our lack of success by making pleasant comments about the view. We abandoned our tree-hugging strategy and walked slowly back toward camp without a further thought to caution. We were in the middle of a large open meadow that had a shallow draw running off to the tree line when I saw a large brown 'thing' about fifty yards off to our right. At first I thought maybe it was a bear! I stopped and stared and saw that it was grazing and moving slowly up the draw in our direction. It raised its head and took a couple of steps more toward us and I realized that it was a full grown bull moose with a huge head of antlers.
'Do you see what I see?' I said quietly to Gunner.
'I do,' he replied, 'but he seems not to see us!'
'I think you're right; he's either blind or he doesn't see us if we don't move,' We stood and watched him work his way up the draw until he was less than thirty yards away.
'I think maybe he's as close as he's going to get,' I said and raised my rifle. Gunner did the same. The moose took one more step and I fired. A puff of dust rose from the hair on his chest as Gunner fired and hit close to where my slug had struck. The moose looked up and seemed to be astonished that anyone would interfere with his lunch in this way. We both fired again. This acted like a wake-up call and the huge animal snorted and charged rapidly toward us. I fired once more when he was about ten yards distant. Finally his front legs buckled and he pitched forward, a mere five paces away.
I wouldn't want to guess his weight but he seemed huge and there was no way we were going to get anything meaningful done at this time of day, especially in the absence
of Bert and Vern. We decided to leave it where it lay and come back in the morning.
There was no problem getting Gunner and me out of our sacks the next morning and after a hurried breakfast the four of us set out on horseback, Vern leading a pack horse. I had been concerned about scavengers but they had obviously not discovered the kill as yet and only a solitary raven squawked and flew off as we approached. The draw was convenient and we needed only to give the carcass a half roll to get it securely fixed on its back with its legs in the air. I straddled the beast and cut open its belly, my objective being to disembowel it so we could separate the hindquarters without obstruction. However, the hindquarters of the animal were slightly downhill from the rest of its body and as soon as I lifted out the main part of its innards the deep cavity remaining slowly filled up with dark red partially congealed blood. I still had to cut through the final section of the bowel to separate the pile of innards completely. I tried unsuccessfully for about ten minutes to find the correct piece of intestine but there was about ten inches of pooled blood interfering with my efforts.
I finally decided that if I were to succeed I would have to get rid of the pool of blood so I rolled up my sleeves, straddled the beast wide-legged and began scooping the blood back through my legs. Vern became pale and walked slowly away over the adjacent rise. Bert and Gunner both stood watching me, unconcerned by the sight of gallons of blood and of my activities.
'Where the hell is its heart?' Gunner said.
'Those little red bits the size of jelly beans were all that remains of its heart, I guess,' I said.
'Great Caesar!' Gunner exclaimed, 'no wonder they say a bull moose is tough to kill. We'd blown his heart apart and he was still coming on. Incredible!'
'Them moose can carry a heap o' lead,' Bert said sagely. 'You can assume that they're never dead 'til they're lyin' on the ground with their eyes closed.'
'Hand me that axe you brought along, please Bert,' I said. I gave the exposed backbone a few solid whacks until it separated. Isolating the two hindquarters was quick work after that.
'I guess you're going to have to help me here, Gunner,' I had found it impossible to lift and hold one of the hindquarters, which I guessed must have weighed close to a hundred and twenty pounds. When Bert brought the pack horse up to the carcass, it took both Gunner and me to hold each hindquarter up to the horse's side while Bert secured each one with a barrel hitch. Finally we went to the animal's head, chopped the antlers free, then tied them to the pack horse.
When we got back to the camp we wrapped the meat in cheesecloth, packed everything up and headed back toward home. Bert hadn't referred to the packhorses as 'knotheads' before but I guess his patience finally wore thin. It probably all started one day when the trail had narrowed and we were proceeding through a patch of heavy shrubbery. 'All hell' suddenly broke loose as one of the pack horses disturbed a hive of 'yellow jacket' hornets. The 'knotheads' didn't just run, they ran and bucked! The pack boxes that didn't get bucked loose scattered most of their contents deep in the bush. I learned a few new words that day as Bert and Vern rounded up the 'knotheads' and Gunner and I searched through the bushes for the scattered items.
For all their 'knotheadedness' the horses had some unchanging characteristics, none of which were particularly desirable. They were stubborn, lazy and singleminded and had the memories of elephants. Whenever we passed a campsite we had used on our outward journey they would unilaterally decide that we were through travelling for the day. They would emphasize their conviction by wandering off the trail and standing immovably in the woods. They preferred to stand in heavily wooded spots so that Bert couldn't get a good swing when he went in to whack them. After about twenty minutes of whacking and swearing he would have them all out of the woods and back on the trail again. His whacks were not 'love taps' and one day he had a chunk of fir somewhat larger than usual. He lost his temper and gave one especially intractable packhorse a bigger whack than usual with the result that the 'whacker' broke and the horse began to bleed from the nose. Bert was obviously deeply sorry about the incident and covered his embarrassment by swearing more loudly than usual. Gunner and I made no comment.
'Serendipity' seemed still to be alive and well on our returrn journey. One morning we arose only to find Bert missing.
'He spotted a ram standing on a nearby scree slope and said it was too good to pass up,' Vern said. True to his word, Bert showed up fifteen minutes later with a mature ram slung across the rump of the horse he had ridden up to the trees at the bottom of the scree slope. The following day he nailed a yearling buck deer he spotted standing at the edge of a grove of trees. We were rapidly running out of transportation space and cheesecloth.
All of the problems with the single-minded packhorses was a result of Bert's decision to make what was usually four day's travel into three days. Once he was through hunting he wanted to get back home as quickly as possible. We rode into Mercoal after dark three days later and after unloading the horses adjourned to the local hotel in time for a couple of rounds. We then made our goodbyes to Bert and Vern and went to bed. We rose early the next morning and drove non-stop to Calgary.
There was a public food storage freezer just west of Fourteenth Street on Seventeenth Avenue and I had my meat properly wrapped and stored when I got back to Calgary. I had 70 lbs. of minced moose meat (preferred for chili), about 30 lbs. of venison steaks and loins and about 30 lbs of choice sheep steaks and loins. When I left for Europe I generously gave keys for the locker to my brothers. When I visited my locker about a year later all I found was 70 lbs. of frozen moose meat! I decided that my brothers' palates were keenly discriminatory if nothing else.
When I saw Gunner after my return from Europe he said he had seen Bert in the University Hospital in Edmonton and that Bert wondered why I hadn't been in to see him.
'I didn't even know he was in the hospital, besides, I was in Europe, I hope you told him that!'
'Relax, I told him.' he said.
'So how long was he there?'
'About a week, I think,'
'So how is he now?'
'Not that great, he died in the hospital!'
'Oh, for God's Sake! What a shame! He was undoubtedly one of the most unique characters I have ever known!'
'Amen to that!' Gunner said.
— The End —