Moose mane is usually pretty easy to come by here. We still have a lifetime supply for us saved from a moose my wife shot. I intended to save some of Riley's moose hide, just because...

Riley keeps walking around saying, "Iwant to go hunting... For RABBITS!"

DG
I have done stupid stuff lots of times and even been lucky a time or two... But perspective can be a tough thing to recognize. As a kid just a bit younger than Riley my father and I dealt with a moose alone that ran into a bigger lake a died.

We floated a canoe down a river and portaged across to the moose in the lake. Then we cut up the moose in the lake... Which is all the detail I ever recounted until Sunday night when I realized what my old man had been up against with just a skinny kid for help.

And then the moose recovery got difficult...

At the first portage we thought the ponderous freighter canoe would float the moose and us across the shallow pond. It did not. So we mostly dragged the canoe across pond after pond until we reached the river and stashed motor.

We put the brand new '69, 6 horse evinrude on the motor mount and dropped the gas can in the back and realized the thread of life between them was missing... The gas hose was still in the rig several miles upriver. Walking back was not an option.

So we lined the canoe up. Lining is extremely hard work. It seems easy to say the keel held at exactly the right angle to the water will cause it to run right up the river and all you have to do is keep the working the line. And taking a wrap around a convenient tree will give you most of the resistance needed.

What it doesn't begin to tell is how hard the sweepers are to negotiate. Cutting them down with a small meat saw is easier than going around most of them.

It took three full days to get the moose and canoe back to the road.

And I sniveled about Sunday... I am appropriately shamed...
art