There’s no substitute for getting outside. The things we see, big and small, are difficult to predict.
Sometimes you almost get it. It’s a kind of outdoor imagination game of horseshoes or hand grenades, depending on whether you dream of soaring eagles or rampaging grizzlies.
So, before I headed up to an alpine trout stream, I imagined I might see a moose. They are pretty common here as the creek is surrounded by a thick forest of willows.
It’s a willow-flavored, lollipop land for moose.
Moose are the largest deer in the known universe and on the horseshoes-to-hand grenades spectrum, they reside just a notch below grizzlies on the hand-tossed explosives end of the scale. They’ll mostly avoid you if you give them fair warning, but a rutting bull or a cow protecting calves is a dangerous, human-trampling device.
Because of this, as I meander up the stream fishing, I shout “Moose!” over and over, whenever the willows close in.
I don’t suppose moose acknowledge the name we’ve assigned them as correct. I could be singing the fight song of my alma mater, the University of California, Riverside, for all they care. They’ll react all the same whether I’m shouting “Moose!” or singing an off-key rendition of “Brave Scots one and all we stand together, the tartan clan of UCR.”
But moose is easier on the vocal cords and will seem far-less ridiculous if I come upon another human.
Even with my caution, babbling brooks babble, and often that’s enough to drown out my human-in-the-vicinity alert. Of course this happened the other day, as I worked my way downstream, scanning stream-side log jams for my lost landing net (more on that in a bit). I was walking in an open stretch but the far bank was thick with cover. Then I noticed a willow about the size of a Sprinter van shaking violently.
I caught just a glimpse of a rear haunch, about eye level, as the moose escaped out the back side of the trees. I never got a look at the moose, but I was pleased the beast was on the other side of the stream and felt compelled to increase the distance between us rather than trample.
The lost landing net was the most disappointing part of the trip. It was a small, wooden net, made by Blue Ribbon Nets in Bozeman. I bought it years ago on my employee discount at Sportsman Ski Haus, and it had tamed hundreds of fish through the years.
I misplaced it along the stream a few days before. I’d hooked a nice cutthroat on the stream, a fish big enough that I never had any control over it. After I set the hook it hunkered down to the deepest part of the pool, head shaking with determined annoyance. I tried putting a little pressure on it, hoping to work it in close enough to net, but my ploy had the opposite effect. The cuttie streaked over to the far side and zig-zagged through the willow roots under the bank.
Somewhere in the midst of that catastrophe, I fumbled my net off of the magnetic clasp that held it to my vest. When that trout tied a knot around those tree roots I set the net down on the bank instead of reattaching it before I waded across the stream to see if I could salvage the fish.
Alas, the power of tree roots prevailed.
It was four days later when I went looking for it, so someone could have carried it off. I went searching downstream log jams because the river had come up following a cloud burst and the bank where I’d placed my net was now under water.
Which led me to that quaking Sprinter van, on the far bank, where I prefer quaking Sprinter vans.
That glimpse of haunch made “almost” close enough.