February 19, 2005

• More about the Moose

  When I left off last time,
  I didn’t know where the moose was or if it was dead, wounded, or
  what.  Doug told me it was down, presumably dead in the yard, and
  that he’d shot it twice in the head.  He explained the other two
  shots I’d heard as a first warning shot and an accidental discharge as
  he attempted to uncock the revolver.  I noticed the blood on his
  thumb, and he gave me a closer look at the thumbnail Koji had torn
  loose while Doug was freeing him from the chain.  I sent him to
  the bathroom for first aid.

  Before
  he was back with a bandage wrapped around his thumb, I had stuck my
  head out the door and shot the first picture of the moose.  It lay
  in the hollow of the packed snow path, between two piles of snow that
  had been shoveled from the roof and the path.  Koji’s chain is
  visible across the bottom of the picture and looped around the tree on
  the right.  The stump and the other tree behind which I’d seen him
  dodging the moose’s hooves are out of frame to the right.

  I felt sad about the dead moose and guilty because I’d let Koji out
  there and started it all.  I hadn’t seen the moose before I put
  Koji on his chain and let him out, and when I first realized from
  Koji’s frantic bark that there was a moose there, I’d opened the door
  and called Koji to me.  But when he moved toward me, the moose
  attacked him.  He had dodged back behind the stump then, and when
  I heard his yelps as the hooves hit him, I’d retreated and closed the
  door.  That was a cowardly move, but I suppose that distracting
  the moose by getting it to charge me would have been a foolish one,
  especially since Koji did such a good job of dodging it.  I was
  wearing slippers, not boots, so I’d probably have been on my butt after
  one step on the packed snow. 

  The moose looked big lying on the ground, and had looked a lot bigger
  on those stilt-like legs.  It had scared me in life, and now lying
  there dead it presented a different problem.   I knew I
  needed to call either the state troopers or Fish and Game to report
  it.  It was Sunday, so the Fish and Game department offices were
  closed.  It wasn’t an emergency, so I needed the number for
  trooper dispatch.  My eyes wouldn’t focus.  I handed the
  phone book to Doug.  The number he found was in Anchorage, so I
  found some better light and settled down with the phone book for a few
  minutes and finally found the right pages.  The dispatcher said a
  trooper would be here soon.

  Before the trooper got here, Koji went to the door wanting out. 
  When he stuck his head out there and caught sight and scent of the
  moose, however, he decided his business could wait.  I didn’t
  really like that idea, but wasn’t able to persuade him that the moose
  was no longer a threat.  He has been housebroken for years, and
  hasn’t let that training lapse even when left alone for hours.  I
  was hoping we would get the moose out of there before Koji couldn’t
  hold it any longer.

  We hadn’t looked at the clock at all that morning, so when the trooper
  showed up sometime before noon, we were unable to answer his first
  question, what time the shooting took place.  Finally, I think he
  put down 10 AM, a reasonable estimate I guess.  We did okay with
  the rest of his questions about our names and all, until he started
  asking why Doug thought he had to shoot the moose.  To us, it
  sorta went without saying, so when we were compelled to say, the
  answers didn’t come easy.  Doug talked about defending the dog and
  himself, said he knew the moose had been about to charge him, and the
  trooper just asked how he knew.  I pointed out that we had both
  been charged before by moose, and Doug told the guy that the moose’s
  ears had been down.  I don’t know if he thought about mentioning
  its hackles being up or anything else of that sort.  The trooper
  was still asking questions.

  Finally, in answer to one of those questions, Doug said that the moose
  had been too close for him to be able to get the dog off the chain and
  into the house, and Trooper Jones breathed a sigh of relief, grinned
  and told him that was the right answer.  He wrote it down and
  left, saying that dispatch had already called “a charity” to come and
  salvage the meat.  They should be here, “soon.”

  About an hour and a half later, after another of those abortive trips
  to the door to try and let Koji out to do his business, I phoned
  dispatch again and asked if she had any idea when they would be here,
  and if they needed directions to find us.  She just said that
  there were several road kills and it was a busy day for the
  charities.  Someone should be here, “soon.”

  We waited some more.  Then the phone rang.  It was
  dispatch.  She said that one of my neighbors was on the
  line.  The person sent to get the moose had stopped in there
  because he couldn’t find us.  Could she patch him through, she
  asked.  Okay, I said.  The neighbor turned out to be Frank,
  across the highway.  He was already living in the neighborhood
  when we moved in here just before Doug’s second birthday.  He had
  been a nosy busybody until his heart trouble began tending to keep him
  at home.  After that, he’d gotten into some sort of dispute with
  some other neighbors who lived near him.  I recall a summer
  barbecue in those people’s yard that was interrupted by gunfire from
  Frank’s yard.  That was over a decade ago, and I’ve not seen much
  of Frank since then.  I hadn’t known for sure that he was alive
  until he got patched through to me that day from the troopers.

  It took the old codger a minute or two to catch on to who I am, and a
  minute or two more for me to explain that I was no longer living on his
  side of the highway but had moved over here six years ago to housesit
  for Mark.  Fortunately, he knew where Mark lived, so he could tell
  “John”, the son of some old friends of his from Michigan, how to find
  us.  That “John” turned out to be the man I know as Dancing Bear,
  a knifemaker from Talkeetna that we’d gotten to know when Greyfox had
  been running his roadside stand there on Main Street.  I had last
  seen Dancing Bear a couple of years ago when I’d taken Sephiroth up
  there on leave, to get Masamune, his great sword, sharpened.

  Koji started jumping around and barking as soon as Dancing Bear’s van
  pulled in the driveway.  He has always been noisy about
  visitors.  He’s not yet fully convinced that we want
  the garbage truck to steal our trash each week.  Doug restrained
  the dog for the few moments that Dancing Bear was in here while we said
  our hellos and discussed what had to be done.  Whomever it was
  that the troopers had called originally, probably someone from the
  Talkeetna food bank, had called Dancing Bear because they already had
  more moose than they could handle in one day.  Dancing Bear said
  he has been teaching skinning and butchering classes in Talkeetna for a
  while, since his knife shop burned down last fall.  The word that
  Dancing Bear got was that there was a moose at mile 90.  He
  assumed it was a roadkill on the highway, and had spent a considerable
  amount of time trying to find it before going to Frank’s house to call
  trooper dispatch for directions.

  We trooped out there and stood around looking at the moose, which
  Dancing Bear said was a young bull, probably about three years old and
  12 to 15 hundred pounds (if memory serves–I could have gotten that
  weight part wrong, wasn’t paying attention).  We discussed that
  hollow it lay in and the difficulty of maneuvering it for skinning and
  butchering.  Dancing Bear had a “come-along” hand winch with a
  cable too short to be of any use in moving the moose into a better
  position, so he decided to dismember it where it lay.  I explained
  that my asthma and COPD would keep me from doing any heavy work, but
  that Doug and I would help as much as we could.  He looked
  relieved at that, having expected to be doing the whole job by
  himself.  Since he didn’t know anyone who wanted the hide, instead
  of unzipping it down the belly and preserving the skin, he decided it
  would be simpler to unzip along the spine because of the way the
  carcass was situated.

  All this time, Koji had been making a yapping racket in the
  house.  When I came in for my leather gloves and my neat little
  Kit Wray skinning knife, I discovered the hard way that he hadn’t been
  able to “hold it” any longer.  Being somewhat light-blind when I
  came in out of the snow, I stepped in a pool of his stress diarrhea and
  tracked it for a couple of footprints before I noticed.  That was
  the first time that day that I was thankful for the sinus infection
  that has had me limited to about half of one olfactory sensor for a
  month or so.  Figuring that the mess could wait better than
  Dancing Bear and the moose could, I left it, grabbed the gloves and
  skinner, went back out and cleaned my boot in some snow well away from
  the moose.

  After
  Dancing Bear unzipped the hide down the back, for a while he worked on
  skinning the left, uppermost side of the belly up near the head while I
  worked on skinning the back at the rear end.  When we got to the
  point where we would have been getting in each other’s way, I left the
  skinning to him and at Doug’s suggestion got the camera.  The kid
  knew I’d be wanting to blog this.

  Doug’s help with the skinning consisted mostly of applying tension to
  try and keep the stiffening legs out of the way so Dancing Bear could
  reach the more difficult areas.  He was trying to get the hide off
  without nicking the guts or any internal organs, but just about the
  time I took the pic at left he punctured the abdomen and let out a
  hissing stream of gas that made him and Doug turn a little green around
  the gills and wrinkle their noses.  That was the second of several
  times that day that I was glad I had this sinus infection.

  As Dancing Bear worked on skinning the left forequarter, he found a
  bullet hole near where the neck and shoulder were joined. 
  Apparently, Doug’s first shot missed the head by a little bit, and went
  through the lungs instead.

  In the shot at right, Dancing Bear was working on removing the left
  hindquarter, carving around the hip joint while Doug pulled on the leg
  to keep it out of his way.  When it came loose suddenly, the hoof
  slipped out of Doug’s grasp and knocked him back against the old truck
  parked there.  He remarked on the irony of getting stomped by a
  dead moose.

  The upper side of the moose was skinned and the left hind- and
  forequarters removed and stowed in Dancing Bear’s van before we started
  trying to turn the carcass over to work on its right side.  I
  crouched at the head and cranked on it as Doug and Dancing Bear used
  the legs for leverage, and we flopped it over finally.

  The
  pic at left, of Dancing Bear skinning the right hindquarter, shows how
  deep the snowpack is here.  Just above the trailing moosehide on
  the right is the side mirror on the old pickup truck in our driveway.

  As he worked, he talked, explaining what he was doing.  Often, he
  would explain that what he was doing wasn’t the “best” or usual way of
  doing it, because of the awkward situation working in that little bowl
  between snowbanks.  I admired his poise and perseverence when,
  immediately after saying he was having Doug hold the leg out of the way
  so he wouldn’t nick the
  belly, he made that gassy little nick.  He kept right on working
  and talking that time, and also later on, just after explaining the
  importance of not piercing any of the guts, when he did so and flooded
  the body cavity with cloudy yellow-green liquid that caused both men to
  blanch and gag.  Yaay, sinus infection!

  With
  the hide and all four legs off, Dancing Bear started removing the
  head.  He tried for a while cutting between vertebrae with one of
  his handmade knives, then gave up that effort and got out his
  saw.  Through the entire procedure, I got the impression that he
  both understood and respected the “right” way, the most elegant, expert
  way of doing it, but that for him expediency was more important this
  time.

  The tool kit he brought with him was in a small black bag, and he joked
  about his “doctor’s bag” when he first set it down.  It included
  two knives he probably had made himself, both with old-fashioned
  high-carbon steel blades.  They take a fine sharp edge but don’t
  hold one for long.  He stopped frequently to sharpen the blades,
  using a pair of steel sharpening rods he had set at precise angles in a
  block of wood.  None of the awkwardness of wrestling with the
  moose and its body parts was evident in his quick flashing movements as
  he sharpened his knives.  It’s obvious that making and maintaining
  the blades are more his thing than is their practical usage.

  After he
  and Doug had carried the meaty quarters to the van and dragged away the
  hide, Doug commented that what was left didn’t look much like an
  animal.  Dancing Bear paused and looked at it and said it sorta
  looked like a big tadpole.

  We all took a little breather at this point, and discussed how best to
  contain the gutpile for disposal, before he cut into the belly and
  released it.  I brought out a cup of hot tea for Dancing Bear
  after gulping down my own cupful in the kitchen.

  Doug worked our sled out of the snowpack it was stuck in and replaced
  its broken pull rope while Dancing Bear drank his tea, then we spread
  Dancing Bear’s tarp over the sled and tucked its edge under the moose
  belly to catch the guts.  Some scraps that were lying about went
  in the sled first, then all three of us wrestled the slippery moose
  abdomen into position over the tarp and Dancing Bear had a second cup
  of tea.

  With
  all the relatively neat, clean and easy part of the job out of the way,
  he was in no apparent hurry to get on with the dirty work.  Saying
  that the blood already on his clothes would stink up his cabin more
  than enough, he took off his shirt and tossed it aside before getting
  into “the stinky stuff.”

  This might be a good place to talk about the weather.  In the
  weeks before this, we had about ten days of subzero weather, down to
  minus 30 a few times and never getting much above minus ten.  The
  moose incident came during a brief warmer period before the weather
  went back down to about minus twenty for a few days.  On the day
  when we were out there butchering the moose, it was above zero, and
  almost up to freezing — about 26° around sunset when I looked at the
  thermometer after we had finished.

  Here at
  left, Doug pulls back on the ribs so Dancing Bear can cut loose the
  internal organs for removal.  This pic was taken just before the
  knife slipped and released the nasty flood of smelly liquid.

  Dancing Bear mentioned several times what good shooting it had been,
  because that lung shot caused the moose to bleed out into the body
  cavity, improving the quality of the meat.  Doug humbly explained
  it was an accident, that the lung shot had been aimed at the moose’s
  head.  Dancing Bear also spoke at length about the inferior
  quality of most of the roadkill moose he has to deal with:  bone
  chips and bloody meat, as well as having to work in many places that
  end up being even less convenient than our front yard.

  I was delighted when he asked me if we wanted to keep any of the
  moose.  Generally, people aren’t supposed to get to keep any of
  what they kill out of season, whether it’s accidentally on the highway,
  or in defense of life and property.  Luckily for us, it had been a
  bad day for roadkill.  I said I’d love to have the liver and
  tongue, knowing that most people don’t like those parts.  Dancing
  Bear had already been asked by someone in Talkeetna for the head and
  tongue, but he said I was welcome to the liver and other organ meat
  because he has gout and can’t eat it.
  
  He asked if I know how to cook kidneys.  I said no, and started to
  tell him I had a few cookbooks (a few feet of shelves of cookbooks is
  more like it), when he broke in and said, “just boil the piss out of
  ‘em.”

  A friend of Dancing Bear’s, a Native woman in Talkeetna, had asked him
  to save the gut for her.  He said she made “something” out of it,
  but didn’t know what.  Here at the right he has just stripped out
  all the fully- and partially-formed “moose nuggets” from the gut. 
  We talked about how important it is not to waste stuff like this, and
  we both expressed regret that we weren’t equipped to deal with the
  hide.

  In a comment on one of Greyfox’s updates, someone asked if we eat the
  hooves, too, probably in response to his report that we’d kept the
  kidneys and testicles.  Greyfox replied facetiously that we boil
  the hooves down for glue.  Actually, Dancing Bear said he intends
  to steam and soften the hooves and form them into knife handles. 
  There was also a comment asking about the rack, the antlers many people
  keep and display as trophies.  It being winter, this bull had shed
  last year’s rack and hadn’t started growing a new one yet.

  As
  we worked, we’d spent quite a bit of time discussing what to do with
  the gutpile.  Getting it out of the yard is important because
  bears will be waking up soon and it will be an attractive source of
  food.  They’re always hungry in early spring after that long
  hibernation.  We don’t want them coming in the yard looking for
  food.

  We decided to dump the guts out in the muskeg.  Doug scouted and
  found a place up the road where a snowmachine trail cut across the
  roadside snow berm.  Dancing Bear gathered up the sides of the
  tarp and steadied the load as Doug pulled it.  They took it maybe
  thirty feet out onto the muskeg and dumped it.

  As
  Dancing Bear put away his tools and prepared to leave, Doug used the
  snow scoop to clear away some of the bloody snow from the path. 
  It looks a lot better than this now, cleaner, because it has snowed
  another foot or so since then and covered most of the gore.

  However, there is still some important cleanup needing to be
  done.  Dancing Bear had tossed a big mass of clotted blood from
  the body cavity out under the trees by the woodpile for the ravens and
  magpies to scavenge.  Then it snowed and covered it up.  Then
  Koji, whose chain just barely reaches that far, dug some of it
  up.  He has brought a few of the icy clots (or bloody snowballs)
  to the door, but I won’t let him bring any in.  Consequently, in
  the yard and around the door are several bloody patches that could
  attract bears.

  I had a brief hypnogogic flash of dream as I was awakening one
  morning.  In the dream I heard a scratching at the door and went
  to let Koji in, and there was a bear on the doorstep.  I hope Doug
  will get the bloody snow cleared up soon.  Having a door that
  doesn’t latch is convenient for the cats.  All they have to do is
  lean against it and it opens to let them in.  It would be far too
  convenient for any bear that wanted in, too, in my opinion.  I
  don’t want bears in here even more than I don’t want them in the yard.

  That
  night after Dancing Bear left, I had two trays of meat.  One of
  them held the organs:  liver, heart, kidneys and testicles. 
  The other one held both tenderloins, which Dancing Bear had generously
  given us unasked.

  First, I trimmed the fat, veins and arteries off the heart, stuffed it
  with onions, celery and herbs, placed it on a rack in a covered baking
  dish and poured tomato soup over it before baking it.  Eventually,
  I sliced it for sandwiches and used the scraps, the stuffing, and the
  remaining liquid as a base for soup. 

  While the heart was baking, I trimmed and sliced the liver and put it
  in the freezer.  I removed the veins and membranes from the
  testicles and refrigerated them.  I got out The Joy of Cooking
  and looked up kidneys.  It recommended marinating them overnight
  in “acidulated water.”  The only vinegar I had on hand came from
  pickled jalapenos, so that’s what I used to acidulate the water. 
  By then, I was too exhausted to deal with the loins.  That tray
  went into the fridge until the next day.

  I also refrigerated the baked heart for a couple of days before I got
  around to slicing it.  Neither Doug nor I ate any meat for several
  days.  Neither of us had much of an appetite for anything, and the
  smell of meat was more than we could handle.  The kidneys floated
  in their bowl of acidulated water in the fridge for more than one
  overnight.  Finally, Doug said that seeing them every time he
  opened the fridge was putting him off his feed.  I told him to go
  dump them with the other offal.  I hope the magpies like the
  jalapeno flavor.

  Eventually, we got our appetites back.  The moose heart soup and a
  later pot of stew made from the trimmings of the loins were both eaten
  and enjoyed by the whole family.  Koji and the cats seemed to
  enjoy the liver trimmings, and I’ve a bag of sliced liver and one of
  tenderloin steaks in the freezer for later.

  Next time, I think I’ll write about the emotional trauma, the PTSD that
  Doug and Koji and I all exhibited and to some extent are still
  experiencing.
  

  • 9:39 pm
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