Gotta tell you. Visualizing that moose attack was, for me, pretty graphic and made my sphincter tighten...(I don’t hunt, so I hope anyone who reads this will take this for what it is worth...I just wanted to write out what my brain visualized, knowing nothing about hunting. A writing exercise.)
The Moose Head Spear
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I crouched low looking at the great bull moose walking through the trees. It walked sedately, and seemed to be mostly unaware of things around it except things that looked edible.
But it wasn’t the moose I saw first. Only seconds before, I first saw the antlers.
They jutted above the vegetation growing on the edge of a small ravine the moose was walking in. As the disembodied antlers moved along the edge of the leaves, they swayed gently from side to side rocking like a boat, and something about that gentle swing made them seem unearthly in some way.
My father once told me about when he was in the Hürtgen Forest fighting the Germans as one of a thousand new guys sent in to refill that meat grinder.
His first time in those terrible dark woods that had driven many men mad, he saw a real German soldier for the first time. And it was the helmet he saw first.
He said that seeing that uniquely shaped helmet made it seem somehow surreal. It was something he had often dreamed about for many years since then. Seeing that helmet.
As I watched those antlers marching slowly onward, my brain just didn’t process it in the usual way, almost as if I were watching a movie and and thought “Hey. Those are moose antlers.”
That was the same way I felt when I saw those gigantic antlers. I saw them jutting up, so big, that I felt I could have lain comfortably in the depression of those antlers with nothing more than a sleeping bag. My brain simply took a second to process, to the point my stomach probably sent me a signal before my brain did.
It was massive. Perhaps 30 yards away, with a huge bowl-shaped antler rack. It was proceeding at a somewhat stately pace, with the seemingly unafraid assurance of an animal that just knew it wasn’t going to encounter anything bigger or stronger than it was.
It was awesome. I had never seen a wild animal that big. It was at least 1,600 pounds, and looked like solid muscle. It had a very dark coat with some flecks of brown in it. Strands of its coat stuck out and gave it a texture as if it had been finely and minutely carved from a block of beautiful, dark,oiled wood.
Each of its black, expressionless eyes seemed to be embedded in a sphere of bone structure about the size of a small volleyball. And the eyes reminded me of a dull and dimwitted person.
I didn’t see his ears at first, as they were somewhat hidden behind the antlers, but when one of them twitched slightly and I recognized them as ears, they struck me as incongruously huge, out of place on this beast. It somehow made it seem less intimidating.
When you see a big stocky thug with tiny ears, your brain expects it. But when you see a thug whose ears are so big that it gives his formerly shaved thug head the appearance of a non-threatening 100 watt bulb, it hits you in a funny way. If it were even possible, it somehow gave the visual feel of the bored placidity of a large cow.
I already had an arrow pulled back tight, tracking it, when at that moment, the moose stopped moving and gazed around it as if something had poked dully at the back of his brain.
Now!
I let fly the arrow, and at the moment I released it, the moose saw me and changed his posture towards me to assume a more head-on aspect.
The arrow streaked by, grazing his right upper upper shoulder, and as his eyes were fixed on me, in that instant, his countenance changed.
In a strange, detached way, I saw how his formerly expressionless and placid eyes seemed to grow small and VERY dark. In those formerly bored eyes, I saw an instant change to a brutal, malignant hostility.
With not even an instant of hesitation, he barreled towards me thorough the trees and vegetation, seeming to reach full speed nearly instantly.
This all seemed to be happening with super slow-motion clarity, and as my body screamed at me to take action, run, do something, my mind was noting how this oncoming moose seemed, impossibly, to be able to navigate a straight path at me through these trees without catching on any branches or hitting any trees.
For a second, I imagined how hard it would be to take a six foot long 2x4, holding it parallel to the ground and run at top speed though that forest.
Actually, I don’t think it was a second I thought of it. It was probably a gazillionth of a second, the image popping up like a single picture in one of those old slide projectors, before changing in a clunk to the next image.
In that next slide, the moose was right on top of me.
Ever see one of those movies where they have something approaching the viewer, and they splice it together to give that disjointed look of something advancing quickly?
That was what happened.
Before my mind could snap back into real time, the moose had covered that thirty yards and was coming right at me. Then the slide projector throwing up an image of me reaching for my sidearm, but just as quickly, that slide disappeared with a mechanical thud and was replaced by a slide shot of the incomprehensibly huge front of this bull moose.
Nostrils flaring. Eyes reduced to pinpoints, and those huge spherical shapes they were embedded in took an an aspect of merciless brute animus that made the words in my head visually form: “You’ve had it.”
And then it hit me.
Most people think of moose, and they think of those spectacular bowls of antler, edges smooth and rounded, and might conclude that the injuries it inflicted on its foes might be more in the blunt force trauma category, and for all I know, that may indeed be true.
But I didn’t see those skeletal bowls at all. I saw large, conically shaped spears. The one side of those antlers that I had my eyes fixed on looked for all the world like a huge, misshapen pitchfork shaped from elephant tusks instead of rusty iron tines.
When he hit me right in the chest, instead of feeling pain, I felt a pressure. Then, as he jerked his great head, the antler embedded in my abdomen ripped painfully free as I was thrown high into the air.
I don’t know how far I went. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mi-
I hit the ground with a resonant thud and instantanously I saw him standing over me, and without rearing up, stamp his right hoof down on top of me. He hit came down on my right pelvic crest, and with a crack that I felt more than heard, something gave way.
He lifted his other hoof, and as he came down I twisted and avoided it, but then he raised his whole body bringing both front hooves off the ground and brought them in unison right down on top of my left thigh and my right knee at exactly the same time.
All of this happened in what seemed simultaneously like a flash, the stomping, stomping, stomping, and yet in an odd way, it seemed to go on forever.
Then, he impaled me again, and I felt myself being scraped and dragged along the ground.
When I came to, there were people standing around me in those woods, and all I could think of was “How did they get here?” Then I passed out.
When I came to again, I was being carried in a steel litter by a bunch of guys. Again, I blacked out.
I became aware of a noise, and opened my eyes, not knowing where I was, wondering if I were at home in bed and some fire alarm was going off. As my brain began to process things, it pieced them together for me.
Tiles. Roof tiles? No. Ceiling tiles. The ones with the small black crevasses in them that are made out of some powdery white compressed board. One of those things on a metal pole that makes that annoying hospital noise. I move, and something tugs at my arm. Something cold on my leg. A plastic or rubber tube. What is that there for? Pillow behind my head. Completely loopy. A hospital.
What am I doing here? I was bow hunting today. Oh. Yeah. I remember now.
My first mental slideshow image was that same one in the instant before he gored me. The wide open black nostrils. The small, malignant eyes, the impossibly huge head.
And those sharp, pointed antlers, coming right at me, with no chance of escape.
And I remember what it felt like. It was the same feeling you get when you reflexively look up to glance into your rear view mirror after you stop short in traffic, and see a pickup coming at you at high speed. Then, in a split second that might even be one beat of your heart before the collision, you have a dull feeling of resignation. Nothing you can do. Here it comes.
That was how I felt when I saw that bony Moose Head spear pointed directly at my chest.
good stuff...
Applause. Keep up the writing.
Elk are courteous enough to run away when they see something’s up. Moose are reputed to have very poor eyesight. A rutted-up bull may take on a train.
Yeah...large antlers hit you different. Elk and moose can turn their heads very quickly, and when a large bull does it, all of that mass swings with it. When they lock up with another bull, it’s mostly a pushing contest. If they get ahold of a little meatball like a hunter, they can do serious damage.
Metaphor for the onset of the OneWorld government, no doubt. We’re in the first part of the encounter. The being thrown in the air part comes next!
Seriously, well done, all of it. My only nitpick is that the final sentence is unnecessary!
That’s pretty good.