Change in a pattern in the land is no danger if you see it in time. (...)
Back on the river, the pattern breaks again: a sudden sense of being in shade, although the sun is bright. The bank to our left, rising fifty feet above us, has split and caved in on itself. A vast gouge remains, the solid darkness of soil stripped of growth. Half the river channel is blocked by an earth-berg, large as a small house, the trees that were once its surface half underwater. There is a strong odor of decay. Layers of dead plants and lichens in the permafrost, their decomposition long deferred by cold, lie open to warmth and rot. Stanley slows the boat, easing us through the narrows.
It is the largest collapse we have passed, but not the first. Early in the day we saw a slumped shore, which seemed unremarkable, as rivers always erode and shift their beds. Then we passed another. And another. Banks had lost all coherence, like a bag of flour slashed open. Dark loam spilling down and dissolving into the river. Over the gunwale, passing the most recent slump, I see birch branches swaying in the current. The leaves are still green.
Up the river, more. The sun is swinging low and westerly: we need to make camp soon. The land is low and flat, much of it covered in muskeg too wet for sleeping. Geese rise before us, honking their complaints at our disruption. Two bald eagles keen from a thermal. Shadows under the bank lengthen. At a turn in the river, almost a corner, Stanley pulls to shore. We clamber out of the boat, awkward in our layers and life jackets. Thirty feet or so above the river is a dry place. Under tall spruce, a scattering of cranberries. This will do, Stanley says.
We slip and pant and swear our way up the steep, muddy bank to set the tent. A wall tent requires making a frame, like a three-dimensional stick drawing of a house, out of spruce poles. I hold them at right angles while Stanley does the knots. With the skeleton in place, we hang the canvas tent from the center pole, Stanley whistling through his teeth, and tie out the sides. I cut spruce branches to cover the floor. Stanley retrieves a small metal stove from the boat and rigs the pipe. With more slipping, we haul the rest of our kit into the tent: two axes, two rifles and a shotgun, sleeping bags, caribou hides, spare boots, a crosscut saw, a bag of ammunition, a purple Rubbermaid tub filled with food, backpacks with clothes. There is camping and then there is living somewhere, just not permanently. (...)
All moose begin as stone.
The taiga’s pulse of winter freeze and summer thaw grinds rock into dust, as do the rasp-tongues of glaciers high in some mountains. Streams suspend this silt in their waters and feed it into rivers; rivers flood, coating their shores in a slick of young soil. Willows push out sprouts, their roots drawing nutrients from the mud into new leaves rich in phosphorus and calcium. From rock-born elements, willows condense the raw stuff of bone and flesh. You might not think so by looking at it, but the green gauze of foliage is dense with protein. Moose gorge, stripping catkins as the snows melt, using their flexible noses and lips to select new leaves. A bull grows forty or fifty pounds of new bone in his antlers each summer; a yearling will add nearly the same to lengthen her femurs and widening scapulae. A grown cow sets no antlers but must nourish the bones and tissues of her fetal calves.
The moose we kill is among her willows, standing in the reddening dusk. In her second year, with no calf, she is alone. We come to her two days after making camp. The first morning dawns to a wet inch of snow on the tent roof. We spend a long morning by the stove, Stanley sipping coffee from a metal bowl—cools faster, he explains—and talking, pulling back the tent flap now and then to watch the river. No moose. By noon the sun is warm. We head upriver. No moose. After an hour, Stanley cuts the engine and we drift back toward camp. Flat land wide under the sky, the horizon pricked by the knotty tops of spruce.
And more eroded banks. In places, a carpet of mosses and berry roots hang a fraying edge over the maw of absent earth. The erosion is most common in the direct exposure of southern and eastern slopes. “No one pays enough attention to this,” Stanley says, gesturing at the slump. “Look at how cloudy this water is. All that erosion ends up in the river. It’s bad for the fish. It’s bad for everything that eats the damn fish. We eat the damn fish. But erosion isn’t exciting. Everybody wants the icebergs melting.” We fall silent then, drifting on the current.
It is simpler to tell the end of the moose, for it is clear why she dies. Her body will feed us and others back in town. Stanley slows the boat and brings out his rifle. I take the wheel. He sights her in the scope at fifty yards. Her ears prick in alarm.
Moose have many ways of evading danger: running, or hiding where they can smell and hear threats approach, or swimming. Some will even charge. This moose stands her ground, stamping once, shaking out her long neck and jutting her nose into the wind.
Then comes a sound like the air splitting: the contained explosion of the bullet echoing off the water. The moose’s front knees buckle. She bows, then shudders to the earth.
Doing right by her carcass takes hours. Just as there is no ease in killing, there is labor in gratitude, and an acute sense of our dependence on this animal. We cut willows to lay in a clean bed beneath the dark form. Spread a new tarp in the boat to hold the meat. Sharpen knives. It is skilled work to peel skin from flesh, to sever bones from each other at the joint, to skim around bundles of deep-red muscle. Stanley tells me where to hold a leg or pull taught the edge of hide as he peels it back. The fur under my fingers is damp from the wet grass. The air smells of blood and crushed plants, and occasionally the thick rot of digestion. The minerals moose consume in plant tissue feed colonies of bacteria in their gut, which, in turn, moose metabolize for protein. A moose rumen contains an entire microscopic world.
I take a turn skinning, crouched over and sweating. I am not fast or more than barely competent. We will be hungry soon, so I hand the knife back to Stanley and gather dry brush to make a fire; fetch a pot from the boat and fill it from a small stream. Stanley cuts strips of fat and muscle, which I add to the pot. In an hour we will have boiled meat. (...)
I had no words until we came back from hunting the first moose I saw die. Stanley sent me to bring the tongue and belly fat to an Elder named Tabitha, who lived across the dusty street. Tabitha scared me a little; my incompetence and foreignness felt acute in her presence. But that afternoon I could say: “We went upriver for moose. It was a bull. Can I make you boiled meat?” Even I could boil meat. We would boil more than one pot together. (...)
Now, Stanley and I pause to eat boiled meat. Alone, without this moose, we would be lesser, and hungry. Carrying the parsed carcass to the boat, Stanley groans under the weight of the shoulders and haunches. I follow with the carefully cleaned stomach, the sheets of ribs. Before we head back to camp, I wash my hands in the creek that veins down through the shoreline grasses. The water is reddish; there is iron in the land’s bones, and the tannic acid spruces release as they decay in the damp muskeg leeches trace metal from bedrock. Wolf prints rim the stream. More than one, it seems, from their interlaced patterns. Perhaps they came during their own hunt, stopping to drink where the water pools. Down the sloping bank, the stream gurgles as it joins the river, a capillary merging with an artery sunk in the flesh of the landscape.
And more eroded banks. In places, a carpet of mosses and berry roots hang a fraying edge over the maw of absent earth. The erosion is most common in the direct exposure of southern and eastern slopes. “No one pays enough attention to this,” Stanley says, gesturing at the slump. “Look at how cloudy this water is. All that erosion ends up in the river. It’s bad for the fish. It’s bad for everything that eats the damn fish. We eat the damn fish. But erosion isn’t exciting. Everybody wants the icebergs melting.” We fall silent then, drifting on the current.
It is simpler to tell the end of the moose, for it is clear why she dies. Her body will feed us and others back in town. Stanley slows the boat and brings out his rifle. I take the wheel. He sights her in the scope at fifty yards. Her ears prick in alarm.
Moose have many ways of evading danger: running, or hiding where they can smell and hear threats approach, or swimming. Some will even charge. This moose stands her ground, stamping once, shaking out her long neck and jutting her nose into the wind.
Then comes a sound like the air splitting: the contained explosion of the bullet echoing off the water. The moose’s front knees buckle. She bows, then shudders to the earth.
Doing right by her carcass takes hours. Just as there is no ease in killing, there is labor in gratitude, and an acute sense of our dependence on this animal. We cut willows to lay in a clean bed beneath the dark form. Spread a new tarp in the boat to hold the meat. Sharpen knives. It is skilled work to peel skin from flesh, to sever bones from each other at the joint, to skim around bundles of deep-red muscle. Stanley tells me where to hold a leg or pull taught the edge of hide as he peels it back. The fur under my fingers is damp from the wet grass. The air smells of blood and crushed plants, and occasionally the thick rot of digestion. The minerals moose consume in plant tissue feed colonies of bacteria in their gut, which, in turn, moose metabolize for protein. A moose rumen contains an entire microscopic world.
I take a turn skinning, crouched over and sweating. I am not fast or more than barely competent. We will be hungry soon, so I hand the knife back to Stanley and gather dry brush to make a fire; fetch a pot from the boat and fill it from a small stream. Stanley cuts strips of fat and muscle, which I add to the pot. In an hour we will have boiled meat. (...)
I had no words until we came back from hunting the first moose I saw die. Stanley sent me to bring the tongue and belly fat to an Elder named Tabitha, who lived across the dusty street. Tabitha scared me a little; my incompetence and foreignness felt acute in her presence. But that afternoon I could say: “We went upriver for moose. It was a bull. Can I make you boiled meat?” Even I could boil meat. We would boil more than one pot together. (...)
Now, Stanley and I pause to eat boiled meat. Alone, without this moose, we would be lesser, and hungry. Carrying the parsed carcass to the boat, Stanley groans under the weight of the shoulders and haunches. I follow with the carefully cleaned stomach, the sheets of ribs. Before we head back to camp, I wash my hands in the creek that veins down through the shoreline grasses. The water is reddish; there is iron in the land’s bones, and the tannic acid spruces release as they decay in the damp muskeg leeches trace metal from bedrock. Wolf prints rim the stream. More than one, it seems, from their interlaced patterns. Perhaps they came during their own hunt, stopping to drink where the water pools. Down the sloping bank, the stream gurgles as it joins the river, a capillary merging with an artery sunk in the flesh of the landscape.
by Bathsheba Demuth, Emergence | Read more:
Image: Sarah Gilman
[ed. Moose hunting's usually a grind - hard and sweaty, mosquito infested, and, if you're lucky, rewarded with packing hundreds of lbs. of bloody moose meat sometimes miles through swamps and dense alder in bear country. Definitely Type 2 if not Type 3 fun.]
[ed. Moose hunting's usually a grind - hard and sweaty, mosquito infested, and, if you're lucky, rewarded with packing hundreds of lbs. of bloody moose meat sometimes miles through swamps and dense alder in bear country. Definitely Type 2 if not Type 3 fun.]
