Near Death Encounters with Wildlife, Part 2 — Don’t Shoot No Moose

Upon the threshold of your adult life, you should be rational. My friends were rational as our collective clock ticked toward graduation. They interviewed with Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Amoco, and Price Waterhouse. Some found internships, others real jobs. They had plans, rational plans.

Not me. In 1994, I was in love. I was in love with a sun-kissed beauty in hiking boots. And with the Rocky Mountains. With 32 ounce beers at a dive bar called Mac and Joes. In love with a little house on Heather Lane where I lived with my guys. In a fanboy sense, with my Structural Geology professor. And with Jonathan Livingston Seagull, John Denver, and Pearl Jam. Trite as it sounds and simple, I was in love with the world.

That was me as I hiked down Cascade Canyon in Grand Teton National Park on the fourth day of a solo backpacking adventure: in love with the world; ecstatic and flowing. On that trip, love made me do some dumb things. I climbed a crumbly spire without a rope. I jumped in an icy lake. I wrote wretched poetry. I stored my food improperly in bear country because Venus was rising above the silhouette of the mountains and I couldn’t be bothered. It was The Time of Big Feelings.

Feeling those big feelings under a sapphire sky in the shade of cathedral peaks, I hiked along a stream belting out a Pearl Jam song. That’s when I saw the moose.

The bull was ten feet away, the distance between yourself and the Netflix stream on TV. He looked up from the willows where he was browsing. I froze. A brown mountain of a creature and close enough that I smelled the earthiness of him. He was easily eight feet tall; his antlers were a six foot mantle shelf.

From park rangers I had heard that it wasn’t the bears that killed people (a fact I’d cling to a few years down the road outside of Missoula, Montana when I came nose-to-nose with a black bear during a trail run), it was the moose. Generally docile giants, they had the tendency to stomp a person to death when they were surprised or a cow was protecting her calf.

The moose gazed at me and ground willow bark between his teeth. He shifted his weight and twigs snapped beneath his plate-sized hoofs. The stream babbled behind him. The echo of my singing bounced off the rock face above and made a break for the sky.

There was a man named Don Green who was a mentor to me. Veteran, engineer, two-time National Rifle Championship finalist, tinkerer, motorcycle enthusiast, adventurer, photographer, rascal, and master bull shitter; I have Don stories for days. Standing in front of this moose, simultaneously hoping not to be trampled to death and in awe of the animal, it was Don’s sonorous voice I heard in my head. “Don’t shoot no moose!” It was a favorite saying.

In my late teens, Don taught me to hunt. Under his tutelage, my friends and I hunted rabbits and sometimes squirrels. And we lived by the Don Rule that if you shot it, you had to eat it; a rule that may have arisen from depression-era ethics. During the Great Depression, Don’s family was resourceful. They planted a bigger garden and fanned out to find work. Don and his brothers hunted in northern Michigan to put meat on the table.

Later in life, Don didn’t have a ten point buck mounted over his fireplace. No taxidermy fox glared at you from his shelf. Hunting was for food. If you just wanted to go shoot that’s what targets were for…or the fireplace. Sometimes with Don my friends and I shot a long-barreled .44 with a wax load into the fireplace. It was super fun, but I digress. According to the Don, animals were for eating, even when you shot a moose up that tipped the scales at a thousand pounds. How long does it take to eat a moose? Don knew. Hence his saying, “Don’t shoot no moose!”

During my trip, I glimpsed pikas and marmots in the talus fields. I saw a momma moose and her calf from far off wading in a boggy wetland. I came across a group of hikers marveling at a bear cub up in an aspen tree, but left quickly because, you know, momma bears. Wildlife reminds us, in a visceral way, that we are not alone. We share this place with creatures who also struggle and strive, who care for their young, who inhabit the places we’ve set aside for them, and remind us of the scourge of our species and its brilliance. Had those been my last thoughts, it would have been alright.

Recently, I had the honor of speaking at Don’s funeral where family, friends, co-workers, and disciples like myself gathered to pay homage to this man who solved impossible engineering problems, rode his motorcycle on six continents, and, when he was given six months to live, lived another twenty, living them well. After the service, rehashing his adventures over beers with my friends, it struck me that Don didn’t actually listen to his own advice pertaining to the shooting of moose. He shot plenty of moose.

The drudgery of eating moose burgers for the nth time couldn’t have been harder than endless uncomfortable hours in the saddle riding across Africa. The moose stew on the table (again and again) couldn’t have been less tasty than the daily grind at Steel Warehouse where the machines refused to stay fixed. And minced moose pie had to have been easier to chew than the decade of stress Don (and Marion, the most patient woman in the world) endured after opening their home to my wayward friend and, by extension, the rowdy bunch to which I belonged.

Even after the lesson of the Michigan moose, Don shot more moose…metaphorical moose. By that, I mean he lived big and, through the discomfort, boredom, and the grind, enjoyed epic successes and failures. He listened to his own advice (“Don’t shoot no moose!”) in a literal sense only, and I’m with him on that. I’m all for letting moose roam freely and picking up tempeh at the store.

But metaphorical moose? I think we need to listen to Don’s actions, not his words. Let’s hunt them; let’s take risks with our lives which aren’t, after all, for saving, but for risking…especially over the long haul when our bets take years to hit. Gambling our talents and time, risking what we have been given in the hopes (rational or not) of epic payoffs, that’s what we are here for. That’s what Don was about.

These days my metaphorical garage freezer is stocked with metaphorical moose meat. And I’m chewing it, metaphorically, one bite at a time. Example: I’ve been married to that mountain beauty (the girl, not the moose) for twenty-five years. Each day, mundane and sublime, we risk ourselves for a higher purpose, a bigger payoff.

Also, two decades of teaching has been a total gamble. Maybe, in the end, the risk will have been worth it, these years spent in the service of helping kids grow up. But maybe I should have been more rational like my friends, some of whom, the bastards, are already thinking about retirement.

Of course, I’d be lying if I said that I never hoarded myself, that I never took Don at his word. I’ve been foolish, selfish, and risk-averse many times. And I have paid for my fear with loneliness and regret. When I should have let it shine, I doused my light under a bell jar, safe from the world, and snuffed out.

Not today though. And, I hope, not tomorrow. Today: a cold morning mountain bike ride (through Michigan woods that are sadly empty of both moose and bear) and these words. Tomorrow, with hope, more.

Friends, let’s roll the dice. Let’s see what luck betides us. Though the path is long, it need not end in smallness. Shoot the damned moose.

After our moment of mutual consideration, the big moose lifted its tail, pooped a stream of what looked like Hershey’s Kisses, and came crashing out of the willows…then trotted away from me down the trail. The journal I kept on my trip tells me I stood pointing with my mouth agape as the moose moved off. Tingly with adrenaline, I gave him plenty of space before double-timing it down the canyon, rejoicing in my close call.