Friday, 10 April 2015
moose by the numbers
In one heavily hunted area near Fairbanks, 1/4 to 1/3 of hunters are successful each season. The News-Miners outdoors reporter, who almost always gets a moose, wrote this week that he spent nearly 15 hours a day for 10 days watching a single meadow and waiting for a bull. He watched the ducks and muskrat, and he saw the leaves change color before his eyes. I know I dont have that kind of patience, or faith -- that after 120 hours, a moose might come on the 121st hour. We watched a few places for whole evenings or mornings, then decided our luck there had run out and left, only to wonder again if the willows really were greener somewhere else.
If the first weeks were mostly hopeful, and the start of the third mostly marked by regret, by the end of the third Id learned to appreciate the hunt even when we werent successful. I liked the feelings of perceptiveness -- noticing a single birch leaf fall 150 yards away, or smelling where a moose had been. I liked driving home with my face tingling from sun or cold. I liked feeling my heart race when we had our one shot, and again when I thought Id called in a bull by imitating a lovesick cow.
By the end of the season, the cranberries were juicy and sweet from hard frosts and even spongy ground had turned solid. (We had our first snow 121 days after the last snow of the spring.) On the last daylight hour of the season, I remembered that I got my moose last year in the first daylight hour, but we had no parallel luck. We walked up the hill to the truck and I wondered if its too late to hunt ducks.
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