Moose Prayer

We spent the day moving down the backs of the mountain, racing the sun. Our four-wheeler carried us through ridges and over rivers, from craggy, dolomite-strewn tundra to the boreal bogs and lowlands stretched across the valley. We were betting on our machine to get us to the far end by sundown, but night falls quickly in the north. Early shadows gathering in the valley warned us we’d lost the bet.

The swamp changed as the sun disappeared. Trees twisted in place, carrying shadows on their backs. The underbrush darkened under silver-crested leaves. By morning, the swamp would be laced with paper-thin sheets of ice, easily dismissed by the morning sun, a shadow of the heavy freezes to follow. After consulting the wilted white petals of a dying Ciilqaaq flower, my father said the landscape here would be covered in snow in two weeks' time. In the north, September is the beginning of winter.

September is also the beginning of moose season. My father pulled me out of my third-grade classes for a week, as fathers did for many of my classmates. Alaska schools often specially designed their curriculum for the month of September so it could be completed at home. In a bag tied to the back of the four-wheeler was a packet full of math problems for me to complete later by the campfire. It was acceptable, even expected, for male students to be absent for weeks at a time. Last year nearly all the boys my age had come back in the first weeks of snowfall with almost-certainly exaggerated stories of rifles and blood, of long treks carrying butchered body parts back to camp, of cooking and eating moose hearts, brains, and tongues around roaring fires. I was eager for my own chance to exaggerate.

Moose were ever-present in our lives. We lived along a tributary dubbed “Moose Creek” by the ’49ers who took its gold. It was easy to see why; moose wandered in and out of our yard constantly, following the creek bed for its marshy plant growth. One winter we had a mother and calf bed down in the forest to the west of our house. They stayed close to the creek through the winter, and in the spring wreaked havoc on my mother’s garden. Our family was relatively new to Alaska at the time. My parents spent three hopeful days building a six-foot fence to protect their budding carrot tops and tomato vines from roaming animals. When the moose came back to graze in the garden, they seemed to barely notice all the effort. With all the grace of a deer packed into a body larger than most horses, both mother and calf cleared the fence in a single leap, with room to spare, and went about destroying our vegetables.

Antlers were everywhere. They were part of our art, our architecture, woven into handrails and support beams, or hung as coat racks by the front door. Artists carved elaborate dioramic scenes into the outstretched antler palms and displayed them in galleries alongside paintings and sculptures. In the downtown section of the closest city, there was an arch over the entrance to a museum composed completely of collected antlers. They were displayed in houses, sport-stores, grocery stores, and even churches. When we moved in, there was a three-brow tine set hanging in the garage. But the most regular encounter we had with moose was eating them.

It’s common knowledge among those in the north who struggle to afford food that a single moose can feed a family of four for eight months or longer. People of our economic class hunted, not for trophies, for food. Even the government took part in this, in its own way. It was common for moose to be hit by cars, demolish the vehicle, then stand up and walk away with nothing but a few scrapes. On the occasion a moose was hit by a car and died, the state government would send a trooper out to quarter it so the meat was not wasted. The resulting food was given to a rotating list of charities, called the “roadkill list.” For the three prior winters, the road-kill list fed our family. My father hated accepting the handout, always saying the meat should have gone to someone “actually in need.” He was determined this year to prove he could provide for himself. As the children at school taught me, it was the man’s job to hunt.

September was after the mating season, when the bulls withdrew to lofty mountain marshes like the valley we were in. It became nearly impossible to hunt moose from eye-level in these wetland basins. They knew the marshes, and, if you believe the older, more eccentric hunters, they knew September was a time for them to stay hidden. Moose are ghosts in the mountain bogs; a thousand-pound bull can disappear into the forest with ease. Most hunters stick to the ridgelines encircling the valleys, spotting the moose from the edges of the tundra above and shooting down. Dad had been seeking a better vantage point for this approach when he decided to cross the valley. We were two days, three river-crossings, and one mechanical break-down into this hunting season, and we had yet to even see a moose. The night falling now undoubtedly meant going another day with no chance of a sighting.

There was no way to navigate the Granite Mountains in the dark. Dolomite erratics, dropped from glacial ice in the death throes of the last ice age, are spread over the range, unpredictable disruptions in an unknown trail. We’d gotten stuck on one already on the way down the mountain, and that had been in broad daylight. The bog on the valley floor presented even more obstacles. Deep black pools across the trail obscured the track below. Thick mud threatened to suck our tires into unknown pits like quicksand traps. Worse still, the water lining the edges of our thin dirt strip pressed in constantly, swelling as we ventured deeper into the swamp. This worried my father the most, the ever-present threat of trail flooding, and with it, engine failure. Turning our only transportation into a useless chunk of metal sunk halfway through a thick, soon-to-be-frozen bog would strand us days away from any real road. Being stranded had its own implications—there were creatures more worrying than moose lurking in the swamp. Safety lay in dry land, in the mountain on the far side of the valley.

Even as the sky turned black, Dad thought we could make it. He kept pushing, driving the four-wheeler into the darkness, gambling the trail would be solid and hazard-free. As we entered true night, the difficulties of the swamp multiplied. Even where the overwhelming black shied away from our high beams, darkness fought back from the backs of the brush. Shadows spiderwebbed across our little slice of light, spinning out from every little piece of scrub brush creeping its way onto the path, obscuring the trail. We made it through nearly two hours of darkness, careful not to go too fast or too slow. Then, in one wrong motion, the tires slipped, first one then two, over a muddy brim and into an unseen hole. The mud surged down, collapsing into the air pocket, and the four-wheeler tipped, filth climbing up to our ankles. Dad yelled and we shifted our weight, trying to avoid tipping. Our bags dipped into the grime as the fins over the left-side wheels submerged in mud. He grabbed his steel-gray 30-06 from the side-mounted holster seconds before it filled with vile liquid. The smell of heated mud and metal filled the air, the high beam flickered, and the engine stalled. We scuttled onto a mostly solid patch of dirt and stared at our chunk of metal, sunk halfway through the bog. For a while, unwilling or unable to accept this defeat, Dad tried to dig it out, relying on a steel-cable winch to do the heavy lifting. All of his progress was erased in a moment of rain, a small mudslide reburying the newly excavated tires. We would not reach dry land that night.

Dad said there was a clearing nearby he’d seen on our way in. He thought it would be mostly dry, a place we could sleep for the night. In the morning, we could dig the four-wheeler out. We shouldered what we could carry and left the rest of our gear entombed with the four-wheeler, wrapped in a tarp meant for moose-meat. My father was tying the last corner of the tarp when I heard it. Behind us, off the trail, there was a low rumbling sound, like gravel sliding down a hill. The needling grip of adrenaline climbed up my spine, and I moved closer to my father. It sounded again, a rolling growl, gliding over the swamp. My hands started to shake. My dad didn’t acknowledge the growl. He simply said, “Let’s go,” and started walking, leaving his knot unfinished. I knew he heard it, and he knew I had.

Once we started walking, it became clear the bear was following us. Sticks broke, brushes swayed against the wind, and though she stayed out of sight, low grunts and growls echoed through the night. My father silently put himself in between me and the noises early in the walk. His grip on the rifle strap tightened until his knuckles went white. He was careful to keep the flashlight beam directly on the trail in front of us, never venturing off to either side, never turning to investigate the sifting sound of leaves against fur off to the left, keeping pace with us.

Alaskan schoolchildren are taught about bears like their southern peers are taught the dangers of strangers and drugs. We had special assemblies and visits from park rangers in school, teaching us the different kinds of bears and how to stay safe when encountering each one. I knew by this point it was one thing to come up on a bear unexpectedly, but a whole different situation to have a bear follow you. It meant we were in her territory, a much more dangerous situation than a chance encounter. A coil of dread wound tight in my chest as I tried to push the warnings from the rangers out of my mind.

By the time we found the clearing, I was crying quietly and trying to hide it from my father with the collar of the oversized army coat he’d lent me. He set to work raising the tent but never let go of the rifle on his shoulder for more than a few seconds. I watched the underbrush roll and sway as the bear circled us. As soon as the tent was up, we sheltered within, the nylon walls shielding us from the rain. My father sat at the entrance, staring out into the night, rifle in hand. Exhausted, I fell asleep quickly and deeply. Though I’m told heavy footsteps and growls continued circling our camp for hours, I heard none of it.

~

I woke to the metallic clack of my father’s Remington pushing a bullet casing flush against its chamber. It was morning—light seeped through the bright orange walls of the tent, casting my father and me in an orange glow. My father kneeled by the tent’s entrance, rifle pressed against his cheek, staring down the sights, finger hovering over the trigger. Bleary-eyed and disoriented, I shifted my gaze, tracking the rifle’s aim to the clearing outside.

Standing just a short way from our tent was a moose, grazing on the marsh plants at the edge of the clearing, unaware of the rifle trained on his flank. He stood about six foot tall at the shoulder, a wall of fur-bound muscle. With each step he took, his shoulder would tense, the huge muscular structures hiding under his thickening winter coat in full view just for a moment. His coat was light and full, the water-slicking fibers of the top layer padded by downy, newly grown underfur. He was fully brown, almost tan, like tundra underbrush in fall, not yet bearing the blackening shades age of his elders. He was a “spike fork,” a bull who hadn’t yet grown his antler palms. Instead of the proud double-crowned crest most moose wear, two pronged growths sprouted from his head. They were stick-like, thin and cast in the white-yellow shades of new bone. The left one forked—he was a three point, legal to shoot. He was young, perhaps only a second-year. You could see his age in his coat, in his antlers, but nothing gave away his inexperience like his willingness to come so close to humans.

The sound of my father readying the bullet alerted the moose. He looked up at us, raising himself to his full height for the first time. Even ankle-deep in swamp mud, he stood at least eight feet tall, antlers stretched to the sky like the tops of young trees. His side was exposed, as if purposefully lined up to give his hunters the perfect opportunity. At any moment, my father would pull the trigger, sending speeding lead into the moose’s chest cavity. It would be over in seconds. I covered my ears, as my father had told me to do if he was ever about to shoot a moose.

The shot never came. Instead, the rifle slowly lowered. My father relaxed, and sat down fully from his crouched pose, cradling the rifle in his lap. The Remington’s bolt came up and back, the copper-plated 30-06 round gingerly extracted from its chamber. The moose, ignorant of the mercy he’d experienced, went back to grazing. My father and I sat together, watching the majestic animal finish his breakfast in the hazy morning light, until finally he turned and wandered away. He walked up the same path we’d come down last night, when we had been much less confident in our position on the food chain.

The rest of the day was spent digging the four-wheeler out of the mud. By the end of the day, it was free and working again, thanks to hours of primitive excavation and a makeshift ramp made of downed trees. My father decided to camp in the clearing one more night, to give the trail ahead time to solidify after the last night’s rain.

The sun neared the horizon again, and our fire lit the little clearing. We ate MREs, survival rations that, on a typical night, brought dad back to his Air Force days. That night though, as I worked my way through mud-smeared math sheets, he talked about the moose. He’d been mentioning it on and off all day. At first his comments carried a wistful awe; seeing the marvelous animal so close had an effect on both of us. Perhaps in meeting our prey we understood for the first time what we’d set out to do in coming here. But as the day wore on, his words slowly soured. Now he scowled into the fire, muttering things like, “Should have shot it.” When he noticed me watching him, he looked away and fell silent.

I thought at the time he was looking to the future, to the winter ahead—potentially a very hungry winter. Looking back now though, I think he was embarrassed. There's every possibility that over the course of a grueling day spent freeing our four-wheeler from the mud, he came to view that morning's mercy as a show of his own personal weakness. He could have been thinking about the triumph, the feelings of fulfillment the kill would have brought him. Instead of toiling in the swamp, battling mosquitoes and cleaning congealed filth from the four wheeler’s undercarriage, he could have roasted a heart as big as his head for lunch. Had he killed the moose, had he felt that invigorating hunter’s rush, he could have done anything. He could have freed the machine in half the time. He would have been free to begin the journey back home, bearing the spoils of war, meat for the long, dark months ahead. Instead, he had spent the day being dirty and tired, with nothing to show for it but a story of weakness. It was a man's job to hunt, and hunt meant kill.

~

I’m sure I woke up the next morning to the gunshot, but I don’t remember it. The first thing I remember from that morning is the moose’s scream. I can hear it now, decades later. The metallic clack of the rifle’s bolt sounded again, and a brass shell bounced off the ground next to me, carrying the faint scent of lead and gunpowder. From outside, trees crashed and fell as the moose fled through the forest, pain and panic robbing it of its usual grace. My father, standing half in, half out of the tent, tracked the moose with the rifle, swiveling the gun to follow the animal's staggering gallop, but lowered it as the trees obscured the shot. “It won’t go far,” he said, pulling his boots on. Frenzied, he launched himself into the woods. I stumbled after him.

We ran along the edges of bogs, gray-brown water splashing at our heels, following the trail of broken trees and bulldozed underbrush. It wasn’t long until we caught the moose. He was on the far side of a bog, turned to the side, looking back at us. We could see his breathing from our side of the pond, his massive sides tensing up and down frighteningly fast. He was standing crookedly, as if about to tip. Down his side, a thin strip of brown fur was streaked red. My father kneeled, I covered my ears, and the moose jerked, twisted, and fell forward onto the shore. A metallic clink sounded out as my father threw the bolt back, and a brass shell disappeared, swallowed by the earth.

We came around the pond, my dad keeping the rifle set on target until he was certain of the moose’s death. Coming so close to the bull, I truly gained a sense of how massive he was. Even downed, he was a virtual mountain, a seismic animal.

My father handed me the gun and knelt beside the moose's head. My father is a religious man. He prays before meals, before long trips, when he wakes up, and when he goes to bed. He prays about illness and hardship, about politics, about hunger and avalanches, and his family across the country. I’ve only ever heard him pray to something other than God once in my life. I don’t think I was meant to hear it, I’m not sure he meant to say it, but I am sure it was a prayer. Kneeling in the swamp—hands outstretched, touching the wild, juvenile, still-warm corpse that so recently had been looking, breathing, feeling—something primal arose in my father, a heretical animism so deeply felt he could not contain it. A prayer of sorrow, of gratitude. An acknowledgement of theft, and murder, and cyclical renewal.

"Thank you, Moose. Thank you for your food. Now my family can eat."

Then he unsheathed the bone saw and began cutting.