Good thread dogger. Here is my $.02 worth for the grammar police.
One of the most memorable moose hunting trips I had occurred at Babine Lake north of Smithers, B.C. I had drawn a limited entry hunt tag for a bull moose that year.
My friend and hunting partner had a cabin at Smithers Landing. We would usually team up with another group of hunters from the lower mainland who owned a cabin a few doors down the lake from us. We would keep in touch throughout the year and plan to go to Babine for a week or 10 days for our annual hunt.
Our hunting always involved pre-dawn trips by boat to remote areas several miles from the cabins. We would be dropped off individually or in pairs and we would return to the where we were dropped off around noon. The afternoons were reserved for camp chores like gathering firewood and potting a few grouse or trout. We would leave camp again around 4:00 pm for an evening hunt somewhere across the lake.
It was mid October and we were at the lake about a week before the general open season. The weather was quite miserable, cold and wet and windy. After a few days of hunting our local favorite spots with no luck, the group from the other cabin decided to head up to Morrison Arm and camp overnight. It started to snow as they headed up the lake.
I will spare you the details of the group being charged by a grizzly and sleeping on the boat under a canvass awning in the snow. To add further bitterness, one of the parties consumed a quart of vodka and passed out. Tempers flared and friendships were severely strained.
The following day, the weather moderated somewhat and by mid afternoon the skies cleared and the thermometer edged toward double digits. My hunting partner and I had returned to our cabin around 2:00pm and were sitting out on the deck having a bit of lunch when we saw the crew from the other cabin returning from Morrison Arm. As they motored past our cabin, waving and yelling to us, we could see that they had all 4 quarters of a moose in the boat with them.
We wandered over to their cabin and helped them unload and we gave them a hand raising a large tri-pod from which to hang and skin the quarters of the moose. They were a pretty happy bunch and the successful hunt had gone some distance toward erasing the dissention amongst the crew. As luck would have it, the moose was standing on shore about 3 miles from the cabin as the crew was returning home from their night of misery.
We were invited over for supper that night and we gladly accepted the invitation. As we arrived we noticed that all 4 quarters had been skinned and wrapped in cheese cloth. A big blue tarp had been draped around the upper half of the tri-pod to keep the rain off of the meat.
During supper, the individual who had consumed the bottle of vodka the previous night became rather nostalgic. He described hunting trips from years past and illustrated how the times had changed with Limited Entry hunts and shortened seasons.
In the middle of his tales and yarns, he excused himself for a minute to go outside to water the lawn. About 30 seconds after he had walked out of the cabin, he burst through the front door, rushed into his bedroom and emerged with his old Cooey single shot 20 gauge and a fist full of shells. He rushed back outside while the rest of us sat there rather dumbfounded and somewhat curious. There was a brief silence and then a shot.
During the years I hunted at Babine, I was always impressed with the amount and diversity of wildlife in the area. We had seen wolves, grizzlies, black bears, wolverine, marten, moose deer, porcupine and all kinds of water fowl and upland game birds. However, there was one small creature that does live around Smithers landing that I had been unaware of up until the firing of that fateful shot.
As we sat in the cabin wondering just what the hell was going on, the fellow with the shotgun entered through the front door. He did not need to say anything. We all knew instantly what he had shot at, and missed. What he learned can be described several ways.
Let sleeping dogs lie.
The more you stir it the more it stinks and if you keep stirring it you will get some on you.
Do not shoot at skunks. (Especially if they are just wandering around inspecting your moose
