Moose!

I think this will be my last post about the hunting trip. But no promises.

During our trip, Bill found this moose paddle in the woods. (And I learned that moose antlers are also called paddles. Did not know that.)

Oh—and my sister-in-law gave me this cool T-shirt. 

Can you read it okay? Here's a closer view:

She sent it along with my brother-in-law so I could wear it on the trip. What's funny is that she'd bought it for me a couple months earlier—long before I'd decided to go on the hunting trip. She had planned to give it to me during our girls' week, but it ended up being much truer than she expected!

One of the most exciting things about the hunting trip—for me, at least—was that we saw three moose. I'd never seen one outside of a zoo or wildlife park.

(Yes, the plural of "moose" is "moose."

Not "mooses."

Not "meese."

And yes, I did look it up, thank you very much.

That's what copy editors do.)

Bill took these pictures while I was hogging the binos. They're a little bit blurry because our camera doesn't have a very powerful zoom, and the moose was waaaaaaay up the hillside.

I'm glad he took those pictures of the first moose, because I didn't do nearly as well when we saw the second one. It was later the same afternoon. Bill was driving, so I had the camera. The moose was kind of jogging down the side of the road in the rain. By the time I had the camera turned on, my window rolled down, and took the shot...

This was the best of the four pictures I took.

What, you don't see a moose? 

He's right there in the middle! 

Right there! 

Okay, I'll crop it...

See?!

We didn't get any pictures of the third one, the cow. We were driving back to camp along a rough logging road in the dark. It was snowing. We saw something at the edge of the road up ahead, walking. My first thought was that it was a hunter—we'd seen one in the area earlier, and this looked like a two-legged critter. But it wasn't wearing blaze orange, and it was too tall for the hunter. (He'd been kind of a short, wiry old guy.) Then the walker at the edge of the road stepped into the woods, and Bill and his brother shouted, "It's a moose!" 

I was driving, so I slowed down and we stopped about where she'd left the road. All three guys in the backseat could see her; neither of us in the front seat saw her once she'd left the road. 

But I got to thinking...that could totally be what's behind some Bigfoot sightings. She was so tall and narrow. I never did catch a profile view of her. She looked, at first glance in the dark and the snow, like a really, really tall person walking alongside the road. So if someone, especially someone who was a little bit  inebriated or disoriented, caught sight of her...Sasquatch!

When we told our taxidermist about this, he agreed. He said that even from the front, in the dark a cow moose would just look tall, dark, and shaggy, with big, dark eyes.  

I was so pleased with this explanation for Bigfoot sightings until our son Brandon said, "Yeah, but what about the footprints?"

Um...

Er...

Well... 

Rats! 

I thought I was really onto something there. 

Oh well.