MCA HUT! Archive

Ever catch yourself stalking the indigenous fauna when you’re out on a wilderness canoe trip? Now, I don’t mean stalking with a gun or a camera or even a restraining order, but just for the pure and passing pleasure of catching some wild thing off its guard in its natural habitat. So admit it, you have. And doesn’t it always seem that the harder you look for a particular critter, the more likely that critter is to keep under cover? It’s like they take an almost unionized pride in thwarting our voyeuristic tendencies.

And that’s kinda too bad. ‘Cause the way some people see it, viewin’ wildlife out in the wild is half the reason for goin’ on a wilderness canoe trip to begin with. People’ll spend a heckuva lot of time, trouble, and money to get themselves up to, say, Alaska or northern Canada mostly for the chance of meetin’ a caribou or musk ox or polar bear on its home turf. So it’s bound to be disappointing when the wildlife fails to cooperate.

You can’t really blame the critters, though. I mean, here we are, holdin’ them to the high standards of some PBS creature feature when they can’t even work the remote. How’re they supposed to know we expect them to enter stage right and put on a good show as soon as we arrive? Wildlife videographers can spend months gettin’ those images that flit so fast across the glowing belly of the demi-god of our living rooms. But we watch and get the idea that the back country is chock-full of cavorting creatures: all we have to do is pull up a seat and watch. You know, it’s downright shameful for something as highly evolved as a human being to be that gullible.

Gullibility is a trait I generally don’t like to take to myself. But there was a time in my life when my canoe trips all included some active stalking of wildlife, just for the joy of seein’ it. I had plenty of wildlife encounters. But whenever I was lookin’ for just one critter in particular, I never saw it. And there were plenty of times the native species just plain stood me up.

For years, the animal at the top of my most wanted list of fugitive fauna was the moose. I’d never seen one. In all my years of trampin’ around the north country, I’d never had one of those morose-faced beasts cross my path. Well, if they weren’t a-gonna come to me of their own accord, I figured I’d just have to go a-lookin’ for them. I became an obsessive moose hunter. And the moose became equally obsessive Wally avoiders.

Everywhere I went, I started makin’ the rounds of all the most likely-looking moose hot spots. After makin’ camp each night, I’d try cruisin’ through all the marshy bays on the lake at dusk. And next morning before breakfast, I’d make the rounds again. I’d paddle the tortuous oxbows of little alder swamp creeks looking for the ungainly ungulates. But, like a geeky guy cruisin’ the singles’ bars, I never got lucky. I never met my moose.

No matter what the quest, there’s nothin’ like not succeeding for dampening one’s enthusiasm. Years of swattin’ mosquitoes in marshy moose haunts unhaunted by moose blunted my ardor sufficiently for me to pretty much give up the chase. To heck with ‘em! I thought. Maybe, like Marlene Dietrich, they really did want to be alone.

So I really wasn’t thinkin’ about moose at all (really) when Charlie and I were on a lazy, wander-where-you-will sorta trip up in Canada one summer and found ourselves camped on the shores of Obabika Lake near the outflow of the river by that same name. This river had that universal, come-hither appeal of most wilderness rivers, runnin’ swift and deep and clear over a sandy bed, enticin’ a fella to follow wherever it leads. I guess Charlie and I are just the sort to be easily led astray. ‘Cause after checkin’ the map to make sure we could get back to where we wanted to be without havin’ to do just too much upstream gruntwork, we let ourselves be beguiled into followin’ the river.

It was real nice at first, if you were willin’ to overlook a coupla dozen downed trees in your way. The narrow, twisting corridor through dim pine woods was a pleasant change from the windy, open expanses of the big lakes. We had plenty of critters to keep us company. White throated sparrows sang to us. Red squirrels cussed at us. A woodchuck waddled back into the cover of the trees as we approached. A mink loped along the shore. And a pair of otters briefly escorted us downriver, snorting and chuckling to each other whenever their heads popped up to stare at us. Don’t know if they were editorializing on our technique or if they were just laughin’ at us ‘cause they knew what the river was like downstream.

Late in the morning, the river dropped over a ledge in a tumbling cascade that seemed to be all the gradient the Obabika had left. After that, the river seemed to lose all sense of direction and motivation. It started to wander aimlessly, like an unsupervised adolescent, from one bad idea to another, without ever really getting anywhere.

Now the Obabika meandered endlessly in tight little oxbows that circled the compass and had an interminable sameness to ‘em. At every bend, we had the unenviable task of tryin’ to make a fully loaded, 17-foot, touring canoe waltz straight down the eddy line without gettin’ sucked into the eddy on the inside of the bend or strained through the alders on the outside. It didn’t always work. Friendships have gone on the rocks faster than boats under similar circumstances. So by mid-afternoon, Charlie and I were keepin’ conversation to a minimum. It was safer that way.

To add to the almost surreal sense of paddling in the path of Sisyphus, we soon lost all sense of direction on this loopy river, not to mention any clear sense of where we were or how far we had yet to go. After Nasmith Creek emptied its swamp-black waters into the Obabika, there were no more landmarks by which to judge our progress. We were no longer surrounded by piney woods, but by endless, featureless, flat swamp. All we could see was the next bend of dark river snaking its way between high sand banks overgrown with alder. A coupla hours of this and we felt about as goal oriented as a dog chasin’ its tail.

Well, accommodation to noxious stimuli is a very useful human trait. It’s that tuning out skill that allows you to deal with your neighbors’ kids’ bad taste in music without violating any municipal gun ordinances. As the afternoon wore on, I found myself resorting to it, tuning out the Obabika and its hopeless wanderings.

But just as I was trancing into highway hypnosis mode, a languid movement along the left river bank captured my waning attention. Two fawn-colored rumps were ambling downriver ahead of us. Knobby-kneed legs plodded awkwardly around the next bend. And I was idly thinkin’, "Those have got to be the ugliest deer I have ever seen!"

Technically, I was correct, at least in a broad, biological sense. But this was not a duo of exceptionally homely whitetails. It was a perfectly ordinary pair of moose calves. And as we came around the next bend, there was Mama Moose herself, belly deep in the middle of the river and ready to take exception to any disparaging remarks made about her offspring.

Well, there I was in the bow of the boat, eyeball to eyeball with a moose after all these years. And the only thing I could think of was getting as far away as possible from this long-awaited object of my desire. I was backpaddlin’ like crazy for the opposite bank before Charlie, in the stern, even knew we had company. In all my years of chasing elusive moose, I’d never dreamed of such an up close and personal encounter. I’d been thinkin’ more along the lines of a respectful, platonic relationship from afar. So I was fightin’ both the river and my paddling partner in a frantic effort to put some distance between myself and close to a ton of possibly disgruntled motherhood.

"Hey! A moose!" said Charlie as his half of the boat slid around the bend.

"Yeah," I answered. "Backpaddle!"

"Where’s your camera?" Charlie laconically asked from the relative safety of an extra boat length away from this dour looking diva of the north woods. "That’d be a great picture."

"I don’t need no stinking camera," I replied. "I’ll remember this just fine without any photographic evidence. Backpaddle!!!"

So we back ferried to river right, giving Mama Moose an opportunity to gather up her young uns and peaceably depart into the alder swamp. We didn’t get a picture, so you’re just gonna hafta take my word for what happened. Or ask Charlie. By the time we put down the paddles and picked up a camera, there was nothin’ to see but three moose butts dwindling into the swampy distance.

But it was a watershed event. Now I see moose just about everywhere; swimmin’ rivers, wanderin’ through camp in the dead of night, amblin’ in my headlights’ glare down icy county roads in January. They show themselves pretty freely now that I’ve stopped stalkin’ ‘em. ‘Course, it’s usually just their backsides they present to view. Think they’re tryin’ to tell me something?

Well, ‘til next time, keep your paddle wet. And keep in touch. Drop me a line c/o Rich Furman and Morgan MacBain, 901 East Geranium Avenue, St. Paul MN 55106 or editor@canoe-kayak.org. Let me know if Nature’s children have ever given you the slip only to scare the bejeebers outta you later when you least expect it. Remember, Uncle Wally promises to 1} tell the truth so no one would ever believe it anyway and 2} never reveal your true identity to anyone, not even Marty Stouffer.