Running with Moose and Other Stories

Running with Moose and Other Stories

A Collection of Short Stories and Essays

By

Dave Folsom

This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, or incidents are either products of the authors imagination or used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, localities, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Copyright by Dave Folsom 1992 2009-2010 All rights reserved

Table of Contents TOC

Short Stories

1. Running with Moose RunningwithMoose

2. An Afternoon at Pinkham Creek AnAfternoonatPinkhamCreek

3. Millie's Place MilliesPlace

4. Sage Creek at the Boundary SageCreekattheBoundary

5 Selling Cameron SellingCameron

6. Solitude Solitude

7. Foolhen Foolhen

8. Scaling Rexford ScalingRexford

9. The Last Bus from Two Dot TheLastBusFromTwoDot

10. Trapped Trapped

Essays

11. Camping at the Gold Mine CampingAttheGoldMine

12. Poultry Purveyors Anonymous PoultryPurveyorsAnonymous

This book is dedicated to my wife and our three wonderful daughters.

Cover Picture: USFWS Photo by Ryan Hagerty

Running With Moose

I sat alone in a bar full of crusty tough loggers dressed in tin pants, red and black wool shirts and dented aluminum hard hats, who, based on the booze they'd consumed, should have been prostrate on the floor. Instead they drank loud, playful and looking for trouble, a fairly common condition on any given late Friday afternoon. The Road Boss blew threw the door, two-hundred-thirty pounds of meanness and eyes dark as coal, just in time to save me from the loggers. He stood tall in the doorway, filling it completely with a red checkered wool shirt and high-water canvas pants over tight-laced White high-heeled boots. His dark wavy hair turning to silver hung over a chiseled face used to intimidate subordinates. His reputation as a rigid, driven man ranged company wide and I suspected he hadn't endeared himself to anyone. Those who'd met Augustus Horne and still had their front teeth knew better than use Augustus. His few friends called him Gus and the gypos worse.

Kid, he yelled at me, where the hell you been?

Until quitting time up Squaw Creek right where you sent me this morning. I replied, not looking at him and staring into my beer. I'd been setting road cut and fill stakes nearly twelve hours and my humor ran dark to match his.

How far ahead are you staked? he asked tightlipped as if he had a mouthful of Copenhagen and needed to spit.

Far enough, probably four or five days of construction, I said studying my beer.

Good, first thing Monday, I want you and that other new guy up Gorman Creek where the road ends and start finding them corners along the right-of-way. You got that? Twenty years of dealing with cat skinners, can operators and salty road construction workers had not improved Horne's human resource management skills. One of those skills was making sure we knew that he considered us not important enough to remember our names.

I got it, I said, still concentrating on the beer because I knew it would irritate him. I wanted him to know that I too had White logger boots laced tight.

Horne raked me with steely eyes, his jaw cast in granite and lips pursed thin. You get one free one from me, he said, the words coming from deep in his throat, you just had yours. Remember that.

If he expected an answer, I disappointed him. Silence hung heavy before he continued. How much surveying you done?

Enough, I said, dredging courage.

Horne's silver-streaked hair, noticeably compressed in a circle by his hardhat band, probably accounted for his tight mouth. Those of us who wore aluminum lids every day had that distinct band line across our foreheads. His sun-darkened hands jabbed a threatening index finger at me. Square frame shoulders tugged at his heavy wool shirt and sinewy arms bulged out of rolled sleeves. From my barstool perch, I couldn't see horns, but my gut told me they were there. Somewhere.

He looked straight at me. A smart mouth will get you nowhere fast. I've been riding herd on gypo loggers and cat skinners since before you were born. Anytime you think you're tough enough to try me, come ahead. He waited for that to sink in and when I didn't argue, he added, You'd better hope you've done enough! before moving off to talk to the loggers. Knowing he'd stand by and not lift a finger while the loggers used me for floor sweeping, I took the high road and left dreading the coming of Monday morning.

My partner in this adventure, whose name Horne couldn't remember, was also newly graduated, three years older and carried the devil in his pocket. He took great pleasure in jerking my chain. Lester Dermott wore his surveying vest like mine, heavy with compass, pencils, notebooks and measuring instruments over a flannel shirt and black logger jeans. We both wore heavy caulked boots calf high.

Damn! Les griped, pulling on his rain gear after we'd parked the pickup. I hate rain!

It was cloudy, threatening rain and windy. The deepening overcast obscured the tree tops while we drove a steep, winding, already muddy road until it deteriorated into a small turnaround. We lingered in the dry pickup cab just long enough that the low-hanging mist opened up and rained in earnest.

Gurley Aluminum Forester's Compass, plumb bobs, Abney level and our brown bag restaurant lunches packed into a backpack, Les grabbed the fifty-four-inch Jacob staff leaving me to carry the heavier rolled up K & E two-chain trailer tape and a short-handled double-bit brushing axe. We'd flipped a coin in the truck to determine who got the more desirable compass man job and I didn't win. I would have been more depressed had I known the day would go from bad to worse.

We found our starting point after thirty minutes of searching in a thicket of dogwood brush, prickly six-foot spruce seedlings and foot deep bear grass. The original rock monument included a granite stone with a scribed X covered with moss. Two of the bearing trees, reference points for the stone marker required by land survey rules, were gone, long destroyed by old forest fires, hungry bark beetles and raging mistletoe. The two remaining had blossomed into thirty-inch diameter, one hundred and fifty foot giant Western Larch surrounded by a mat of rotting annual needle fall. Blazes cut by the long ago surveyors were healed-over and unreadable.

I'll flag while you're putting up the markers. Les said, electing himself boss to go along with his elevated station as Compass Man. I dug out the yellow-painted aluminum markers that would notify anyone passing by of the section corner.

It rained just long enough to make us miserable for the day. Les drove the Jacob staff into soft ground, mounted the compass, swung the instrument until the needle pointed north and said, Ok, I'm ready, grinning because he knew I was going to bathe with every swing of the brushing axe.

Locating the original sixty to eighty year old survey corners in the dense underbrush required a combination of cutting forest material out of the way, precise measurement, careful compass work, monk patience, and a large dose of good fortune. Les would gleefully keep me on line while I struggled to clear obstructions. He would pick a tree on the site line as far along as the terrain would allow. Once I had the brush cleared, I'd blaze the selected tree, hike back to where Les waited, lay out the two chain trailer tape and we'd measure the distance, correcting for slope with the Abney level and the trailer part of the steel tape. By noon our progress fell short of a mile and a half. And we were soaking wet. Along the way we'd spotted one black bear, standing on his back legs looking at us over a hundred yards of jumbled windfalls before ambling off, several mule deer and a bobcat who lay unafraid on a buckskin pine windfall with one front paw hanging down, questioning our sanity for being there.

We temporarily gave up looking for a quarter corner and found a semi-dry windfall to sit on while we consumed a cheese and dry bread lunch. I choked down half of mine and gave up, leaving the rest to some small forest critter. Head against a tree, I closed my eyes and drifted into sleep when Les exploded, Jesus, look at that!

What? I said, sitting up, looking around and seeing nothing.

There! Les exclaimed, pointing down the hill. Just behind that big alpine fir. A moose. I think it's a cow.

Looking closely, I could just make out part of a deep black outline of movement in the brush below us maybe two hundred yards away. A solitary animal, more than six feet tall at the shoulder and weighing over a thousand pounds when mature, moose, both cows and bulls, are a formidable sight. Long gangly legs, a lengthy broad nose and wide mouth, guarantee a moose not winning a beauty contest. Normally shy, they quietly move away from danger according to most accounts and this had been our experience.

Looks like she took off. I can't see her anymore, I said, immediately losing interest.

I read somewhere that the cows can be pretty aggressive, especially when they have a calf. Les suggested, grinning. You better watch out or she'll getcha. I could feel the tug on the chain. Lester Dermont at twenty-six stood a couple inches shy of my six foot-four, kept the Highlander brewery in business long after the other regional brewers disappeared and stilled the hearts of most women between sixteen and sixty. He wore whiskers long, but neatly trimmed, dark black like his hair. On Saturday nights, Les drove the hundred miles to Butte with his Canadian friends to play semi-pro hockey. Tough as the hobnails on his calf-high logger boots, his left cheek carried a three inch puck scar from mouth to ear to prove it.

Let's move, I said, it isn't getting any drier.

We continued, as we had all morning, battling the wet brush, hollering out slope corrections and finally finding the remnants of the quarter corner, quickly marked it and kept going. An hour later, I brushed through tangled alder and broke out into an open area. Waving at Les to read the slope, I pulled the correction, drove in a chaining pin, and motioned him forward. Ahead was a long, solid rock outcrop to a point where it dropped suddenly twenty-five feet or more into a mini-canyon containing a ten foot wide stream bubbling over large boulders. The rock ledge on the opposite side rose to almost level with where I stood. Looking as far as I could see downstream the canyon continued. Upstream seemed better although still deep and a sheer drop