Moose Calf in Barbed Wire
Nicole finds an unlucky moose calf and attempts to make the most of it.
I hold the moose calf’s unsteady gait as a rhythm against my own beating heart.
The knees seem like the biggest parts of that little body, her hocks pumping to try and keep up with a mother so long-legged she seemed above the landscape, a potential for flight if the matriarch decides to leap into the sky.
I was running. Uphill. Stopped in an instant by the crashing through the brush, and less than ten yards from the pair. There was no acknowledgment. Just leaving, running past me. Keep up, the long-legged mother seemed to say, keep up keep up keep up. Brand new. Her tufts of unfolding fur finding the pockets of sun in the canyon, drying for the first time, licked into waves by her mother. How the two dogs free and bounding never saw them I don’t know but they didn’t.
I have known this cow for a few years now. She has always been different. Taller, shorter-coupled, lean in the way of a dancer. I’ve seen her as a two-year-old, now likely three, or is it four? This drainage is her home. I think I know the place somewhat but she knows it even more than I could ever. She knows it through four seasons, through the windstorms that rip trees from their roots. She knows the curves that make for easy walking, the pockets of rose hips and thimbleberries, the easiest way through the scree up high and down low.
Though she is likely the most dangerous animal in the area, especially with a newborn at her own knees, I have felt the energy come off of her in waves and it’s curious, it’s soft, it’s something else. I’ve made a promise to this drainage: I come in peace and for peace. I carry no gun. I walk to walk. I know where the spruce grouse lives, where the bachelor bulls bed, where they come down for water, where the mother moose sometimes sleeps off the trail with tall grass curling around her body. I also know the drainage where the bull moose, a likely father, lives. It’s about a mile as the crow flies.
I hold my own energy out like either an offering or a gift. When things seem overwhelming, I go there and it lifts from my shoulders. I think maybe I’ll only walk this far and then I keep going, called forward, by the pair of moose tracks, by the birdsong, by the coolness against summer heat. There’s always a reason to stay longer. To relish the place.
A creek ripples through its narrow confines, and there are spots where the trout fry cut through the water, jump, and hide. They are fingerlings, safe in the glacial cold, tumbling through sun and shade. My dogs know the deep spots where they wet bellies and tongues, and in most places it’s crossable by a single big step. If you so choose to walk all the way through the canyon, you’ll find the chimney of an old homestead, still usable and intact. People camp there, building fires, pulling trout from the old homemade dammed pond below. The only things I consume are rose hips and berries. The trout rise and I let them.
At one point, this spring, a very old pine ripped from its roots and crossed half the width of the canyon. Storms had whipped through and the idea of being caught in the mire sent shivers up my spine. Wind events, we call them in Montana. You’ll come to a spot in the trail where it looks as if God pressed him palm down unrelentingly, flattening dozens of trees to the ground. I had to climb through the creek and around the brush to keep going, until someone took a chainsaw to the huge trunk in the trail.
Things change. Sometimes we are a part of that change, whether we want to be or not.
Perhaps my peace treaty of keeping my hunting adventures elsewhere is my effort to avoid changing a place that has so often been bothered by human touch that irreversible damage lines its boundaries. Mining tailings. So many of them. The piles of rock are tell-tale. Sometimes I catch glimpse of a hazy figure out of the corner of my eye, walking in the trees. These are the things I tell no one. But I’ve seen him, more than a few times. Walking, like I am. This has happened to me since I was a child, and whenever I learn more about the figures, I learn of untimely deaths. This area had a plethora of deaths, mining and otherwise. But if this is where his spirit walks, I can only assume that heaven is here in its own right. Believe it. Don’t believe it. But it’s happened. It’s happening. This small canyon speaks to me, shows me, and sometimes it calls me.
It called to me, weeks ago. I was already driving somewhere else, with my dogs, taking off for country that I hadn’t seen in some time. I ran an errand, got in my truck, and then turned around. Pulled toward the canyon. I’d driven a half hour into town and drove back past my house, down the two-lane highway, and then climbed the dirt road toward the path through pines and scree I’d taken so many times.
I saw her crumpled form when I pulled past the campsite. Saw her and felt my heart sink into my feet. She was still. She shouldn’t be still. No. No no no. The dogs were already whining with anticipation and when I kept them shut in the car, they whined some more. I walked up to her, slowly talking. I had yet to see her eye, newly bluing.
“Hey girl, hey girly,” I sang to her nervously, but I knew. The calf, now a year old, had a front and back leg diagonally caught in the barbed wire. Thrown on her side by the violence of struggle, she had died a brutally unfair and unspeakable death. Impossibly caught. Nausea rose in my stomach. I kneeled by her body and placed a hand on her neck, not warm but hot to the touch. I just missed saving her. Just missed it. Tears fell on her winter-thickening, tawny coat. I whispered expletives, then pulled my knees into my body and sat with her, apologizing.
But I also understood the offering. The call. I had made a promise to this place, and in return it offered nourishment. Newly dead, the moose calf could be salvaged.
I placed a final bite of grass in her mouth. My truck held all my hunting gear, my sharp knives, my game bags, headlamps, and my beloved Silky saw. A cool silence fell over me in a shroud, and I began methodically pulling her hide back, began breaking apart her carbon copy short-coupled long-legged body inherited from her mother.
Her mother.
There is a point in the day where dusk hits a tipping point. For the crepuscular among us, it’s when the long shadows of the sun no longer give away locations, and shade covers the earth. When you hunt, it’s a clear moment, one in which restless animals finally choose to move, one in which you too can cover country once those animals make themselves known.
I wasn’t paying perfect attention to the turnover. But her mother was. Against the working silence of my effort, hooves hit dirt hard and fast in a trotting rhythm. Initially I thought someone was trotting a horse down the road, but when I turned, her mother stood, head high, staring from forty yards away.
Her mother. Her worried and restless ballerina of a mother. My friend, my canyon companion, of many years. My hands are holding my knife, both covered in blood. A hindquarter rests in a red-stained game bag against the fence.
She is not human. There is no weeping or wailing, no flinging down of her elegant body. Internally, I am the one feeling all of this things, feeling as if somehow this is my loss as much as hers. She turns and trots twenty yards to try and get a different look. I am talking to her the entire time. She’s gone, I tell her. She was gone when I got here. I’m taking her with me. I’m…
As I talk, her ears wheel back and forth like motors. Later, a friend asked if I was scared, as if she was going to think I was the predator and come after me. No, that didn’t cross my mind. Not at all. And anyway, I was right.
I don’t know how long I stood in silence with her after the explanation but I knew to not break the moment of solidarity. She stood a long while. Then, with a flick of a tail and a shake of her head, she turned and walked into the pines. Away from her daughter. Away from me.
I turned back to the work of making meat from a life.
All fall I had been hunting with my bow in hand, carrying small disks that fit into the upper palate of my mouth, adjusting my breath and tongue pressure to create bugles, mews, and the many sounds of elk. Say the curious and correct thing, and a bull will come screaming from the forest at full tilt, filling the air with both sound and fury. The season of the rut had turned over by this point, meaning that bugles were waning. Still, as dusk lengthened into nightfall, a bugle rose, restless and unsure, from the bench where I knew the bulls to sit during daylight hours.
It’s a perfect spot. The wind swirls and whisks itself around the mountain, deadfall rises to the edges of the mountain bench, the bulls are road-adjacent and are offered the scent of the trail throughout most of the day. They are all-knowing. Curved getaways cut into the mountain offer funnels into timber so thick it can feel like evening in the middle of the day when you climb into the foliage. Anyone trying to get to or at them is gambling, but they are in their house, and the house always wins.
As hard as I’d hunted, I had yet to fill a tag with my bow, and I held no such tag for a moose. Getting a legal moose tag is a once-in-a-lifetime adventure for most of us, but Montana’s game laws offer some respite. Game wardens can issue tags that allow us the prevent the ‘wanton waste’ of meat in circumstances where an animal is killed by car, or caught by a barbed wire fence.
The word ‘waste’ sticks like a splinter in my palm. Waste. There is no waste in the natural order of things. I could have left her here and the world she was born into would have taken her back like a gift offering, or a ritual sacrifice. Coyotes, owls, ravens, the magpies already waiting in the trees, the hungry organisms in soil, the dry and desiccating air, the coyotes singing on the edge of it all — she could have contributed back the small amount of life she had taken.
Instead, much of her musculature sat cooling against the barbed wire fence. Her hide, thick with the promise of coming winter, sat folded neatly beneath the quarters. White with fascia, her distended rib cage held a plethora of organs already engaged in the business of turning what was once dust back to it. It swelled with the possibilities.
Managing the emotional structure of the moment felt both obscene and pragmatic. I needed meat. Hunting, though fruitful in both adventure and experiences, was proving fruitless. And much like the entanglement of pasterns and barbed wire, my professional situation kept pressing me one way, then another, then offering up a promising possibility, then taking it away. The barbs of life were in my own ankles, the obvious metaphor of struggle so familiar I couldn’t not know what it meant to be her in the first moments, struggling to survive, struggling so hard that you struggle yourself into the next lifetime.
I had what she didn’t. Opposable thumbs, conscious reasoning, an education that helped me make the most of this loss and then turn it into a gain, and — most audaciously — hope. Cutting through her hind end, I found that she’d separated one femur from the pelvis so much so that she’d done internal damage. Even if I had saved her, she’d gravely injured herself far beyond the wire cuts at her ankles. Even if I had set her free, suffering and a likely death probably awaited and sooner rather than later.
I still don’t know what to make of this, really. I called the game warden and began crying when I told him the story. I told him I had the pictures to document the situation, and he said that he didn’t need them. The salvage tag arrived in my email the next day. A legal moose in the freezer.
A few weeks later, I killed a pronghorn doe in the final hours of the season on a long stretch of BLM land on the Wyoming border. I climbed over a barbed wire fence so quickly that I tore the soft fleshy part of my hand open and made the shot covered in my own gushing blood. The shot was a bit of hail mary, I couldn’t get an accurate read on my range finder, and I sent the bullet with good form and well wishes rather than a force field of defined accuracy. It found its mark.
The rest of the herd left and the doe stood there, woozy. She turned and walked another fifty yards, where she laid her final rest in the sagebrush. I thought maybe I’d hit her in the gut, maybe I’d taken a bad shot. I sat sick with that misguided belief, with prior experiences haunting me. It took more than thirty minutes for her to die, and when I walked up to stillness once more, I noted that the shot was so perfect that it felt impossible for her to have lasted so long. To have held onto life so calmly and purposefully. At the edge of my knife, she transformed from animal to meat, from form to function. I told her how strong she was, that I admired her strength and would embody it. I am doing my best to keep that promise.
But across the board, this season hit me like a brick wall. There are seasons that I’ve barely hunted, when my own constitution wasn’t up to the task of determining life and death. Sometimes, I yearn to be back in the ease of my prior life, a life before hunting, when a warm and sunny fall meant more long hikes in the golden arches of aspen and larch trees, or cardigan-and-sundress brunches filled with champagne and laughter, or riding a horse in the outdoor arena rather than the indoor. Back then, just seeing a moose was the pinnacle of excitement. I’d catch a glimpse into a wild life for just a moment. That was as far as I thought it would all go. I was wrong.
After years of living close to the land, I have traded the ease of enjoyment for the intimacy of the familiar. I became so curious about knowing a place that the place, in turn, began to know me. If anything, that must be progress. That must be what humans are meant to do, how our ancestors made it all work.
But I’m still grieving that little moose. I have been for weeks, and I’m not sure how to shake that grief from my bones. Perhaps it’ll fade when the long winter begins to turn over, when the days get longer and longer, reaching towards spring renewal. Or perhaps it’s something I’ll just carry with me, from the inside out, until I adjust to the weight of it.
And, perhaps next spring, I’ll once again run into the long-legged mother, with a new life tottering at her knees, fresh and ready, doe-eyed and curious, as long-legged and innocent as every calf before her as ever been.
Nicole Qualtieri (@nkqualtieri) is the Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of The Westrn. She’s worked in outdoor media for a decade, with brands ranging from MeatEater to Backcountry Hunters & Anglers to acting as the long-time Hunt & Fish Editor at GearJunkie. Her writing has appeared in USA Today, Modern Huntsman, the Backcountry Journal, and more.
Beautiful — thanks, Nicole.