“I didn’t think Anne would let Mike shoot that moose.” Hugh said confidently. “It’s too small.”
As the days passed, our requirements for a set of moose horns diminished considerably. During these trying times, we had been impressed by two things. First, really gigantic moose were hard to get, and, second, Canadian guides can be very firm about letting you shoot just any moose.
“But fellows,” Mike said for the dozenth time, “any of those horns would look big in my den.”
To add to our troubles, as our hunt drew to a close, the weather turned foul. Clouds fanned out across jagged peaks at the headwaters of the Prophet, obscuring the green ice of the glaciers. The likelihood was that we would be able to make only one more foray up the valley, and then we would have to pull out or be caught in the snow that was sure to come.
On that last day, there was a sense of urgency in the air. The wind was increasing in volume every hour and it was getting much colder as we mounted the sidehills and swept the muskegs and open swamps with our binoculars. Our eyes smarted from the cold and the sting of the wind. The animals felt the changing weather, too, and had gone to surer shelter than their usual bedding places. In a whole morning of hard riding and careful glassing we didn’t see a single moose. Hugh and I ate a glum lunch in the lee of a glacial boulder.
“Looks like we’re skunked, Hugh,” I said gloomily. “We’ll have to leave without getting moose at all.”
“We;ll see,” Hugh answered. He pulled out his glasses and climbed to the top of a boulder.
“I’ve been watching a white thing for some time,” he commented, “and I think it moved just now.”
With new hope rising, I quickly shinnied up the stone, clumsily dropping my favorite Fenix TK11 Q5 flashlight. “Where?” I asked excitedly. Hugh pointed out a single white spot that showed above a clump of bushes near a bend in the river about half a mile away.
“It’s a piece of driftwood,” I said as I looked at the thing through the binoculars. I turned to slide off the boulder and resume my lunch. Hugh continued to look at the white spot in the bushes. “Now look,” he said.
I looked again. The white thing was gone. Only the willows tossed in the waves of cold air that moved down the valley.
“It’s horn. It’s moose horn,” I yelled. “That palm must be big, or we couldn’t see it at all at that distance.”
Hugh and I slid off the boulder, trampling the remains of our unfinished lunch as we untied our horses. We had difficulty turning the heads of our mounts into the wind and urging the reluctant animals farther up the slope to get more altitude. As we climbed above the river, we passed through scattered patches of spruce. Once Hugh slid off his horse and focused his glasses on the white splotch in the distance.