moose by the numbers

After another, final unsuccessful evening of looking for moose, Mark pointed out that he'd spent 1/18th of his year thinking about moose. We both figured it's actually more than that, if you consider the hours we spent in advance of the three-week moose season or the fact that we might keep looking with fall and winter hunts. All told, I spent part or all of 11 days hunting moose -- anywhere from one hour to 14 hours, not including drive time of 15 to 45 minutes to get to hunting areas. On the first day of the season, we saw or heard four moose; on the last day, I was glad to hear one. Several days we saw only tracks, and sometimes barely that. In all, my various hunting partners (Mark, Ian, and Toby) and I had one good shot at a moose -- a beautiful one at that -- and I missed it. It's an awful feeling I'm still trying to get over. I think about Eminem's one shot, and missing it. I think about how much I wanted the story to end differently, and how a losing gambler could keep betting. Then I think of my sister, who reminded me it's just a moose. And of the obvious response: be better prepared next time.
In one heavily hunted area near Fairbanks, 1/4 to 1/3 of hunters are successful each season. The News-Miner's outdoors reporter, who almost always gets a moose, wrote this week that he spent nearly 15 hours a day for 10 days watching a single meadow and waiting for a bull. He watched the ducks and muskrat, and he saw the leaves change color before his eyes. I know I don't have that kind of patience, or faith -- that after 120 hours, a moose might come on the 121st hour. We watched a few places for whole evenings or mornings, then decided our luck there had run out and left, only to wonder again if the willows really were greener somewhere else.
If the first weeks were mostly hopeful, and the start of the third mostly marked by regret, by the end of the third I'd learned to appreciate the hunt even when we weren't successful. I liked the feelings of perceptiveness -- noticing a single birch leaf fall 150 yards away, or smelling where a moose had been. I liked driving home with my face tingling from sun or cold. I liked feeling my heart race when we had our one shot, and again when I thought I'd called in a bull by imitating a lovesick cow.
By the end of the season, the cranberries were juicy and sweet from hard frosts and even spongy ground had turned solid. (We had our first snow 121 days after the last snow of the spring.) On the last daylight hour of the season, I remembered that I got my moose last year in the first daylight hour, but we had no parallel luck. We walked up the hill to the truck and I wondered if it's too late to hunt ducks.