Moose in the water

In preparation for the tourist rush that officially begins this weekend, I've moved out of the house in town to Gerald and Jenafor's cottage at Goose Creek about 10 miles south of town. At first I was a little reluctant to leave to comforts of the house, ie. wireless internet, but the cottage has proved to be a welcome reprieve from the constant ringing of the phone and small town politics. It's a cosy place, with a woodstove and electric heat, a mish mash of building materials, trinkets, and animal furs. We come back to the house for breakfast and dinner anyway, usually spending a couple hours here in the evenings, which gives me some time to check Facebook and the news sites in between running to the hardware store, feeding Thunder and Isobel, and grabbing a few winks on the couch.

We got up early this morning and took a drive down towards the water treatment facility, a road lined with watery brush lush with aquatic plant life; in other words, moose country. Gerald is itching to get his moose this year and we were looking for a potential hunt.

On the way back, having not seen anything but wild chickens and ducks, Gerald proclaimed, "Not today," and picked up speed. A few seconds later we came to a quick stop and he pointed across my lap, out my side of the window.

"There he is."

Sure enough, maybe 250 yards away, stood a massive bull moose. Through the scope on Gerald's 306 I could see the massive rack on its head, and also the grey hairs on his back. He was huge, but he was old. A great trophy kill but not so good for eating: older animals are really tough meat and a moose that large and that old would have passed more for dog food than steaks for the barbeque. Gerald clearly didn't want to take the animal but it was also clear he didn't feel right about anybody else shooting it from the road.

"An animal like that deserves to be hunted," he said, "Not shot from the hood of someone's truck."

He took a couple shots into brush at about a 50 yards, attempted to scare the animal further into the trees beyond. The moose turned its head but didn't seem to care too much about us.

We had to get back to town so we moved on, Gerald talking softly about the giant animal we had just found.

***

We saw a tundra wolf the other night trotting down the road, which was a little disconcerting since it was within a few miles of the dog yard. It was first time I'd seen a wolf like that and I've been thinking about it ever since. Wolf stories run into the near fairy tale land horror stories. One year a wolf was scoping out the dog yard, and even though there was someone staying there, it sat in the trees just beyond where you could see it. It waited there, and watched the person at the yard, and learned the person's routine, when they went out and when they came back in. It waited until a snow storm and until the person in the yard was in the tent and took a dog right then.

Stories like that make them seem unneccesarily evil, like some creature of the night in a child's story book.

***

We got the wood stove in the dog yard tent today. One step closer to me moving in.

Dog yard tent.