November Light

In an abandoned woodlot, three of us stumble through the late September morning, adrenaline overtaking our weariness. Two bull moose spar on a distant ridge. We approach them cautiously, single file: Shawn, my father's neighbor, hunting partner, and recruited moose-caller; my dad, Steven, pushing seventy, faithful sub-permittee, struggling to keep up on bad knees; and me, the Bull-Only permit holder. Dad has postponed knee replacement surgery until mid-winter so he won't miss hunting season. Of the three of us, I am by far the least-accomplished hunter, which is at once comforting—the feeling one gets in the presence of experts—and, because of my historical bad luck, and general lack of experience, a little intimidating. We're more than three hundred miles north of my Portland apartment, on the eastern perimeter of the Allagash Wilderness. It's the second day of Maine's annual moose hunt.

Shawn stops and crouches beside an old logging road, among tangled alders a few feet ahead of me. He's trying to blend in. In his mid-forties, Shawn appears younger, blonde hair winged from beneath his camouflage baseball cap. With both hands cupped over his nose and mouth, Shawn lets out a wailing call, opening his hands slightly and lifting his head to mimic an eager cow. His call sounds to me like a whiny child. Dad crowds in behind me, looks frazzled after another night sleeping on the ground. "Those are both shooters," he whispers, his eyes on the moose as he fingers his leather gun sling.

Two hundred yards away, in a clear-cut near the top of a ridgeline, the larger of the two sparring bulls turns to the sound of Shawn's call—apparently more intrigued by the prospect of female companionship than by fighting rivals—and lumbers toward us at full trot.

You've got to be kidding me, I think, dropping to a knee and opening my shooting bipod with a loud, unintended clack. Shawn repositions behind me, my father beside him. I rest my rifle on the bipod and thumb off the safety. Through my scope, set to the fourth power of magnification, the moose's black body—crowned by magnificent, almond colored antlers—appears too large to be real. It slows to a walk, having cut the distance between us in half. The moose stops and laps its tongue against its wide brown nose. The breeze is behind us, and I'm nervous as hell.

"I've got a shot," I whisper. My heart pounds.

"Wait—still too far," Shawn says from over my shoulder. "Let it get closer."

Then the bull steps from the logging road into the alder bushes, disappearing from my scope, from our view. I keep my scope fixed on the general area, waiting for the moose to step back out. Shawn makes another cow call. Nothing. I wait a few more seconds, then stand, collapse the bipod, and shoulder my rifle.

"What happened?" Shawn asks, though none of us has the answer. Dad steps out from the brush, perplexed. "The wind must have busted us," he says.

________

On the basement wall of my childhood home, my father displayed the rack of every whitetail buck he'd ever shot. Many of the antlers were small: spikehorns, or four-pointers, screwed through small segments of skull to a horizontal wooden slab. "The antlers have been a way for me to visually mark the passage of time and my own life," he told me once. Dad shot his first buck at age fourteen, on a hunting trip with his father, though he was alone when he killed the animal. "I kept thinking of how proud my father would be, and I dragged the deer a mile back to camp to meet him." It was a small buck, and his father couldn't hide his disappointment. "And so hunting has been a lifelong search for redemption, of sorts," he added.

Later in his teen years, my father harvested a big ten-pointer, hunting alone this time. After it dropped, he walked to the buck and...