The Moose Jaw (14 page)
After breakfast, I decided it was time to build the rocking chair Haywood had suggested. I poked around in the driftwood piles along the gravel bar and found a couple of slightly curved limb logs that I shaved into rockers. I worked on the chair itself, off and on over the course of two days. In the end, it turned out rather well. I made the seat a tad wider than the kitchen chairs, and I rounded the high parts a little to make it more comfortable on my back. After I carried it into the cabin and situated it near the stove, I sat in it and rocked. It creaked a bit, but it fit my form like it had been custom made with me in mind – which, of course, it had.
I was about to go to the counter and pour myself a celebratory drink when I noticed something had changed on the chess board. I walked over to the table and saw that the dark king – the bear carved of antler – now stood directly in front of the white queen, upon the square of the missing pawn. The dark pawn, which I had removed from the board, was right where I had placed it on the table. Beside it sat the white pawn which had gone missing my first night in the cabin. Like the prodigal son, it appeared he had returned.
“O.K., Yega,” I said aloud.
“Are we just having a little fun here, or am I to divine some cryptic message in all this?”
To my great relief, I received no answer to this query. I went to the counter, poured myself a double, gestured toward the table with my glass held high, and said, “Don’t think you’re driving me to drink. I do it happily, without provocation. Now, bugger off.”
With that, I tossed back the whiskey, poured another, and took it out onto the porch. When I had imbibed that libation at a more leisurely pace, I went back inside the cabin, boxed up the chess set, and packed it away under the bed. Then I found an empty wine bottle, situated it in the middle of the table, and stuck a candle in it. I decided it would make a much better centerpiece than the ill behaved chess set. It also boasted the utilitarian function of providing me with a little more light.
On the morning of the twenty-ninth of August, after my first few nights sleeping in the cabin, I was sitting on the front porch, sipping a cup of coffee, when a lone caribou cow wandered down the bar on my side of the creek. She had very thin, gnarled antlers; I had seen her a few times before. It occurred to me that I had never seen her with a calf…hmmm. I was just about fed up, literally, with ptarmigan, spruce hen and fish. So far, I’d only taken small game because I didn’t have the time to properly cure or jerk anything bigger, and the days had been too warm to simply hang a quarter up in the cache. But this caribou’s timing was, from my point of view, excellent. The days were getting cooler now, and with the cabin complete, I could devote my time to other pursuits. I considered this for a moment, picked up the Marlin, which I kept loaded and ready to hand, and shot the wayward cow in the head.
It was a little closer to camp than I liked, being right there on my door step as it were. I dragged it down to the creek and, with a great deal of heaving and grunting, wrestled it into the canoe. Then I went back up to the cabin, gathered my skinning and boning knives, a ground tarp and a few meat bags, and carried them down to the canoe. The bears had moved off the creek when the salmon runs had ended, but they were still around and would certainly smell fresh blood. I paddled my unfortunate cow a mile downstream, where I felt more comfortable leaving the carcass. Getting her out of the canoe was a lot easier than getting her in. After offloading my rifle and skinning equipment, I spread the ground tarp out on the gravel at the water’s edge and hauled her over the gunwales and plopped her on it. The canoe helped out by tipping up on its side in the shallow water. I arranged her at the lower edge of the tarp so the blood would run off during the gutting process and I wouldn’t be kneeling in it while I skinned and quartered her.
I quickly opened the stomach cavity and rolled out the guts, then busted into the chest cavity and took out the heart and lung sack. I dragged the steaming pile over to the side, took the heart and liver down to the creek and washed them off; I set them on a clean rock to dry. I’d fry up the liver with some onions for that evening’s dinner. There is nothing better than liver, fresh that day, simmered slow with onions. The heart, boiled or pickled, made good sandwich meat when you sliced it thin, if you had bread, that is. I’d have to learn to use my new oven. Then I got out my skinning knife and touched up the edge on a steel. It’s amazing how fast you can dull a knife while skinning out an animal. Caribou weren’t too bad but a moose’s hide was so thick and tough you often had to stop and sharpen your knife two or three times while skinning. I always carried a steel in my knife bag.
I took my time with the skinning. You can ruin the taste of meat if you get a lot of hair on it. It’s important to keep it clean and get the carcass cooled down as soon as possible after the kill. Head shots made this a lot easier, since you didn’t have a big, gaping hole full of bloodshot meat and bone fragments to deal with. I never shot at running game. I wasn’t that good a shot from the off-hand position and, as a young man I had to follow too many wounded deer through miles of briars and thickets or poison oak because I, or one of my hunting companions, had taken a hasty shot. Now, I didn’t shoot unless I could take a leaner or rest my rifle on a stump or something equally solid and stable. I also didn’t shoot until the game was standing still. Then I’d go for the head. If I hit, the animal died instantly and dropped where it stood, and I didn’t have to go chasing it into the next county. If I missed, I missed. No harm, no foul. Sometimes the animal took off for cover and that was that. Other times, it would simply lift its head and wonder if a high-speed hornet had just buzzed its ear, and I’d get another shot. But, as I said, the best thing about the head shot was you didn’t ruin any meat.
When I had skinned half the carcass I took off the fore and hind quarter from that side and rinsed them in the shallows. I left them in the water to cool while I went back to my skinning and butchering. After taking the ham and shoulder off the other side, I put them in the creek with the first two and then touched up my knife again before boning out the back strap, neck and brisket. There was a little bloodshot running down the neck muscles from the shock of the three hundred grain ball slamming into the skull, but there was enough good meat for a couple big pots of stew. I rinsed all this and sacked it up in one of the smaller game bags with the heart and liver. Then I dragged my tarp into the creek and gave it a good wash before spreading it out in the sun on the bank. I wanted to let the quarters dry a little before I bagged them up, so I dragged them out of the creek and laid them on the tarp. The day was cool, but it was clear and it wouldn’t take the sun and breeze long to dry them.
While they were drying, I washed my knives in the creek, touched up their edges on the steel, bagged up all my gear and stowed it in the canoe. Then I picked up my rifle and wandered downstream and around the bend to see what kind of tracks I could find. For the most part, it was the usual – wolves, moose, beaver and bear. But, for the first time that summer, I found the tracks of four or five Dall sheep. We had seen them in the high country on our two previous trips, but I’d never seen them along the creek. I’d heard they often came down out of the mountains in the autumn, and knew that sooner or later, I’d run across them. Twice, while scouting the banks, I’d noticed sheep hair in wolf scat I’d found, so I knew they were around. The wolves sometimes ran down and killed a weak or injured Thin-horn, but usually they just found a carcass and fed on the carrion. Grizzlies would do the same. Bears and wolves were opportunists and wouldn’t pass up anything that offered a meal.
I scouted downstream another half mile after I found the sheep tracks, but didn’t find much of interest other than some old tracks of a rather large bull moose. It looked like he’d been using the same crossing for a long time, but since there was nothing to indicate he’d been through there lately, I assumed he’d moved on, no doubt looking for a cow to woo. I didn’t want to be away from the carcass too long. The longer you waited, the more chance there was that a bear would have claimed it when you returned. There weren’t so many bears on the creek now as there had been during the height of the salmon runs, but as the salmon hadn’t completely petered out, there were still bears patrolling the creek. I didn’t want to have to fight a grizzly for my dinner so I turned around and started back.
Luck was with me. There was no bear guarding my kill when I returned, so I bagged up the quarters and loaded everything into the canoe. The carcass and guts were still on the gravel bar, and I had no doubt that a bear or a pack of wolves would find it by nightfall and clean everything up for me. I pushed off the bar and paddled my way back upstream.
As I rounded the second bend I saw a grizzly sow,
followed by one cub ambling down the bar. She stopped just long enough to stand upright, sniff the wind and then pick up the pace a little on her way downstream. Junior trotted along behind, trying to keep up. It was clear she’d detected the scent of the caribou carcass and was on her way to investigate. I imagine she was getting a little tired of salmon for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Bon appétit, I thought as they disappeared around the bend.
It took me a little over an hour to make my way back upstream. The current was strongest in the channel, so I tried to keep to the calmer water off to the side. The trouble with that tactic is there’s not always enough water to float the canoe, so one might have to do a bit of wading and dragging. Still, the day wasn’t too cold and the canoe wasn’t too heavy, and I had nothing better to do anyway. I beached a couple hundred yards downstream of the cabin, where I’d built the willow drying frame, and carried the quarters up and laid them out to dry. Then I went back down and waded the rest of the way upstream to the cabin, towing the canoe behind me.
After I put all the gear away, I washed up at my new sink and decided to have some lunch. I carried a box of crackers, a tin of sardines and a bottle of beer out to the porch and took up where I’d left off when the caribou had interrupted my morning coffee. I sat on the bench and leaned my back against the sun-warmed logs of the wall and stretched my legs out, resting my heels on the new boards of the porch. I was quite pleased with myself. The cabin still needed a little finish work, but to all intents and purposes, I was ready for guests. It would be another two weeks before Haywood came back, so I had plenty of time to tinker with the little refinements.
It clouded over in the afternoon and the cool breeze picked up strength. I couldn’t have asked for a better day for drying and curing the meat. If I got a little frost in the night, so much the better. I could always hang the quarters up in the cache, but the air circulation wasn’t so good inside, so I wanted to give them a couple of days on the drying frame before I moved them into storage. I’d have to keep an eye out for bears, but they hadn’t been coming too close since I started running the chain saw almost daily. They knew I was here and gave me my space.
After I finished eating lunch, I lit a pipe and savored the rest of my beer. I had rationed myself to one a day since I discovered I was down to ten bottles. I still had plenty of whiskey, but I wasn’t much of a daytime whiskey drinker. I saved that for evenings by the fire. As I sat, I thought about what still needed doing. I had to have a project for the afternoon. Everything in the tent needed to be moved into the cabin, but that didn’t appeal to me. I finally decided to make and set all the wall pegs I would need for hanging my gear and clothes. If there was time, I’d also build a couple of high shelves for storage.
When I had finished my beer, I took my folding saw and hatchet and wandered up into the spruce stand. There were plenty of ready-made pegs sticking out of the spruce trunks – hard, dead snags of broken branches, just waiting for me to come and harvest them. Within twenty minutes I had more peg stock than I needed. I didn’t take anything less than three quarters of an inch thick. I intended to hang up everything from heavy coats to sacks of potatoes and carrots. I didn’t want them snapping under the weight.
I set up shop on a stump near the cabin and cut about forty pegs, all eight inches long. I planned to anchor them three inches in the wall and I wanted five inches of peg sticking out. After I got them all cut to length, I used my pocketknife to taper the butts a little so they’d slip into the pilot holes before I pounded them home with a wooden mallet. This cutting and whittling took longer than I thought, and I began thinking how good another Heineken would taste. I was saved from myself by the arrival of two more caribou. I caught the movement out of the corner of my eye and looked up. Here they came, wandering slowly down the bar, following almost in the tracks of the unfortunate cow I’d shot that morning. I put down my tools and stood quietly in the shadow of the cabin and watched them mosey by. They stopped briefly and gave the cabin a quick sniff and visual inspection, deemed it of no interest, and continued their stroll. They never saw me. They must have smelled the blood when they neared the canoe and displayed a little anxiety by trotting a few yards up the bar, then looking back over their shoulders at the evil on the bank. They stared at it for a minute and then, tails twitching nervously, they trotted off into the cover of the willows. It reminded me I had to go wash out the inside of the canoe before it got any colder. If the caribou smelled the blood a bear would too.
Bears were notorious for biting holes in rafts
or breaking up canoes in the backcountry. There was a lot of debate as to why they did this. My theory was that hunters and fishermen usually left their boats smelling like fish or blood or rancid meat, and the bears came to the smell. They wrecked the boats because they thought they were food, or because they were enraged when they discovered they weren’t food and just busted them up for spite.