guppie9
New member
Great article in today's Fairbank's newspaper. This story really captures what a moose hunt in Alaska is like. Although I read a comment from a guy who said, if you want to know what moose hunting in Alaska is like, stand in a cold shower and rip up $100 bills...it is the same thing.
http://newsminer.com/news/2009/oct/01/hunting-and-gathering/
To be continued....it is too long to put into one post.
http://newsminer.com/news/2009/oct/01/hunting-and-gathering/
Hunting and gathering in the season of the moose hunt
By Sam Bishop
Published Thursday, October 1, 2009
FAIRBANKS — The smell of moose meat, potatoes and cabbage cooked with an onion and some parsley filled our kitchen Monday night. I’d placed these ingredients in a Crock-Pot earlier that day. As I worked at the office, I imagined that smell. When I arrived home, it didn’t disappoint.
The meat, the central character here, was a roast cut from the upper hind leg of a moose I’d shot two weeks earlier. After simmering in the pot all day, it was tender enough to fall apart at the push of a serving spoon’s edge. My 17-year-old daughter, Nell, had already sampled it by the time I arrived, and, while she liked it, she described it as a little “dry.” That description applies to most meat on a moose and, in this case, conveyed not a lack of water but rather a lack of the marbled fat that lubricates beef in our mouths.
Monday’s dinner was the culmination of efforts dating back to late winter, when my wife, Suzanne, planted the parsley and cabbage seeds under lights in our garage. She later moved them to gardens next to our house. The potatoes and onions were planted in late May and June. All were harvested during the past few weeks, along with that central character, the moose.
Hunting, gathering and growing one’s own food has received a great deal of attention across the nation in recent years. The interest seems similar to that which I vaguely recall from my childhood. The back-to-the-land movement captured a small corner of the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and my family sometimes sat in that corner. A mish-mash of motivations, ranging from a desire for cheaper, healthier food to a interest in polluting less, were behind it then, and I think the same is true today.
I suspect those benefits could be attributed to our Monday night meal. But I know it’s not simple. With all the gasoline we burn and the equipment we need to hunt, gather and grow, I can’t say this path always is cheaper or less polluting than shopping at the grocery store, which sits at the pinnacle of an extremely efficient system. I do know that what we did this year is more satisfying and interesting than pushing a cart to the meat section.
Three green harvest tickets for moose sit in my file folder titled “hunting.” The oldest ticket, about a quarter-inch longer and a little grayer than the other two, is notched to indicate Sept. 12, 1988. On the back, I wrote “Tanana Flats, 8 a.m.” That was the first moose I killed. On Sept. 10, I killed my third. Tanana Flats, 6 p.m.
I’ve helped clean and pack many more moose, but between the first and third to drop by my bullets were two decades, just one other moose and too many Septembers spent not hunting at all.
I have a moderately defensible excuse for nine of those years, the past nine. My family and I lived in Arlington, Va. That state has many white-tailed deer, but I had no success hunting them. I tried a few times, in November, on a friend’s farm on the northern peninsula that juts into Chesapeake Bay. But I don’t know white-tailed deer, and I couldn’t spend enough time in the woods there to change that.
Given my mixed success hunting in Alaska, I can’t claim to know moose either, but I have a much closer acquaintance. This fall, more than a year since returning to Fairbanks, I renewed that acquaintance with the help of my parents and, for a few days, my nephew. On Sept. 5, after obtaining the state licenses and tags and a military land access permit, we launched two riverboats on the Tanana River and headed for the flats.
We didn’t know exactly where we were going, so it took us a few days to find out. When I first turned my boat up the small slough that eventually captured our interest, it didn’t look encouraging. Thick brush lined high banks, making a moose sighting unlikely. The brush opened at a burn, but the jackstraw carpet of dead spruce trapped us in one spot. A fallen tree blocked the channel. My Ouachita riverboat slips into many places, using a steel propeller-adorned 30-horsepower Honda outboard on an old-fashioned, hand-levered lift. But we had no saw to clear the branches that day, so we turned back to camp.
This outdoor grocery aisle and the others we explored during the following week proved full of curiosities, if not always moose. As I let the quiet, four-stroke motor idle up the slough that first day, we spotted a lynx crouched on a fallen log. It gazed at us, showing no sign of concern. We were the first to move on.
Behind our camp along the Tanana, ruffed grouse picked rosehips along the banks of a semi-dry slough we used for quiet walking; one morning, I rounded a corner to find five before me in the sedges. By then accustomed to our passage, they stalked off rather than flying. Hairy woodpeckers chirped and hammered. Red squirrels, mostly absent near our house outside Fairbanks this year, scolded regularly from the white spruce stands. A red-backed vole scurried up a log, stopped at my knee, gazed at me and reversed course. Cranes flew over from the west, calling. Great horned owls hooted and coyotes cried at night. Mostly, though, the forest was so quiet that the sound of cottonwood leaves dropping through their brethren would catch my ear and draw my glance.
My dad watched a cow moose and its calf one morning. Another, I heard a bull rattle its antlers. Two moose, we think, thrashed through the water behind our camp one night. But nothing appeared that was both legal to shoot and carrying enough meat for the year ahead. Picking lingonberries in the cool moss of a black spruce flat was the best use of the sunny afternoons.
On Wednesday, early afternoon, I returned to camp and re-opened the book that Suzanne had given me some time ago — Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” I’d finished a chapter before sleeping the night before. The new chapter title was “Hunting,” which seemed auspicious.
Pollan’s book is about that dilemma. When we can eat a wide variety of foods, what do we choose? For most of our history, the answer depended upon what was immediately safe, i.e., not rotten or poisonous. Today, we also wonder about the ethics of eating foods, given their long-term consequences and the way they are produced.
For example, my 14-year-old daughter, Louise, has been a vegetarian since she was seven, a choice that Suzanne and I have supported. We marveled at her resolve at such a young age.
Pollan, a prominent writer on the subject of food, decided he needed to try hunting so he could better understand such diverse ideas. So he pursued and eventually bagged a wild pig outside San Francisco. Such behavior is easily mocked, he observed. “Irony — the outside perspective — easily withers everything about hunting, shrinks it to the proportions of boy’s play or atavism,” he wrote. He’d considered much of the writing about such activity, from Ernest Hemingway to Ortega y Gasset, as “hunter porn” — the “straight-faced reveling in primitivism, the barely concealed bloodlust, the whole macho conceit that the most authentic encounter with nature is the one that comes through the sight of a gun. ...”
Then he found himself writing something awfully similar. “I am not by nature much of a noticer, yet here, now, my attention to everything around me, and deafness to everything else, is complete,” he wrote of his first hunt. “Nothing in my experience (with the possible exception of certain intoxicants) has prepared me for the quality of this attention. ... I am the alert man.”
These words mirrored an observation that a dedicated trapper once made to my wife, who is more gatherer than hunter. Nothing teaches a person about the woods like trapping, he explained, because you observe everything so keenly.
To be continued....it is too long to put into one post.