Post #296296 by Cammo on Mon, Apr 2, 2007 8:37 AM

All contents © Cam MacMillan 2006,2007

Bob’s Big Talk
"Counting Moose"

When I was a teenager, I spent the summers with my two Indian friends in Algonquin Park learning how to survive in the bush by eating moose and fishing for pickerel. Algonquin Park isn’t a little city park in Canada, it’s a huge forest preserve hundreds of square miles wide. There aren’t any buildings in it, it’s all just trees and swamps and lakes. You need a canoe to go just a few miles into it. It’s real dangerous, dozens of people are killed there every year by getting lost or being eaten by animals.

For college, I went to the Hailibury School of Mining, where they taught us three things; how to find your location on Earth using only a needle, a short twig, and some water, how to find gold using just a sharp knife, and finally how to blow up an entire mountain using a gallon of gas, 6 pickle jars, and a bottle of after shave lotion. I graduated at the top of my class by inventing a new way of exploding things using charcoal and match heads.

At Hailibury they let us use dynamite once a week, it’s my favorite.because of it’s elegance. Dynamite is beautiful when it destroys things. It has a mysterious, ephemeral quality which can’t be analyzed using any known scientific method. I’ve been working with dynamite for 45 years, and never once has it done what it was supposed to do.

For instance, I was hired to dynamite a freeway access road in Lima, Peru in January of 1973. We used only five sticks of dynamite, placed in a concave array. I lit them using a charge coupled series connection, which allowed me to watch it from a mile away. Instead of blowing up the new road, though, it blew up the construction crew, half the church beside it, and destroyed the water viaduct that supplied Lima with all of it’s potable water. I decided to run away and get on the first plane back to Canada because a good engineer studies all of the original calculations at his desk when something goes wrong. My desk was back in Canada.

I don’t know if they’re still looking for an explanation. I’ve never been back to Peru.

Here’s something strange that happened to me once, since you’re listening so good. It’s the story of the first time I ever used dynamite, way before college. One summer the Canadian government paid $5.00 for every moose counted in any Canadian forest. They wanted to know how many there were. Anybody could make $5.00 by finding a moose, taking a photo of it to prove you had seen it, and making measurements of it for statistical purposes. Actually, I thought they should have only paid us a buck a moose, but this was the government, y’know? My two Indian friends, Joe Crowfeet and Elja Farcry and I decided to make some easy money, so we headed to Algonquin Park again and camped there for a few months. We were so far into the park we didn’t see anybody else the whole time, which was great because we wanted to count our own moose. We tried to find one, but it was hard. They’re really shy. We sat up at night waiting for those dumb moose, we waited in trees all day trying to spy them below, but nothing worked. They were really hard to see. We knew they were out there, but we couldn’t find them. I was wrong, you see? A buck a moose was way too low. Even five bucks was almost nothing for all the work we put into it.

Then we found it. The dead moose. It was the only moose we ever saw. It was so dead. Little animals had eaten out the whole body, leaving the skin and bones. It looked like a deflated moose balloon. We stood around looking at the dead moose, feeling real sorry for ourselves, watching the flies buzz around. Then Joe and Elja walked right up to the thing, and started pulling at the fur. It stank so bad, I didn’t want to touch it, but those guys pulled and pushed at the tough skin, and started talking about tanning it. Then they whipped out their knives, big shiny things with antler-bone handles, I never thought we’d need those big knives but here they were doing the job slitting the moose belly up from the legs to the chin. Mostly worms poured out, then we all dragged it down to the water to soften the thing up a bit. It took all day to clean that thing, and the smell and worms didn’t matter so much after a while. It kind of made you not want to eat for a few days, though. My job was the bones, I had to sever the tight tendons, borrowing Elja’s knife, and scraped the things right down. Then I washed them all, and laid them out in a big pattern just like you’d see in a Natural History book. Jim softened the skin up, scraped the muscle and fat off, then pegged the whole mess out in the sun, upside down. The pegs were big pine branches, they had to be big cause the skin would shrink and tighten up a lot over the next few days, pulling hard at them.

We did a right smart job of it ‘cause we had a plan.

Three days later those bones were dry and white. The skin was still smelly, but it was soft now. Then we really got to work.

We gathered a lot of moss, you know that old saying, ‘a rolling stone gathers no moss’ well we gathered all the moss the stone left behind, and then some more. We gathered a mountain of it. Then we tied the bones together with string, shoelaces, tentlines, anything we had around, then put the skin back on. And stuffed it with the moss.

Bingo. Instant moose. That moose didn’t look so healthy, but it looked sort of alive again if you didn’t look too close.

We called her Jill.

Then we just photographed Jill from different angles at different times of the day. All over the place, in the lake, behind some trees, drinking water, lying down sleeping, hell, we could have put Jill up in a tree if we wanted and taken pictures of her roosting. We ended up having 572 pictures of that moose, with different measurements all written down nice and neat. At the beginning of July, we went back to Red Lake, developed the photos, and sent them on to Ottawa. It only took a week to get our check back for $2860.00. We divided it three ways and made $953.00 each. We actually had our picture in the Globe and Mail newspaper, next to the story of how we had counted more moose than any other team in Canada that summer. We were heroes. It created such interest and amazement in the wildlife community that the Ministry of Fish and Game decided to thin out the moose population. “Thin out” means kill as many as possible. They thought Algonquin Park was in the middle of a moose plague; a moose invasion. They paid people $50.00 per moose now to kill them. All you had to bring back was a piece of the moose – the nose, the eyeballs, the antlers, anything as proof.

We were just kids, you know? We had never shot a moose before. Elja had a pretty good .22, but that isn’t much use on a moose, even if we could find a real one this time.

So I thought up a plan. If I could have bought some dynamite, I would have, but that was illegal. I could buy dynamite “caps”, though. They were small, round explosives that ignited larger pieces of dynamite. Just one was strong enough to blow up a car, for instance. My friends and I bought about 100 dynamite caps from an army surplus store in small lots of 5 or 6 each, so nobody would get suspicious. Then we bought 10 bushels of apples, and went right back up to Algonquin Park. We made traps there, all over the place in the marshy areas where we thought the moose lived. They were rigged up good, Joe Crowfeet was great at trapping. All the moose had to do was try to take one bite of a yummy apple we had left out in plain sight, and BLAM the dynamite cap it was attached to would blow up. Goodbye moose.

It worked great. It worked too well, because every animal in Algonquin seemed to like apples. Squirrels, beavers, deer, BLAM BLAM BLAM, we got at least five big explosions a day in the swamps. It was hard keeping up with them. Almost nothing was left of the animals - they vaporized in the explosion. We found fur, teeth, toes… and collected what we could find in a big bag. The meat we found was cooked by the explosion, so we ate pretty good every night. At the end of August we took everything back to Ottawa and gave the bag to the Wildlife Department.

We were scared they’d be mad at us for killing the other animals, but nope. They weren’t much of a wildlife ministry, because they thought everything in the bag was a moose. Everything, even the tiny little teeth from some five inch long chipmunk. They were happy with our great job, and we got our picture in the paper again.

Money –wise, let’s see. They counted 62 different chunks of fur, tooth, or meat. That’s $3100.00 or $1033.00 each. I think we killed a lot more than 62, but we didn’t want to argue.

There was some moral to this story, but I forgot what it was. We made a lot of dough that summer, though.