There Ought to Be a Law

There ought to be a law against anyone attending a fishing trip who doesn’t understand the seriousness of yelling, “moose!” around a temperamental young bull of said species.

You see, when I was 14 I attended a camp owned by the corporation for which my father worked. One warm summer afternoon, Tom, a boy my age; Vern (Tom’s dad), Bob and his 3-year-old son, were lazily fishing in a canoe on the Little Snake River in the state of Idaho. The fishing was lousy and our attention span, along with any hopes of catching fish, withered in the heat of the sun.

Tom had just finished telling a joke when I spied something downstream.
“Hey, look,” I said. “There’s Bullwinkle.”

A few yards from us was a young, but very large, bull moose, standing knee-deep in water, feeding off the river bottom.

“Bullwinkle, where’s Rocky?”

With that remark, my companions burst into laughter, and silliness overtook us.

Our jocularity caught the attention of young Bullwinkle, who stared back at us.

“We’d best quiet down,” suggested Vern. “We don’t wanna rile the big fella.”

We hushed, and Bullwinkle went back to eating. But before long we were acting giddy again, when suddenly Tom lost the smile on his face. “Look!” he bellowed.

Bullwinkle was shaking his antlers at us.

“Hush up now, or we’ll be in a heap of trouble,” Vern said, and this time there was more than a hint of concern in his voice.

Just as we finally quieted down again, our 3-year-old partner pointed downstream and hollered, “Moose, Daddy!”

Bullwinkle again shook his antlers at us.

Turning ghostly pale, Vern bestowed upon us the wisdom of age, “Let’s get the #### out of here!”

As if on cue, Bullwinkle began swimming toward us.

Bob and Vern slapped the water with their paddles, moving the canoe toward shore. Now I must interject something here. Just before this incident occurred, I had read an article about a fisherman who had been treed 12 hours by a moose. So it shouldn’t seem odd that when we were a couple of feet from shore, Tom and I leaped from the canoe (we both swore we heard Vern and Bob yell “jump!”), which pushed it back to the middle of the river.

Once on shore, I ran straight up the river’s embankment, looking for a tree to climb. You know, it’s a strange feeling when you are being chased by a moose and suddenly realize that the only trees big enough to climb are rotten and will collapse under your weight. Luckily, I spied a Jeep Cherokee not far from me. If Bullwinkle was still on my heels, I figured on climbing that Jeep and sitting on the roof. I didn’t see the moose, but what I did see was astounding.

To the right and a little behind me, Bob (all 300 lbs of him) had his son by one arm and was running up the steep embankment. Not far from Bob was Vern, running stride for stride with Bob.

Vern had been in a motorcycle accident years earlier and had seven compound fractures in one leg. These injuries left him with a permanent limp. Yet, he was running faster than the rest of us.

The following spring Tom called me to ask, “Hey, going to camp this summer?”
I hope I didn’t damage his hearing when I slammed the phone down onto its receiver.