by Peter Walker

It all started in October, 1983. A young mother moose and her very large and rambunctious calf took up residence near a high-end subdivision in the town of Manchester, about 12 miles from Augusta, Maine. At first their presence was a novelty for the homeowners. But when the moose started eating ornamental shrubs their stock dropped considerably. When they joined a flock of trick-or-treaters on someone’s doorstep on Halloween, the residents had finally had enough.

            At the time I was the fish pathologist for the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, working out of a small laboratory in the Belgrade Lakes Regional Headquarters near the State House in Augusta. Word came down from the head office across town that, when a call came from Manchester, we wardens, biologists, and technicians were to respond immediately to capture and remove the errant moose.

            The two moose, as if sensing the game had changed, became reclusive and unpredictable. We were called out 3 times in November only to be turned back because the miscreants had again disappeared.

Finally, the week before Christmas, the mother-daughter moose insurgents attempted another raid on the neighborhood and met with tragedy. They crossed the road in front of a speeding truck. The calf was struck and killed. The grief stricken young mother was standing nearby with her head held low.

The call to come get the remaining moose came in around 3 p.m. In that high latitude and on the far eastern edge of the Eastern Time Zone, there is very little daylight left at 3 p.m. on the shortest days of the year. We had to hurry. Two wildlife biologists, one technician, five game wardens, and a fish pathologist piled into three or four vehicles and struck off for Manchester.

The remaining moose was not hard to find. She stood outside the corner of a fence in a hay field about 150 yards off the road. With head held low and ears drooping, she certainly appeared to be in mourning.

Daylight was fast drawing to a close. Wildlife biologist Craig McLaughlin made a quick mental calculation. Figuring an average cow moose in that part of the world probably weigh at least 850 pounds, and knowing that there was only about half an hour of light to work in, Craig bumped the dosage of tranquilizer in the dart he loaded into his gun to speedily knock out the moose.

Next came the hard part: darting the moose. Ordinarily there would have been snow by now, but it had been a dry fall. Since there was no cover in the closely cropped hay field, McLaughlin, an experienced black bear researcher, simply walked up to the moose.

The horse-sized animal appeared not to notice the man’s presence until he was less than ten paces away.  Then suddenly its head came up, it erected its mane, laid its ears back and turned to face this pipsqueak who dared to approach. 

By comparison to the nearly black cow moose, Craig looked tiny and powerless. He nonetheless raised and cocked the modified shotgun and coolly stood his ground. A game warden standing beside me back on the road said with awe, “You’d never catch me doing that!”

For several long seconds there was a standoff. Craig needed a better target than the moose’s nose. The moose looked mean enough to squash him like a bug. Then an ear began to wiggle and switch positions. The moose was losing its nerve. Suddenly it whirled to run away and Craig fired the dart into its rump at nearly point blank range. The moose lumbered off toward the back of the field with the red and white dart sticking from its haunch.

It was obvious that the animal was going to make it to the woods beyond the field. If it made it back into the tangle, we might never get it back out. Instinctively I ran to head it off while Craig followed it from behind. The rest of my compatriots stayed put near the safety of their cars.

As I feared, before I could get close enough to be of assistance the moose disappeared into the dense trees with Craig McLaughlin not far behind it. Half a minute later I ran through the same opening on the woods’ edge to find that the ground suddenly dropped off about 30 feet into a brush-choked ravine. The moose stood at the bottom of the ravine. Craig had managed to outdistance it as the great animal began to feel the effect of the tranquilizer and now blocked it from progressing any further into the thicket.

By now the moose was no longer fiery-eyed and defiant.  The tranquilizer caused her to stagger with legs splayed and head sagging. With each breath she moaned a loud, pathetic, almost dog-like roar.

There was not time for discussion. We had to try to coax her back up the slope into the field or our mission would fail. Craig asked me, “Do you want the back or the front?”

“Lead the way. I’ve got the caboose!” I replied.

Craig grabbed one of the animal’s ears and began to lead it like a misbehaving child. The moose bellowed in protest but seemed powerless to resist. Meanwhile I first tried pulling on handfuls of coarse rump hair before finding I could do more good by simply whacking her on the butt and yelling, “Hee-yah, Moose!”

 At a trot the three of us noisily scaled the side of the ravine. As we reached the top the moose’s legs seemed to be turning to rubber and she staggered. “Don’t stop now!” Craig yelled.

The rest of our group was by now cautiously approaching the edge of the woods. It must have been quite a spectacle to see a moose with a human on both ends come bursting into the open in a screaming, bellowing tangle. Just as we re-entered the field the moose passed out and fell to the ground with a big plop. Craig and I stepped clear as the beast went down.

“If I hadn’t seen that with my own eyes, you could never convince me it happened,” said one of our incredulous onlookers.

It was nearly dark. Luckily our moose was very small as cow moose go. We later speculated that she had mated during her first fall. She probably weighed less than 500 pounds. It was a good thing as it turned out.

Had we been more prepared, we’d have brought a tractor with hydraulic bucket on a low bed trailer. Moose can be easily lifted onto the trailer by means of wide straps. But the only conveyance we possessed that evening was a yellow Chevy LUV compact pickup, the result of the sitting Director’s austerity campaign..

Gene Dumont, the other biologist in our midst, drove the little pickup across the frozen hay field and backed it up to the unconscious moose. The dinky trucks’ tailgate was lowered and eight men managed to slide the yearling cow moose on her knees up into the bed. Had it been a full-grown cow moose, her caboose would have protruded too far to secure it in the miniature truck bed. As it was, by lifting her great head up onto the cab, we were able to squeeze her forward enough to shut and chain the tailgate. A great bulge of moose rump hung over the top of the closed tailgate.

By now the moose was having trouble breathing because its relaxed tongue was in the way. Craig and Gene climbed into the truck bed and squeezed up behind the cab on either side. Standing, one held the moose’s head upright while the other held its enormous tongue out to one side to keep its airway clear.

Gene looked at me and said, “Get in and drive.”

“Where to?” I asked.

“I don’t care”, Gene replied, “As long as it is a long way from Manchester.”

As I eased the little truck across the frozen field I suddenly had an idea. The Chief Warden, John Marsh, had a back pasture in a very secluded area about 20 miles away. When we got to the road, I turned south.

So off we went through the countryside of central Maine on a crisp, clear December evening. I drove very slowly, mostly to spare my two companions from frostbite. As we passed through villages brightly lit with Christmas decorations, folks on the sidewalks would stop and stare slack-jawed as we passed.

It was a sight you just don’t see every day. The absurdly tiny, yellow pickup truck  was grossly overloaded with a kneeling moose whose head lay stretched out across the roof of the cab and its nose drooped down onto the center of the windshield. Two biologists lay stretched across the cab on either side attending to the moose. Meanwhile her more than ample moose rump with its stumpy tail bulged back over the top of the tailgate.

Half an hour later I turned into the driveway of Marsh’s Bog Hill Farm. As I drove past the house, I waved to John’s long suffering wife Judy as she stood in the doorway just shaking her head from side to side. She’d seen crazier things than that.

I proceeded right on through the open pasture gate and drove to the high side of the sloping pasture. It turned out that all we had to do to unload our “package” was to lower the tailgate and, with Craig and Gene holding on to her south end, drive slowly northward sliding her out onto the ground.

Craig by now realized that he had greatly overestimated the size of the moose and therefore had given it a very large overdose of the immobilizing drug. It was going to be hours before the moose would regain its mobility. Meanwhile he volunteered to sit with her lest she choke.

Gene decided to drive me back to Augusta before returning to assist Craig. As I closed the tailgate I spotted an aerosol can along the edge of the truck bed. It was a can of fluorescent red tree marking paint. In an instant I had a great idea! We could paint Merry Christmas on each side of the moose before it came to!

My two partners, both of whom had to deal with grumpy administrators and a discontented public on a daily basis, vetoed my idea. Thus one of the great artistic opportunities of a lifetime was lost. They wouldn’t even allow me to spray a tiny red spot on her nose.

Our moose did not regain full function until almost midnight. Somewhere in the Maine countryside that Christmas wandered what might have become a real live Rudolph….sort of.

by Peter Walker

            In the 1970s the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife had need for a large float plane that could carry large loads of fish for stocking remote lakes as well as occasional heavy or bulky loads to road-less locations in the northern interior of the state. That need was satisfied by the long-term loan by the U.S. Army of a deHavilland Beaver from its reserve aircraft fleet.

            The Canadian-made Beaver is a single-engine, high winged “tail dragger” powered by a big 400 hp radial engine. ME IF&W fitted large floats to the 7-passenger flying truck and soon the distinctive oscillating rumble of its 9 cylinders could be heard from time to time as it lumbered from one lake to another on its various missions.

            The Beaver’s primary use was as a flying hatchery truck. With two large, bomb-shaped water tanks mounted on top of each pontoon, the Beaver could carry enough water to support 360 pounds of brook trout, landlocked Atlantic salmon, or lake trout (Mackinaw) per load. Generally loads that size were destined for large lakes. Therefore, on most of the Beaver’s stocking missions, the pilot could land and gently release the fish into the water rather than rudely “bomb” them into the lakes from the air.

            The ability to carry that much water aloft made the Beaver a fairly capable forest fire fighter as well. Maine Warden Service pilot Gary Dumond once responded to a Maine Forest Service request for help and managed to kill a small lightning-sparked fire with a single drop before it could progress beyond an acre or so.

            Maine IF&W maintains a hangar with float plane ramp in Greeneville at the southern tip of 42-mile-long Moosehead Lake in the northern interior of the state. One June day Chief Aircraft Mechanic Howard Lambertson, an assistant, and Pilot Gary Dumond were overhauling the engine on one of the department’s Cessna 185s when the distinctive drone of a radial engine began to grow in the distance.

The Warden Service Radio was wired to a speaker over the workbench. From it came the clear voice of Chief Pilot Dana Toothaker, who was at the controls of the Beaver. “Howard, something has come loose and is banging against the floats. I’m going to do a low fly-by. See if you can tell what it is.”

Pulses quickening, the three men grabbed binoculars and ran out onto the tarmac between the hangar and the lake. Damage to the rigging of the floats could make a landing dangerous.

To the north they could see the big yellow plane lumbering toward them and appearing larger and larger as it closed the distance.

With field glasses trained on the plane’s undercarriage, each man strained to spot some loose cable or strut. The engine noise grew loud as the airplane filled their lenses.

Closer and closer; louder and louder it came until it was right overhead. Then, in an instant, there was nothing but water in their fields of view!

Bloosh! The three were struck by 1,000 gallons of water released 300 feet overhead at a speed of 100 mph!

Now that is wet!

Gotcha!

Puritan Mainers abhor open controversy and avoid public display. They tend to minimize or, better still, deny any history that appears ostentatious (or, Heaven forbid, possibly sinful!) until succeeding generations forget it entirely. Thus embarrassing incidents in Maine history, such as the stealing of the statehouse in 1879, the burning of Falmouth (what is now Portland) by the British during the revolution, and the raid on Casco Bay by a Confederate warship, were omitted in the junior high Maine history texts of my time.

Nevertheless, my seventh grade teacher, a career one-room school teacher until the consolidated Poland Community School was first opened in September, 1954, once mentioned that a remarkable religious event occurred in the first half of the 1800s in an area of West Poland called Rabbit Valley or “the Promised Land.”  There seems to be absolutely no mention of these goings-on in history texts or town accounts despite the fact that this activity indirectly resulted in the birth of a major Protestant denomination. From a few internet sites, particularly the website of the Seventh Day Adventists, I’ve been able to piece together what happened.

It all began when Rev. William Miller, a Baptist preacher from upstate New York, came to the conclusion after years of study that no prophesies in the Old Testament Book of Revelations had yet come to pass. Miller was apparently sincere; he did not consider himself a prophet but just an enlightened interpreter of the Word of God. Among his conclusions was that the number of “days” mentioned in Revelations actually referred to years. By his calculations, therefore, Judgment Day would take place on October 22, 1843.

In the years prior to the scheduled event, Miller convinced hundreds, perhaps thousands of followers that they needed to settle their worldlyaffairs and prepare with him for the end of the world. The faithful Millerites liquidated their estates since there would be no need for such. At some point it was decided that the flock would gather in West Poland, Maine, in an area not far from Tripp Lake Camp and now known either as Rabbit Valley or the Promised Land, to be received en masse into the Kingdom of Heaven. Thus Rabbit Valley filled with h8undreds, if not thousands, of the faithful by October, 1843.

When the date passed without incident (to the great astonishment and enormous disappointment of all), William Miller went back to the Book of Revelations and discovered that his predictions were one year short. The real thing, he declared, would occur on October 22, 1844.

The second failure of Miller’s predictions the following year brought anger and frustration to most and complete nervous breakdown for some. Miller perhaps wisely seems to have disappeared after that, never to be heard from again. However, in the aftermath an opportunistic, if not divinely inspired, former Millerite, Mrs. Ellen G. White, gave convincing public testimony in a meeting place on “MacGuire Hill” in Poland, Maine in 1845 (probably the Meguire Hill Meetinghouse) to a series of visions she claimed to have received from God. Mrs. White’s prolific visions and writings from that point on into the first decade of the Twentieth Century gave rise out of the rubble of the Millerite movement to the Seventh Day Adventist Church. (It was one of White’s numerous visions which led to the vegetarian beliefs and customs in practice by modern day Adventists.)

In recent times, Seventh Day Adventist historians and theologians have reviewed Ellen White’s teachings and claims with brutal honesty. They have proven that her first public “vision” was a hoax, plaguerized from an experience related to her from a local dairy farmer. Her prolific writing was for the most part plaguerism and doubtless all of her subsequent visions.

It led Seventh Day Adventist scholars to admit their theology has little or no basis in the Bible. But this in no way detracts from the sincerity of adherents to this denomination or lessens their humanitarian accomplishments.

I admire the willingness of latter day Adventists to openly and honestly examine their roots. Leaders of other denominations have at times gone to great expense to confiscate, hide, and deny inconvenient documents.

by Peter Walker

It was 8:30 p.m. on Thanksgiving Eve. Colorado District Wildlife Manager Betsy Robinson was heading home from Iliff in Logan County an hour’s drive northeast of her home district of Fort Morgan. She was the on-call game warden for the Sterling and Akron Districts this weekend as well as her own.

 Three hours ago a farmer had witnessed someone shooting at running deer from a pickup truck on a county road close to the river. The Logan County Sheriff’s Office had relayed his call to her. She contacted the farmer and got a description of the truck but no plate number. Using a flashlight she found no sign of blood in the area where the farmer had seen the deer. It was a dead end investigation.

The heavy duty tires on her Ford Super Duty hummed loudly as she cruised southwestward on Highway 6 through Atwood, then the village of Merino. The night was crisp and clear and the glow of the sunset had lingered a long time on the western horizon. Meanwhile an almost full moon had risen in the northeast and now made it possible to see trees and round hay bales and cattle quite clearly. The highway made a rising sweep to the left over the railroad tracks, then across the South Platte River. Just ahead were the three access roads to Prewitt Reservoir State Wildlife Area. As she approached the first turn-off, on a spur-of-the-moment decision, she put on her blinker and took the turn. Half a mile down the dusty county road she turned right onto a gravel access road that led to the base of the dike at the northeast end of Prewitt. The lot was empty.

For no particular reason she got out of her truck and climbed the stamped steel stairs all the way to the top of the concrete-faced dike some 30 feet above the water. Aligned from southwest to northeast, prairie winds pounded waves from the big man-made reservoir against the dike with ferocity at times and it required the sloped concrete facing to prevent the lake from simply bursting through and emptying across farmland back into the river. From the top of the dike the night was absolutely still except for the distant hum of tires on Interstate 76 two miles distant to the south. The sky was full of stars, especially in the distant areas away from the bright moon.

As Betsy took in the night’s glory she heard the unmistakable krump-krump krump of a shotgun in the night. It sounded heavy, like a 12 gauge, coming from the west along the northern edge of the lake.

“Hel-lo!” she said to herself, her law enforcement instincts beginning to kick in.

Krump…..krump. There it was again. Now she had it narrowed down. The lake along the northwest shoreline was sandy and sterile from a duck habitat standpoint. But all along the lake a few hundred yards out onto the prairie were a series of shallow seep ponds that usually teemed with waterfowl. The shots were probably coming from one of the ponds and she was pretty sure which one it was. Although it was duck season, hunting by moonlight had been outlawed by the federal government 80 years ago. Shooting ducks against a moonlit sky was a mostly forgotten art once employed by market gunners to kill hundreds of ducks in a single night.

Making her way back down to the parking lot, Betsy had no trouble in the bright moonlight opening the padlock to the cable that allowed her access onto the service road along the base of the dike. With headlights off she drove slowly down the lake with the ponds off to her right. After about a mile she turned the engine off, stepped out and listened.

Five minutes….ten. She began to think she might have spooked the shooter when – Bam! Bam! Bam! – shots rang out in the cottonwoods only three hundred yards ahead. Now she knew exactly where they were coming from.

Grabbing her 4-cell Mag Lite she stepped off down the road towards the sound. Five minutes later she could see the moonlight reflecting from the pond less than a hundred yards to her right through the bare cottonwoods and peachleaf willows. Overhead she heard the faint whistle of mallard wings and a few seconds later another pair of shots – Bam! Bam! – followed by the loud plop of a duck hitting the water.

As she had expected, the shooter was on the west side of the pond facing into the rising moon, the better to see his targets. As stealthily as she could move, the game warden eased slowly around the shoreline, staying back in the trees rather than expose herself at the water’s edge. During her sneak the shooter bagged another duck.

Finally in place only 20 yards or so from the gunner, Betsy had a good view of the small pond’s surface. She counted at least a dozen shapes that she presumed were dead ducks. The gunner was standing in knee deep water in hip boots right out in the pond. Keeping herself concealed in the bushes and reeds, the game warden called out, “Division of Wildlife! Put your shotgun down and come ashore!”

Startled, the man turned toward her but held the shotgun across his waist.

“I said put the gun down!” Betsy drew her sidearm.

A few more tense seconds lapsed, then the gunner whined, “Aw please! It’s a brand new gun and I hate to get it wet!’

Being a gun owner herself, Betsy could understand. “Jack the shells out into the water so I can hear them,” the game warden countered. The man did as he was told.

“Now, hold your gun with both hands above your head and come towards the sound of my voice.”

She took the shotgun from him when he reached her and had him walk out with her to her truck. There she began her questioning. Grateful to be allowed to keep his shotgun dry, the young man appeared to talk quite freely. He was a twenty-five-year-old Fort Morgan resident, an employee at the beef plant.

“Do you always hunt ducks at night?”

“Only when the moon and the weather are just right,” he boasted. “We almost always have a duck feed on Thanksgiving.”

“We?”

“Oh, my brothers and a couple of cousins and me. We never overdo it.”

“Just doing it at all is overdoing it,” the game warden responded.

After a few more minutes of conversation Betsy thanked the duck poacher for being cooperative. She told him she would make out his ticket in better light and look him up Friday at his place of work. In truth she wanted to come back at daylight with her hunting dog, Daisy, and retrieve all of the illegal birds before figuring out what charges to levy on the shooter. The man said good night and headed off down the service road toward the next parking lot. Betsy waited until she heard his car door slam and saw his headlights flash through the trees as he headed back out to the highway.

She got in her truck and started the engine. As she continued on down the road, still driving by moonlight, she thought about what had just happened. This was a very unusual bust and instinct told her this wasn’t over. On a hunch, she took the radio microphone off its clip.

“Morgan Comm, Wildlife 343.”

“Go ahead 343.”

“Can you tell me what time the present shift at the beef plant gets off?”

“Stand by 343.”

She brought her truck to a stop and waited.

“Wildlife 343, Morgan Comm.”

“Go ahead.”

“The night shift at the beef plant ends at 2300 hours.”

“Thanks. 343 out.”

Some of the very best game wardens develop an instinct for poachers. Betsy Robinson had seen this in a couple of her mentors. Her grandfather had been a Maine Game Warden. He had the instinct. Now she was getting a visceral feeling that something more would be going down. Recently widowed, she’d volunteered to work the holiday weekend. She made a decision to stay right here at Prewitt for the night if necessary.

Repositioning her truck well back on the service road beneath the dike where no one was apt to come along in the night. She dug around behind the rear seat and found a set of insulated coveralls and put them on. The night was chilly and there would be a hard freeze before dawn. Then she settled in behind the wheel of her truck and waited.

An hour passed. It was officially Thanksgiving Day. By twelve forty-five the moon was almost dead overhead and Betsy was getting sleepy. Stretching out across the back seat and going to sleep began to look tempting. As she sat half awake, half asleep, the tops of the trees off to the west lit up for a moment. Betsy snapped fully awake. Did she dream it, or had it really happened? Had a vehicle just pulled into the middle parking lot?

She rolled down her window and listened intently. There it was: car doors slamming and distant voices. They’re pretty confident no one is around, she thought. Good!

Climbing out of her truck, she doffed the coveralls, stuck the Mag-Lite in her belt and crept forward toward the pond. Ahead she could hear vegetation crunching and low voices. She swung in behind the poachers as they passed on their way back to the very same pond. Their careless noises and talk masked whatever noises she made and she tagged along only a few yards behind.

There were three men this time. All carried shotguns. When still 50 yards from the pond she watched and listened as each one loaded his gun. There was a twenty-foot ring of flattened grasses along the west side of the pond. When the men stepped out of the bushes into the open space, there arose a great commotion of and loud quacking as well over a hundred ducks took flight. All three poachers emptied their guns into the flock and several ducks fell back into the water.

The game warden simply walked into the group unannounced while they laughed and high-fived each other. One of them turned and offered to high-five her before he realized she wasn’t part of his group.

“Whoa!” he exclaimed. “Who are you?”

The other two shut up and stared.

“Division of Wildlife,” the officer said. “Don’t bother reloading your weapons, gentlemen. For a start, I’ll need to see identification.”

The man farthest away said, “You’ve already seen mine once tonight.”

The three men were considerably less enthusiastic during their walk to the game warden’s truck. Using the spotlight on her idling truck, the wildlife officer set about writing each man up on charges of hunting after hours and illegal take of wildlife. The man she’d caught earlier in the evening received double charges. One of the other men was the original offender’s younger brother and the other a cousin with the same last name. Instead of issuing penalty assessments which can be paid in lieu of going to court, it was Betsy’s prerogative to write each a summons that would require them to face a judge.

The audacity of coming right back out and taking up where he left off really rankled the wildlife officer.

“Now,” she said. “I want all three of you to lay your shotguns here on my back seat. I’ll give you each a receipt, but I am going to ask the judge to award the Division ownership of them.”

As she expected, the first guy really howled at that. She thought he might be suppressing tears as he placed the brand new Browning in her truck.

“I just bought it last week,” he whined.

“You can tell that to the judge,” the officer replied coldly.

  It was the end of an early fall day on the eastern Colorado prairie. The sun, dulled by a layer of dusty haze, had settled onto the western horizon as if resting for a moment before sinking out of sight. The temperature was on the warm side and belied the rapid drop that would occur once the sun deserted the cloudless sky. The still air was nearly silent except for the distant pop-pop-pop of a single cylinder diesel engine on an oil well somewhere to the northeast and the occasional clackety-rattle of an orange-winged grasshopper changing locations in hopes of one last mating as the day came to a close. The shadows had been longer and darker of late, the product of shortening days and bone dry air. The same air was spice scented with sand sage, prairie dog weed, and the countless other aromatic herbs of the shortgrass prairie at the end of summer.

            On a low ridge facing the distant western horizon sat a woman with her knees drawn up to her chest. Betsy Robinson was a District Wildlife Manager, the unique form of game warden-biologist employed by the Colorado Division of Wildlife. She came here on occasion to be alone and to think.

            Down the shallow slope a 9-month-old wirehaired pointer puppy bounced with boundless energy despite the danger of landing on a pad of ever-present hunger cactus. The dog had not been on Betsy’s wish list. But her husband Ron, a Fort Morgan police officer, had been so proud of the struggling, yellow-eyed puppy when he brought it home unannounced one evening last spring; she’d held back her objections.

            Her dad, ever the optimist, had twice brought puppies home when she and her brother Josh were kids, and both dogs, male Labs, turned out to be incorrigible oafs with few redeeming qualities. Now Ron was gone and the female puppy was about all he’d left her from their brief lives together. She hoped Daisy would turn out to be a lot less hyper than the others she’d known. So far it was impossible to tell.

            In the four weeks since a traffic accident took Ron’s life at an intersection in Fort Morgan, Betsy had gradually located all of the papers that Ron had squirreled away in various hiding places – a bank deposit box, a locked metal box in the back of a closet, his locker at the police station, and his desk at home – and discovered the financial fix he’d gotten himself into before and during the time they’d been together.

            They’d met two years ago, soon after she’d been assigned to the Fort Morgan District fresh out of her training year with the Division in Denver. She’d been attracted to his easy smile and quick sense of humor. Ron loved the occasional adrenaline rushes of being a cop just as Betsy loved the cat-and-mouse, give-and-take of working the sometimes less than honest hunting and fishing public.

            Ron and Betsy had been married less than a year when she got the ominous radio call one afternoon from the Morgan County Communications Center just after leaving her agency’s area office in Brush.

“Wildlife 343, Morgan Comm. Please come to Morgan PD at once.”

Please? The dispatcher never used “please.”

There was something in the brevity of the message and the gravity of the woman’s voice that instantly conveyed this was not good. She knew when she saw Chief Kevin Curtis standing inside the door waiting for her that something must have happened to Ron. The fact that she was not summoned to High Plains Medical Center pretty much told her in advance to expect the worst.

Answering a call for another traffic accident, Ron’s cruiser was T-boned at the intersection of Platte Avenue and Main Street by a young woman in a Pontiac trying to run the red just after it turned and beat the start-up traffic entering from either side. It was nearly standard practice among Colorado drivers, but this time it didn’t work. Struck in the driver’s side door, Ron was killed instantly. The other driver was released from the hospital just last week and was expected to need more back surgeries in the coming year.

Betsy’s overwhelming grief had sunk in deeply by the funeral a few days later. By that time her mother and dad had arrived from Maine along with her brother Josh and his wife Terry. Ordinarily visits with her family members were stimulating and much fun. Her dad was a Professor of History at the University of Maine and her mother a social studies teacher in the junior high school in Orono. Josh, three years younger than Betsy, had been a military policeman and was now a new Maine Game Warden in the district east of Bangor which included parts of their Grandpa McIntyre’s old district when he, too, was a game warden in the mid-Twentieth Century. But this time around her grief acted to blur the entire visit.

Then came the awful discovery. Ron had always been private about financial matters. He’d taken care of their finances and paid the bills – or so she’d thought. She found the little key on Ron’s key chain that unlocked the drawers in the big roll-top desk that he’d inherited from his grandfather back in Wisconsin. She was figuratively clotheslined with what she found in those drawers and in his wallet. Ron had eight credit cards, none of which she’d known about. Researching each one, she learned that the most recent three, all of which were in both of their names, had each been used to pay off the accumulated interest of the previous cards. Ron was barely afloat and incredibly in debt.

And just what was did that debt consist of? Between the desk drawers and the safe deposit box at a local bank – the key to which was in the desk – she was just now beginning to get the full picture. The only plausible explanation for what she was finding was that the man she thought she’d known so well was some sort of a closet gambler. If he was, he hadn’t been the usual addict who ran off to the casinos or Las Vegas or played the Internet. There were large sums held back when he cashed his paycheck and other comparatively large withdrawals both from his two checking accounts (one of which she’d never known about) and against each of the earlier credit cards, almost all in even increments of $100.

Ron covered his tracks quite well. There was not a single name or reference to a bookie. But other credit card records from restaurants and gas stations indicated he’d made trips at irregular intervals to Colorado Springs some 150 miles distant after each cash withdrawal. Other notes and literature hinted that his betting most likely involved major league baseball and football. She’d been well aware of his obsessive tracking of sports statistics.

If only she’d looked more deeply into that….

So the man she thought she loved so deeply was likely at least part fraud. Ron had kept so many important details from her that she was beginning to question if anything she thought she knew about him was in fact for real. How much longer, she wondered, could he have continued the balancing act before it all caved in upon him – them.

She had not told a soul of her discoveries about Ron’s financial affairs and secrets. The credit card debt – if this was all of it – totaled more than $80,000, almost as much as they owed on their house and at 4, 5, even 6 times the interest! She knew enough about bankruptcy and the recent “reforms” pushed by now Vice President Joe Biden a year or two before he moved up from U.S. Senator, to know that even if she took the bankruptcy option, there was no way to escape the avarice of the big credit card companies. The way things are now, despite the fact that unsolicited cards arrived in the mail promising “freedom” from financial worries; regardless of the fact that low advertised interest rates often jumped to as much as 30% per annum as soon as the first charge was made, it was now law that bankrupt cardholders could never escape that debt. Some in fact become indentured servants to the grave.

            As she sat huddled deep in thought, the sun dropped through the horizon and, with one last brilliant flash, disappeared from the orange, yellow and pink sky above the jagged western horizon. Right on cue coyotes began to howl from all points on the compass – some singly, others in small groups.

            Betsy looked around for Daisy, but the dog was nowhere in sight. The rolling terrain could easily hide her from view. She hoped the dog was still within earshot.

            As the wildlife officer got to her feet the ear-splitting report of a high-powered rifle very close by cut short the coyote chorus. It was very close, just over the ridge to her northwest. Then she heard a vehicle door slam – no, two doors. As she ran to the ridge, it occurred to her that a rancher might have mistaken Daisy for a feral dog. But when she reached a high enough vantage to peer over the shallow hilltop, she saw two men hurriedly dragging a large mule deer buck carcass by its huge velvet antlers to the back of a pickup. This caper was going down right in her lap!

            Unsnapping her holster as a precaution, the 140-pound female game warden walked up to the truck from the darker quadrant of the landscape unnoticed by the two larger, older men intent on making off with their prize before anyone was the wiser.

            Twenty feet from the tailgate Betsy finally spoke, “Division of Wildlife. What are you up to, gentlemen?”

            Like children caught stealing from a cookie jar, both men let go of the deer antlers and straightened up in total surprise. They were a rough looking pair. As trained, Betsy took note of their features. Oil field roughnecks. One man was fortyish and wore a threadbare and stained reddish tan Carhartt barn jacket. He was balding and possessed about 2 days of dark whiskers on his round face. The second man, who stood farthest away on the opposite side of the deer, was probably the younger and thinner of the two. The man stood a little over 6 feet and wore a dark blue knit cap over longish, scraggly, dirty blond hair. He was clad in faded blue jeans and a black-stained blue denim jacket over a filthy white T-shirt.

            Neither man spoke or moved at first. Betsy broke the silence by saying, “I need to see some identification from both of you. And you can leave the deer right there. I’ll be taking that.”

            With a sheepish and somewhat submissive look, Carhartt relaxed, shrugged and responded, “Sure. It’s in the truck.”

            As Carhartt moved toward the driver’s door on Betsy’s side of the truck, Denim sidestepped to the opposite side of the truck body without taking his eyes off her. She sensed the danger just as he lifted a bolt action rifle from the truck bed and leveled it on her.

            “I don’t think you’re going to do that,” he snarled as he grinned through crooked teeth. “Now, turn around and head right back over that hill, Short Stuff.”

            “Jesus, Donnie!” Carhartt exclaimed. “What the hell are you going to do?”

            Lifting the rifle toward Betsy’s face, Denim snarled, “Shut up! She ain’t gonna do nothin’ to us.”

            It had finally happened – circumstances where the officer loses control of the situation. Betsy tried to process it all and figure out what to do next. Her pistol was in its holster on her belt. She could never bring it to bear before her adversary blew her to eternity. Carhartt’s entire demeanor was one of fear and timidity. The only real danger, she surmised, was the man across the truck bed holding the cannon. If she did as he said, she was certain he’d realize he could not get out of the course he’d committed to without killing her and trying somehow to hide her body. He’d shoot her in the back before she could get over the rise. So complying wasn’t the answer. She decided she’d stand and at least face the muzzle flash.

            “Listen, Bitch!” Denim said in a low, level voice. “I ain’t kiddin’.”

            Betsy heard the safety on his rifle click forward. This may be it, she thought. Her vision narrowed like a tunnel as she faced the man with the rifle.

            At that instant, a large, dark shape came flying through the air from the left and struck Denim at head level. The rifle flew up and landed with a clatter in the truck bed. Making noises Betsy had never heard, Daisy was slashing Denim as he screamed incoherently and writhed on the ground trying to shield his head from the snapping pointer.

            “Daisy!” Betsy yelled. The dog released Denim’s torn cheek and backed off a step.

            “What the fuck!” Denim growled as he felt his badly bleeding face. His expression lost its anger as he realized he was staring into the barrel of the woman’s .40 caliber Glock 23.

            “Roll over on your belly!” Betsy commanded as she simultaneously pulled the handcuffs off her belt and placed her heel squarely on the back of the man’s neck all the while keeping the pistol trained on his head. Bleeding from his lacerated face and punctured hands, Denim complied.

            Betsy looked for Daisy and realized her new partner was now on the other side of the truck keeping Carhartt pinned against the door with her teeth bared and the hair along her backbone standing straight up menacingly. Betsy pulled a pair of nylon clamps from a pouch on her belt and bound the wrists of the second man behind his back.

            When she returned to Denim, he was trying to get to his feet. She almost reached to pull off a piece of vegetation sticking to his bloody cheek when she realized it was his chewing tobacco plug coming through from the inside. Daisy had done some serious cosmetic damage.

            “That’s got to hurt,” she said matter-of-factly without a trace of sympathy.

            After patting down both men and reading them their Miranda rights, Betsy unloaded the rifle and a holstered revolver she’d found on the seat of the truck. With both men sitting on the tailgate and a funny-looking, hair-triggered hunting dog alternating her gaze on each of them, the game warden pulled her cell phone from another holster on her belt and speed-dialed Morgan Comm Center.

            Her voice was calm and even. “This is Wildlife 343. I need assistance from S.O. to transport two prisoners….”

In Colorado, as in most states, for safety’s sake it is illegal to possess a loaded gun (cartridge in the chamber) in a vehicle. It is also illegal to fire a weapon from a vehicle, whether on or off road and it is illegal to fire from or across a public road. Yet so many Colorado hunters, despite having to take mandatory hunter safety classes before they can buy a hunting license, somehow rationalize that the seconds that it will save them if a deer or a pheasant runs across the road in front of them justifies breaking those rules.

The ones I can’t figure out are the knot-heads that store their weapons in the bed of the pickup or the back of their SUV fully loaded. There is no advantage and often it places themselves or their passengers in great danger. I once wrote a ticket up in Sedgwick County to a goose hunter who was driving alone off road in a Suburban with a collection of long guns stacked inside the rear cargo door with barrels aiming right at his seat. The top one in the stack was an enormous 10 gauge shotgun fully loaded with giant shells that looked like small sticks of dynamite! What on earth was he thinking? The fine wasn’t very large. Unfortunately you can’t write someone a ticket for being stupid.

Another time through binoculars I watched a man get out of his SUV and open the tailgate to remove a pump shotgun laid in the back with the barrel pointed at the driver’s seat. He popped open the breach, apparently to make sure it was loaded, then drove it back shut. Instantly the defective gun went off aimed at the ground and blew a large chunk of asphalt skyward startling both the hunter and the two game wardens watching him in the distance. As if to prove the deliberateness of his stupidity, he reloaded the defective firearm and placed it back in his vehicle exactly as it had been before! The guy turned out to be an engineer from the Denver metro area – a person that certainly should have been smart enough to know better. I wrote that ticket with no regrets.

More than twenty years ago Game Warden Larry Budde, now retired from the agency, was on patrol in rural northeastern Colorado north of Hillrose. There is a long bridge across the South Platte on a back road. As he approached the bridge from the south side, Larry spotted the top of a vehicle about to come up onto the bridge from the north. The warden stopped to look and a brand new white pickup with three teenage boys came up onto the bridge and stopped very suddenly when they saw the game warden vehicle 100 yards away on the far side.

Suddenly the windshield of the pickup became opaque white! Budde couldn’t imagine what had happened. He drove forward and, as he approached the truck, he saw a one-inch hole in the center of the roof over the cab and sharp points of steel peeled back around the edges of the hole.

The warden pulled up close to the pickup and could barely make out the driver in a dense cloud of white smoke. He signaled to the young driver to roll his window down. Smoke billowed out of the cab as a stunned face came into clearer view. Budde could see an upright shotgun being held by the boy in the middle.

“Did that shotgun just go off?” Budde asked.

“The kid sort of read his lips, then yelled., “WHA-A-A-T?”

by Peter Walker

            We humans attribute grace and beauty to many wild creatures. But the fact is, even Nature’s prettiest animals sometimes have bad days.

Case in point:

When I was a young fishery biologist in Maine’s central coastal region, I had a bright and personable student assistant one summer named Bobbie Potter. One morning as we drove out Route 3 east of Augusta on our way to a lake, Bobbie recounted his experiences the evening before taking photographs of a herd of grazing deer.

            “I think the whitetail deer is the most graceful animal there is,” Bobbie said sincerely.

            Just as that sentence came from his lips, a whitetail deer suddenly bounded up the steep banking off the right shoulder of the highway just ahead and made a high, arcing leap over the guardrail onto the road. She muffed the landing.

With legs spread to the four points of the compass, the “most graceful animal in the world” did a spectacular belly flop and slammed spread eagle onto the pavement. Even her neck and chin smacked the ground.

            I braked to a stop as we watched the dazed critter struggle to its feet. It seemed to call roll of all its body parts before walking, not running, across the road and down the other shoulder.

            Bobbie was speechless. Either that or he couldn’t fit a word in edgewise through my cackling laughter.

            Even birds wipe out every now and then. Does anyone remember the footage in the early Walt Disney nature movie, The Vanishing Prairie, where the mallards crash land in slow motion on glare ice to the dubbed-in sounds of a bowling alley?

            When my son Corey was going to college at the University of Southern Colorado in Pueblo, the two of us went for a walk one evening during the last hour of daylight along the nature trail near the Pueblo Zoo. We were passing through a grove of tall cottonwoods when several turkey vultures began to descend on the tree tops to roost for the night.

            As the first one settled into the tree right beside us, I pointed it out to Corey and asked the rhetorical question, “Aren’t they graceful?”

            No sooner had those words left my mouth than the dry branch the great black bird selected to land on gave way. The eagle-sized bird dropped three feet onto another branch below. But it failed to grasp the second branch and rolled off, wings flailing without coordination, and fell about 6 feet to the next branch. By now it was upside down; so it bounced off that branch, too. And so it went, zigzagging and thudding from one branch to the next like a ball bearing in a pinball machine.

By sheer chance the vulture landed on it belly in line with the last and biggest limb about ten feet off the ground and finally managed to get a hold. It struggled to its feet, carefully folded its wings and shook out the dents. It was only then that it noticed us humans standing there watching the performance. It hung its bright red head as if in embarrassment and averted its gaze.

“Yup, Dad. Those birds sure are graceful!”

Years ago officers from the Colorado Division of Wildlife organized a road check on Raton Pass on I-25 just before traffic passed on into New Mexico. Even though the main reason for a major check station is wildlife law enforcement (they always coincide with big game seasons), officers from many other agencies attend as well. A typical check station will have State Patrol, drug enforcement, U.S. Forest Service (illegally harvested Christmas trees), federal game wardens and even FBI agents in case someone with a federal warrant should be encountered.

On this particular day a new and very fancy Ford pickup with Texas plates came through the checkpoint with a nice mule deer buck lying in the bed. The driver was a big, good-natured fellow from Dallas in a big white cowboy hat.

He proudly showed them his Colorado Deer License that matched the tag attached to the deer carcass, then engaged several of the officers in some pleasant banter. Meanwhile an older Colorado officer took a closer look at the deer. When he lifted one hind leg it exposed the end of a Canada goose stuffed up inside the chest cavity. For those of you who are not familiar with hunting, waterfowl require a separate license and stamps issued by both the State and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

When a break came in the conversation up front, the game warden asked the Dallas hunter to come back to the back of the truck. Then the officer lifted the leg of the carcass wide to expose the goose and asked, “What’s that?”

Without skipping a beat the fellow feigned a look of total surprise, then grinned and boomed out, “Why that goose-eatin’ son-of-a-bitch!”

The author's parents, Ted and Charlotte Walker, feed carrots to Mathew the Moose

by Peter G. Walker

Farmington, Maine is a college town that lies close to the northern edge of the settled coastal plain in hilly inland Maine. One fall day a few years back a wildlife tragedy occurred on the paved road running north out of Farmington. A cow moose made the fatal error of running into the road in front of an oncoming truck.

The accident might have gone almost unnoticed in Farmington. Moose are quite abundant and car-moose accidents happen from time to time. But this incident was different. Left behind cowering in the roadside bushes was a small bull calf. By fall, most Maine moose calves are the size of young horses and have learned enough survival skills to stand a reasonable chance of surviving their first winter without their mothers if necessary. The one orphaned that autumn day outside of Farmington was a late calf, the apparent result of a late estrous cycle by his young mom. Only a little larger than a Shetland pony, he did not have the training and experience needed to survive.

Bewildered and not yet having learned to fear humans, the little moose wandered into a nearby housing development and found the shrubs and leftovers in the gardens to his liking. In addition, he seemed to take some comfort in the human activity. Aside from a few barking dogs, no one threatened him. A few times a week the attention from children was especially lavish around the parking lot of the Latterday Saints Church at the edge of the woods.

As time went on and the humans became more used to the benign little moose calf, some began to approach him bearing gifts of carrots, apples, and cabbages. Good things to eat! These humans are here to take care of me!

Among the humans that accepted the young moose into their neighborhood were my brother, Tom, and his wife, Andii. Due to Andii’s landscaping and gardening talents, their back yard was particularly attractive to the gangly beast. In addition, their Lab-pointer cross accepted the moose the way any farm dog would accept a work horse. It was a safe place to hang out.

The weeks passed and the weather turned colder. The moose calf established a daily routine of hanging out at a neighbor’s house during the day, then returning to Tom and Andii’s in late afternoon to greet Tom when he came home from work and follow him around as he did his chores. If Tom went in the garage, the moose plodded along behind him to see what he was doing.

That particular moose was neither big enough or goofy looking enough to be a “Bullwinkle.” Andii began calling him Matthew and soon the name was accepted by the neighbors as well.

In November the weather turned cold. Moose are well suited for the lowest temperatures. Nevertheless leaving Matthew outdoors to huddle up against the foundation of the house in the lee of the wind didn’t seem right. Tom and Andii found that on the coldest days Mathew really preferred the shelter of their unheated garage.

Tom always closed and locked his garage and attached workshop at night. One evening when it was particularly raw Tom took a chance that Matthew would not be claustrophobic and left him in the garage when he locked up. The next morning the now half-grown moose was waiting patiently by the door into the house for some attention and some breakfast.

That is how my brother and sister-in-law came to host a moose in their garage through a long Maine winter. There was never a crisis; never an incident. One day Andii forgot to close the door into the garage and suddenly realized that Mathew had entered the house and was standing in her dining room! Not wanting the animal to panic and try to run through the glass patio doors, she gently turned him around and led him back into the garage.

But having a moose for a house guest is not something that can be kept secret. Eventually Matthew’s story leaked to the press and a curious public began to frequent the neighborhood to see the moose. Keeping a moose – or any wild animal – as a pet is no more legal in Maine than it is in Colorado. After a television news piece about Matthew aired on a Portland station in early spring, officers from the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife came to check out the story.

A couple of days later the gentle moose was gone. The Fish & Wildlife agency would only say that they had taken Mathew to a location where he could learn to fend for himself.