lotteries to decide who gets a permit. Maine in 1996 received 82,000 applications for just
1,500 permits. Over 12,000 out-of-staters happily parted with a nonrefundable $20 just to
be allowed to take part in the draw.
Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A
moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old. That's all there is to it. Without doubt, the
moose is the most improbable, endearingly hopeless creature ever to live in the wilds.
Every bit of it--its spindly legs, its chronically puzzled expression, its comical oven-mitt
antlers--looks like some droll evolutionary joke. It is wondrously ungainly: it runs as if its
legs have never been introduced to each other. Above all, what distinguishes the moose is
its almost boundless lack of intelligence. If you are driving down a highway and a moose
steps from the woods ahead of you, he will stare at you for a long minute (moose are
notoriously shortsighted), then abruptly try to run away from you, legs flailing in eight
directions at once. Never mind that there are several thousand square miles of forest on
either side of the highway. The moose does not think of this. Clueless as to what exactly
is going on, he runs halfway to New Brunswick before his peculiar gait inadvertently
steers him back into the woods, where he immediately stops and takes on a startled
expression that says, "Hey-- woods. Now how the heck did I get here?" Moose are so
monumentally muddle-headed, in fact, that when they hear a car or truck approaching
they will often bolt out of the woods and onto the highway in the curious hope that this
will bring them to safety.
Amazingly, given the moose's lack of cunning and peculiarly blunted survival instincts,
it is one of the longest-surviving creatures in North America. Mastodons, saber-toothed
tigers, wolves, caribou, wild horses, and even camels all once thrived in eastern North
America alongside the moose but gradually stumbled into extinction, while the moose just
plodded on. It hasn't always been so. At the turn of this century, it was estimated that
there were no more than a dozen moose in New Hampshire and probably none at all in
Vermont. Today New Hampshire has an estimated 5,000 moose, Vermont 1,000, and
Maine anywhere up to 30,000. It is because of these robust and growing numbers that
hunting has been reintroduced as a way of keeping them from getting out of hand. There
are, however, two problems with this that I can think of. First, the numbers are really just
guesses. Moose clearly don't line up for censuses. Some naturalists think the population
may have been overstated by as much as 20 percent, which means that the moose aren't
being so much culled as slaughtered. No less pertinent is that there is just something
deeply and unquestionably wrong about killing an animal that is so sweetly and dopily
unassuming as a moose. I could have slain this one with a slingshot, with a rock or stick--
with a folded newspaper, I'd almost bet-- and all it wanted was a drink of water. You
might as well hunt cows.
Stealthily, so as not to alarm it, I crept off to get Katz. When we returned, the moose
had advanced to the water and was drinking about twenty-five feet upstream. "Wow,"
Katz breathed. He was thrilled, too, I was pleased to note. The moose looked up at us,
decided we meant her no harm, and went back to drinking. We watched her for perhaps
five minutes, but the mosquitoes were chewing us up, so we withdrew and returned to
our camp feeling considerably elated. It seemed a confirmation--we were in the
wilderness now--and a gratifying, totally commensurate reward for a day of hard toil.
sean pound
(Sean Pound)
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