Three Against the Wilderness

by Eric Collier

  Almost four years passed before a moose was again killed in the Chilcotin, and when I arrived on the scene few of the Indians and almost none of the whites had laid eyes upon the track of a moose, still less one in the actual flesh.

  In the fall of 1925, while on a brief hunting trip of my own at the headwaters of Riske Creek, I too came into almost head-on collision with an animal the likes of which I’d never before seen. If instinct too told me that the flesh of the thing was edible, it also informed me that only some twenty-five paces lay between the ambitious snout of my rifle and the neck of a trophy bull moose. And I chucked the gun against my shoulder, lined its sights on the rut-swollen neck and hopefully pressed the trigger. And got both the thrill and surprise of my life when the bull went down as dead as dead can be.

  There was no shortage of moose along Meldrum Creek when we invaded its headwaters, and the killing of a bull at any time of the year seldom called for more than a few hours of hunting. Their sunken paths crossed every muskeg and meadow, and every salt lick in the forests was churned to a deep mud by the countless moose that came to them to lick the saline soil.

  In winter every moose that had been ranging the higher elevations through spring, summer and fall moved down into the valley to browse in the aspens and willows along the creek. Then there was seldom a morning or evening but what there weren’t at least six or eight moose within a stone’s throw of the cabin, bickering and fighting with one another over which had the most right to browse in this willow patch or that. And the more moose there were in sight, the bigger the nuisance they became.

  If when first they made our acquaintance the moose were somewhat distrustful of us, they had good reason for it. Since the earliest moments of the fur trade, the wildlife of the North American continent has been waging a losing battle against a mankind that is not only encroaching upon and destroying its habitat, but generally meddling with the orderly pattern of its life.

  On any given day in winter, six to eight moose were within a stone’s throw of the cabin. Lillian eventually decided to feed hay to the hungry visitors.

  On any given day in winter, six to eight moose were within a stone’s throw of the cabin. Lillian eventually decided to feed hay to the hungry visitors.

  But familiarity was ever the breeder of contempt. On discovering that they had nothing to fear of us, our winter guests soon became as tame as our horses, and when coming face to face with one on the packed trail leading from cabin to barn, the moose often stood stubbornly in its track, eyeing me belligerently and compelling me to leave the trail and flounder through unpacked snow to the barn. It was easier and safer to go around than to try and remove the moose from the trail.

  The idea of feeding the moose hay originated with Lillian, whose scheming little head was always full of ideas.

  “If,” she began quietly and serenely across the breakfast table one bitterly cold morning when the feuding of the moose outside the windows was assuming disorderly proportions, “we were able to feed them a little hay now and then—”

  “Hay!” I exploded, “Feed moose hay!”

  “Why not? We’ve got chunks of fat hanging out for the birds, haven’t we?” And the way she put it, feeding moose was no harder than feeding the chickadees.

  Just then my eyes happened to fix on a scrawny-necked cow whose every rib stuck out like curved fork tines through her hide. She had a still scrawnier calf trailing along at her heels. “That old lady out there looks as though she could do with a forkful of something,” I observed thoughtfully. “But where’s the hay coming from? It’s about all we can do to grow enough for the horses without taking on moose.”

  Already Lillian had that figured out. “We’ve just got to clear a bit more ground. And this time we’ll grow alfalfa instead of timothy and clover. I have an idea the moose would really like alfalfa.”

  “Alfalfa!” I spluttered, half to myself. As if we didn’t already have enough on our hands to do with wildlife propagation, here was Lillian placidly suggesting that we saddle ourselves with the job of winter feeding a herd of moose.

  Of course she had it her way. Whenever Lillian got an idea into her head, action soon followed. We cleared another acre of ground of its brush, grubbed out the roots and seeded it down with alfalfa. Once the roots became firmly established, this added bit of farmland hacked out of the wilderness produced a crop of alfalfa yielding three tons of hay to the acre.

  And the moose took to the hay as a hog takes to corn. Since its original planting, we have fed scores of moose at the cabin. A calf that had been there all winter with its mother could be reckoned upon to be there next winter as a yearling if disease, predators or other natural calamity did not snuff out its life in the meantime. And it would perhaps be back again as a two-year-old, now with a calf of its own. A number of winter snows have come and gone since Lillian’s head first hatched the idea of feeding the moose hay, and since then we have witnessed both the birth and the death of many a moose that at one time or another moved in on us in December or January, bumming a forkful of hay.

  When one is able to approach almost within hand touch of any wild animal, a photo of the subject becomes an absolute must. Now stored away among the litter and confusion of my desk are hundreds of snapshots of moose that we have known through the years. Photos of bulls with massive horns, bulls that have shed their horns, cows with calf at heel, and cows without calf at all. And somewhere among the lot is a photograph of one of the largest bull moose I’ve seen, and it is not a pretty photo by any standards. The ears of the bull are flat on the nape of the neck, and its mane stands on end. And there is rage and animal hate in its eyes as it hurls forward through three feet of virgin snow, and the object of that rage and target for the hate is Lillian, who stands there, helpless, on her snowshoes, only a few feet away.

  Chapter 16

  It was all my fault in the first place. One foot more and Lillian would have been killed. It started when I was hunting mule deer in a tongue of lodgepole pine and fir that licks almost at the long walls of our home. A November moon was dying, and three inches of snow covered the kinnikinnick and blueberry bushes. The wind was faintly from the north, the air tangy and crisp with a loaded hint of more snow shortly to come.

  Now was the time when I must go to work and stock up with meat against the needs of hungry months ahead. I found my buck, a three-pointer, bedded on the rim of a gulch, staring languidly into the westerning sun, as bucks have been doing on late November afternoons ever since there were bucks. I shot him in his bed, dragged him away from the gulch a bit and gutted him. Then I laid him on his back beneath a fir tree to cool out. In the morning I’d come back with a pack horse and haul him home.

  Standing beside the steaming carcass, thirty yards from the rim of the gulch, I could neither see nor hear any movement below. Yet I had the sudden intuition that life was abroad down in the bowels of the gulch, though why I do not know. It was like the intuition that abruptly came to Lillian and me when we were once pitching an overnight camp in the woods. We were about to stretch the tent between two green and sturdy pines when some little voice started to whisper, “No, not between those two trees.” It was just like that; we ready to pitch the tent, the voice saying, “No, not there.” So we rolled the tent up, moved on a quarter of a mile, picked out another spot for the camp and then set up the tent.

  Along toward midnight, wind began worrying the treetops, and within seconds a mild hurricane was footloose through the forest. Several trees around our camp died that night, and at daybreak I strolled down to the spot where we had first intended pitching the tent. One of the trees to which our ridgepole would have been fastened had blown down in the night, and had the three of us been asleep in the tent we’d have been crushed as a rolling wagon wheel crushes a grasshopper.

  Now, standing very still by the deer, the selfsame voice said, “Watch that gulch”—just like that. So I bolted a cartridge into the barrel of my .303 and crouched back on my heels, eyes and ears working ov
ertime.

  At full maturity, a bull moose weighs around fourteen hundred pounds on the hoof, and many carry a set of antlers spreading sixty inches or more. It does not seem possible that an animal so large can move through the timber as silently as a foraging lynx cat. But it can and does. A bull moose in heavy timber is nearly always seen before being heard.

  As was the case now. The horns came up out of the gulch first, a spread of some forty-five inches, I judged. Then I saw the grotesque Roman nose, followed by the rest of the head and neck.

  It was a couple or so seconds before horns, head and all four legs were clear of the gulch, and if I have often seen moose carrying a larger spread of horns, never have I seen one with a heavier frame of body.

  Head up, nostrils feeling the air, the bull moved stiffly toward me. That seemed odd too, for he could well see me crouching tensely by the body of the deer. By all ordinary rules of the game, he should have wheeled and gone back into the gulch far more quickly than he came out of it. But he moved up to within twenty yards of me before he stopped and gazed at me intently, obviously unafraid of me. And if ever I’ve seen mayhem in the eyes of any bull moose, it was there in his.

  I fingered the trigger of my rifle, watching the bull with both caution and curiosity. Of one thing I was sure: I had never laid eyes on him before. He appeared to me to be a strange moose, travelling through a strange country. Never a forkful of our alfalfa had he ever eaten.

  When a bull or cow moose has fight on its mind—and quite often they have—there is much in its expression that isn’t exactly pleasant. The ears flatten against the neck, the mane comes erect, and the whites of the eyes show. Usually there’s but a soft grunt of warning before the animal lunges forward. And they come exceedingly fast.

  One does not work and live among moose for winter after winter without coming into contact with the occasional bad-mannered rogue. Certainly I’ve encountered my share in my time, yet never have I been forced to use the rifle in self-defence. When moving among them at home, feeding them hay, I’ve often beaten some truculent bull or cow across the nose with a pitchfork to teach it better manners, but never harmed them worse, or they me.

  But there was something about the actions of the bull in front of me that warned me here was one moose who would never be turned aside by any pitchfork once he made up his mind to charge. Looking back on it all now, I think I was actually afraid of the bull from the moment of first setting eyes on him, and afraid with a fear that had never been in me before. Which perhaps explains why I slowly brought the gun in to my shoulder and lined its sights on that broad massive head. And maybe I should have touched off the shot and settled the business for good in that single split second. Had I done just that, Lillian would have been spared the ordeal that came later.

  I know now that I’d have been forced to shoot if a yearling bull had not suddenly got into the act, because here was one moose that would kill or be killed himself. But the yearling temporarily solved the problem for me, paying a harsh price for involuntarily doing so. My first warning that there was a third party in the act was when the big bull suddenly jerked his eyes from me to stare questioningly and angrily at something off in the timber.

  I lowered my rifle and followed the line of his stare. At first I could see nothing but timber, but after another searching look I made out the form of a yearling bull moving slowly toward the gulch. The little fellow wasn’t doing any harm that I could see. He was just nipping off the shoot of a red willow here, rubbing his poor sprout of horns against a seedling fir there.

  Feeding slowly toward us, he apparently didn’t notice the big bull until he was within thirty yards of him. Somehow I wanted to yell, “Get the blazes out of there, you fool, while the getting is good.” But it wouldn’t have done any good to toss him a warning like that, and so I held my tongue and stood tense and expectant in my tracks, rifle at the ready.

  The yearling was oozing good nature, and it was as clear as the air I was breathing that he just wanted to heave up alongside the big bull and pass the time of day. As he started forward again I heard the big bull grunt. There was a weight of warning in that grunt to anyone familiar with moose talk. Again some intuition prompted me to shoot, but I hesitated about squeezing the trigger. The old bull charged before I could decide—not at me, but at the yearling.

  Contrary to widespread belief, a bull moose does far more fighting with its front feet than with its horns. True, the antlers are used extensively and sometimes with fatal effect when the heat of the annual rut is on, but at any other time of the year it is the front quarters that throw most of the lethal blows.

  The unfortunate yearling was in far more luckless plight than any babe in the woods. By the time he came awake to what it was all about, the big bull was almost within striking range. Then the youngster did something I’ve not often seen any moose do: he wheeled and broke into a gallop. At their customary gait when in flight—a swift trot—a moose moves easily and gracefully. But a galloping moose is as graceful as a knock-kneed man in a sack race.

  The first blow flicked out so fast that I didn’t even see it. Crack! It was a sickening crack, too, one that might have been heard from one end of the gulch to the other. Crack! I saw as well as heard it this time. It was like the flick of a swamp adder’s head. And the little fellow went down in the snow.

  That’s when I roared the anger that had been coming to a head within me. The right front foot of the big bull was poised for another blow, but at the sudden clamour of my voice it went stiffly down again. Thus the yearling got his one chance for a getaway, and he lost no time in grabbing it. Limping badly—I think his hip had been dislocated—he came up from the snow and lurched away into the sanctuary of the gulch.

  The big bull continued his hostile appraisal of me for a moment. Then he cleared his nostrils, scratched at his right ear with a hind foot, shook himself and moved slowly away.

  “You cantankerous old bum!” I yelled after him, just to let him know what I thought. Old Cantankerous was as good a name as any, and he was certainly to live up to its every syllable.

  Almost six weeks were to pass before I laid eyes on the bull again, weeks during which the snow inched deeper every day and that saw a constant dribble of moose coming down off the hilltops to browse the willows along the creek bottom.

  Shortly after New Year’s I was kneeling down, placing a mink set in the overflow of one of the beaver dams, when I heard the threshing of willows a short distance upstream. I froze tight on one knee, eyes fixed on the willows. A moose took on vague shape in the bushes, then the outline of the animal became more pronounced as it stepped clear of the willows and paused on the edge of the ice, forty yards away from me.

  I was about to give my attention to the mink trap again when the head of the animal slowly turned. and its eyes fixed on the beaver dam. Then I recognized him: it was Old Cantankerous, though a different-looking gentleman from the Old Cantankerous who had crippled the yearling at the gulch. Now both horns were shed, and that made a difference.

  Since the wind was blowing upstream, I knew he hadn’t winded me. And since the eyesight of any moose is poor in the bright of day, I doubted very much that he could see me either, and he probably wouldn’t provided I stayed still.

  A beaver dam covered with sodden snow provides exceedingly treacherous footing, and my snowshoes were on the far side of it, three hundred feet or so away. When finally I recognized the bull I cursed myself, because my rifle was with the snowshoes. I began scheming how I could get over to the rifle without drawing the bull’s attention but came to the conclusion that it was hopeless. And without the rifle I was a sitting duck if the bull should suddenly become aware of my presence and display that same spirit of belligerence that was in him when first we met. Somehow I smothered the urge to make a quick dash for the gun, and instead inched down behind the dam, trying to make myself as small and inconspicuous as possible. I certainly wasn’t looking for trouble and hoped that he wasn’t either. After abou
t fifteen minutes of indecision—minutes during which the cold began numbing my body—he smelled the snow, belched and veered up the pond and back into the willows.

  From that moment on, the big bull was a perpetual menace to the peace of Meldrum Lake. Having once tasted a mouthful of the hay we were feeding others of his kind, he was constantly in sight of the stackyard, moving in on it at a brisk trot whenever his sensitive ears picked up the sound of fork against hay. No other moose was able to approach within a hundred yards of the stack when Old Cantankerous was in the vicinity. His strength was so massive, and he used it so brutally, that he could give any moose a twenty-five-yard start, overtake it before it got another fifty and rain punches at its body. There was more than one crippled moose in the vicinity of Meldrum Lake that winter.

  The ears of the big bull flattened if I approached too close to him, and often I was forced to jump on one of the horses bareback and ride up the trail from stackyard to house if he was between me and the house. For strangely enough, though he had nothing but arrogant disdain for either a human being or another moose, he became an abject coward when faced by an oncoming horse. “A horse,” I remarked to Lillian, “is his Achilles’ heel.”

  “I’m glad he’s got one somewhere,” she replied tartly. Lillian had little love for Old Cantankerous on account of the way he bullied the other moose.

  The more I saw of that bull, the greater became the temptation to get a photo of him somehow, at really close range as I had with so many others of his kind. And the longer I put the matter off, the greater became the temptation. But to appease it would be a somewhat tricky and difficult matter, one that raised the problem of how to handle camera and rifle at the same time. For to attempt any such piece of photography without the rifle in my hands as life insurance would be an act of irresponsible foolishness. No matter how quick I might be, it would take a second or two to drop the camera, unsling the gun, slip the safety and bring the bull into my sights. A bull such as he, with murder on his mind, can cover a great deal of ground in just two or three seconds. I was under no delusion whatsoever: if the bull were to charge, only powder and lead would stop him in his tracks.