My First Alaskan Moose Packout

Or how we almost killed a horse.

“It’s a dangerous business… going out your door.”

Where I work, is a dandy hunting lodge located in the Alaska Range, 60+ miles from the nearest road, nestled amongst the mountains. Throughout Highschool I worked the summers there, shoveling horse excrement and cleaning the outhouses, until I finally graduated. Without another semester in the way, hunting season was free finally- I could begin training to become a legendary Alaskan hunting guide- I was to be inducted as a packer.

I stayed through the end of July, when I’d usually be waving goodbye through the port of an airplane, and got the opportunity to see the lodge in a new light. The willow was browning, snow began to pile on the peaks, and a whole new crowd of exciting clients flooded in- but before I could hit the trail and accompany a guide to learn, I had to start with the dead basics. Just as I began shoveling horseshit in the summers, I began the season by fleshing bears in the meatshed.

Guides hunting from the lodge would come back every day with their bear stories and their trophies- for that first month I didn’t get to partake in any of that. There was one time I had briefly been told to go help a guide skin a bear that had been shot about a 1/4 mile from the property. So I ran out to help with my knives in hand, and found while wandering in the rain, not a bear, but a horse with its saddle turned-over charging at me. Following him was the guide, huffing and puffing trying to explain that he had already well finished skinning, and when he had tried loading Skookum (as this horse was called) with the bear’s hide and skull, he blew up on him and ran off, almost smashing his rifle and spotting scope in the process.

Otherwise, my duties laid inside that small wooden building. To prepare an animal hide you need to remove all of the flesh from the skin to prevent rot, and then salt it to remove moisture and help it keep throughout shipping to the taxidermist. Bears are greasy things with a blue meat that reeks of fish. And this grease about them gets into all of the cuts that accumulate on your hands throughout the day (it’s amazing that I don’t have Trichinosis), it made work strenuous and frustrating, and often I’d stay up past midnight to finish a hide.

Yet they were good and simple days. The guides treated me well for my hard work. Despite only being 17, I felt I had earned some kind of place among them- allowed to listen in among men whom I respected as they gossiped. My fondest of memories are of standing outside the Tack Shed after sunset, and smoking cheap and sweet Backwoods Cigars with them, after a long day of fleshing. Admittedly, they only ever talked about two things: our horses are too old and our pay is too low…

Then the time finally came, I was going to ride six hours to an outcamp and join the client and a guide on my first hunt. It was a miserable and rainy six hours, but it made getting to that dry cabin all the sweeter- I was away from technology, the incessant drone of the generator, and especially the smell of the meatshed.

I rose early every morning of the hunt, started the fire, the coffeepot, saddled the three horses, and came back inside just as the guide was finishing breakfast. The hunting bit itself, I must admit, was not in any way notable in comparison to the after-party. They were two weeks spent frolicking on horseback like some KUIU-clad aristocrats through the tundra, looking for animals, inevitably not seeing them, and going back to the cabin to pour wine and play Polish Poker (or Golf if you’re British).

It was on our second to last day of the hunt, when… well, I’ll let the piece below tell the rest.

It was something my boss had asked me to write following the hunt (not an incident report or anything [it should’ve been], just for the lodge’s newsletter). Anything belonging between two of these: [ ], represents what I omitted from that original newsletter, for the sake of posterity. And it goes something like:

Our Hides Were Saved

"“It was my first moose hunt. The guide Clay [bless his heart], the hunter and I were glassing on the side of a hill known as Plane Crash Ridge as Clay was whispering to us about the day’s plan. “Imagine, if there is just a 72 incher on the other side of that brush-” He says. And very well a moose pops out his head from the brush 300 yards below us- it seemed worth a closer look. We stalked down the hill, my shaky hand recording every second of it, stopping a few times and calling before he stood up and took his cows behind the willow brush. He bleated jealously. When he reemerged, Clay knew instantly through his binos that he was a shooter with his wavy palms and gnarly points, and the hunter dropped him less than a few seconds later.

“How far is it back to the horses?” Clay asks.

“Maybe about a quarter mile.”

“Do you think you could go back and get my bag?”

“Sure.” It was simple enough, I may have sweated my butt off walking back up that [god damn] hill before stripping off my jacket and the extra pair of wool socks before making it to the horses, but I got back to where the hunter had shot within fifteen minutes- when I heard this yelling from down in the valley.

“WHICH WAY!” Clay and the hunter were scrambling below looking for that bull. I guided them to it, and really wondered to myself: It can’t be that hard to find a 1500-pound animal flailing in some bushes? When the charades were over, however, I soon realized the issue. In brush ten feet tall and made of spindly, and, twisting, and knotting branches that only a 1500-pound animal could push through, no one can see anything in front of them. I tore my shirt on the way down, getting leaves in my hair and stuck down my hip boots before that big body of the moose could be seen laying there- fat, with bleached hair on his back and some chewed willow slop dripping from the mouth.

Then the work began…

One whole moose…

…And a moose in pieces (sorry if you’re sensitive to this stuff). And that’s Clay, he is a pretty decent guide, but I’d also like to publically declare that he owes me money still.

For Clay and I, we knew that the next day would be long but I don’t think we were ready for the pack out to come. The hunter stayed at the cabin as we rode out on our noble steeds, two half-Arabians named Skookum and Jewels, and the perchiron-fjord we had put a pack-saddle on, Puntilla [who is the stupidest fucking horse ever. He sat down on me in a river once]. What separated us from the kill site was a river, beaver swamps, and that wicked willow brush off of Plane Clash Ridge. It took persistence and skill to pick our way to the kill site and begin loading our horses.

Puntilla was first, flighty as he was, his bags were soon loaded with two rear quarters waving in the air with the feet still attached. Then Skookum had to be loaded. Saddle panyards were supposed to be draped over his saddle to set the front quarters in. We looked around for the things on the ground, before we realized that they were at the bottom of Puntilla’s bags, under 150 pounds of moose meat.

We went ahead anyway, not wanting to have to unpack Puntilla and so we tied the two quarters with parachute cord, planning to drap them over Skookum’s saddle and cover with game bags. We each lifted a quarter and slowly crept to the side of Skookum as he was munching away on the grain we brought him. Then- MAHUHUHUH! (or however you are supposed to transcribe erratic horse noises) He leaped and scrambled away from us, the white of his eyes flashing, afraid of that smell of moose reeking from our arms. Skookum has never been a good horse around game meat, and we didn’t understand how much of a problem that was until we wasted the next hour and a half, expending all of our strength loading these quarters on. Every time we got close to him with the stuff, the same thing happened. He flared up and kicked and yelled. The task seemed impossible.

One last try- I got under the quarter and heaved it up. The two quarters landed and stuck. The first miracle was done! (as I thought of it to myself.) Jewels was no problem to load the antlers on and then the long walk began. As there were three horses and only two of us, we reckoned it was too hard to lead all three horses and so we left Puntilla to follow us. STOMP STOMP STOMP! He clomps down the hill past us with half the moose on his back and he begins to follow all those useless and dead-end moose trails which littered the willow brush.

“[God Damnit! Fucking] Puntilla!” We tried calling, with no response. All we could see of him were the two moose feet sticking out from his bags just over the height of the brush. That horse was dead certain that he knew the very best way home and that we should follow him. So much so that when I tried running up to him through the swamp to bring him back he only ran the opposite way faster.

We could only keep an eye on him and hope that he came back our way as we walked Skookum and Jewels further and further, up to the beaver swamp where we found the driest way across. We turned our heads and watched Puntilla swim across the beaver swamp with over 300 pounds on him (something a horse really shouldn’t be able to do).

Then we came to this little stream only a foot across. Skookum refused to put his foot on the other side. He stubbornly pulled back and neighed as if some monster sat waiting in the puddle. Clay tugged and that horse eventually gave way without warning and pounced on to the other bank. Jewels got excited and ran ahead, practically running me over as the lead rope slipped through my hand. Less than a minute later both saddles were turned upside down, sogged in mud. Distantly Puntilla whined. He sounded like a broken slide whistle, bound on his own way again, somewhere down the river.

In moments like these, it is actually incredibly fun to be a packer and to watch everything burn without much responsibility for it. But I understand that for the guide it was not so funny and Clay quite understandably was not laughing, but worrying about all that could happen if Puntilla did not come home. [If his saddle had turned over in a swamp, he would most certainly have been stuck and would’ve died of hypothermia before dawn broke] That ride home, after we fixed everything and had to leave the fronts and trophy by the bank of the river, we trotted and scanned the entire tundra for that big horse. Maybe… just maybe, he made it before us. We thought.

We arrive at the cabin. No horse. We’re screwed.

The hunter out of pure boredom had cleaned the entire cabin for us (this is not typically expected but after the day we had it was awfully nice). We began to draw up plans to look for the horse that next morning. I got on the roof. It was really to late in the day to glass- footsteps. Puntilla charged in over the hill! Trumpets could’ve been blaring to signal his arrival. All came intact on him. [This is a lie; he had dropped the moose cape and a Sawzall somewhere on the tundra, and we had to find it the next day. By the grace of a single raven poking holes in the thing, we happened upon on it.] Our hides were saved.””

With that nonsense said, I am coming to realize that what I do for work, fairly breaks the mold of what most others of my generation could ever dream of pursuing. It’s hard, it doesn’t pay well, and everyone I work with has at least one horse he would happily shoot if given the chance- but it’s truly an adventure that I love.

There is an awful too many boys in my generation that belong to the dull and meek, not willing to eat meat from the knife… not even a bite. For all of the sweating in cold marshes, getting my flannel soaked in blood, breaking my back and swearing at a horse- there lies a glory in it few will understand.

I took a bit of the moose we carried back that night and cooked it on a little grill with minimal seasoning (the hunter himself didn’t want any… not even a bite), and for being some ruddy and tough piece of backstrap, I think it was the best piece of meat I had ever had.

“Not all that’s gold glimmers…”

Danke,

ABSURDISMUS