Gary Paulsen - Brian's Winter

Directly at him.

Ahh, he thought. There it is — like it or not I am about to hunt moose. His stomach tightened and he stood and quickly glanced at his position. The brush was too thick for him to run even if he had wanted to and the truth was he didn’t want to. He was different, he did have better weapons — and there was a lot of meat on a moose.

No room, he thought, to maneuver or to shoot. He moved his head to the right and all he could see was thick brush, then to the left, and it was the same.

No. There, a small opening. Not four feet across and about four feet off the ground — almost a tunnel through the brush — but if it all worked right, all worked exactly right, he might be able to get a shot.

He moved to the left and stood facing the opening, leaned the killing lance against a nearby bush, held the bow up — with the top tipped slightly to the right to keep it out of the brush — and put his best arrow on the string ready to draw and waited.

And waited.

Time seemed to stop.

Somewhere to his left he heard the soft sound of a bird’s wings, then the scratchy sound of a chickadee.

Brush cracked directly in front of him but he could see nothing.

Another bird flew past.

He aged, waiting, and now he heard the moose stepping, its hooves shussh-shusshing in the snow, and another breaking branch and then a line, a curved line as the side of the moose’s front end came into view in the tunnel.

Brian tensed, his fingers tightening on the string. The edge of the shoulder moved slowly, ever so slowly to the left, bringing more and more of the moose’s chest into view.

A third there, then a half, then two thirds and then the whole chest.

Brian drew the shaft back.

A cow, his brain registered, a large cow moose. No antlers. A little spit dripping from the side of her mouth. Brown eyes looking at him but not seeing him, or at least he hoped not.

Twenty feet, no more. Six, seven paces at the most.

He released the bowstring.

He could see it all later in his mind’s eye so it all must have registered but when he did it everything happened so fast — and yet incredibly slowly — that it all seemed one event.

The arrow jumped from the string and he saw the feathers fly straight away from him and at the moose and slam into the moose’s neck just above the center of her chest and in that instant, in the same split second, the moose caught the movement of the bow and arrow and Brian’s head and charged, so fast she almost met the arrow.

If Brian had expected the brush to slow her down, or the arrow striking her to handicap her, he was sadly mistaken. She was at him like a cat, so fast that she seemed a blur, and yet his mind took it all in.

I hit her. The arrow hit her in the neck. She’s charging. She’s charging at me. Another arrow. No, no time. The lance. That’s it, the lance.

He threw the bow aside and reached for the lance, all in one motion and all too late. He felt his hand clamp on the shaft of the lance and at the same time she came out of the brush on top of him. He had one fleeting image of a wall of brown hair with the feathers of the arrow sticking out of the middle and he went down.

He would never know what saved him. She was gigantic and on him and he thought she would crush him, mash him into the ground. But either the arrow hampered her movement or her momentum carried her too far and she went on over Brian and had to turn and come back at him.

He was hurt. His leg, his shoulder, yet he could move, and he rolled, still holding the killing lance, and came up to a kneeling position. He raised the head of the lance just as she hit him again.

One image. She threw herself at him, her eyes red with rage, and he saw her run onto the lance, the point entering her chest just below the arrow. Then her head hit his forehead. Brian saw one flash of white light, as bright as all the snow, then nothing but pain and darkness.

A great weight. Something heavy on him. His mother was calling for him to come back. He was little again, a small boy and playing outside, and his mother was calling for him to come inside but he couldn’t move because there was a huge weight on him, holding him down, keeping him from coming home…

Brian opened his eyes slowly, closed them against the brightness and the pain in his forehead, then opened them again.

It was, he thought, the same world. Snow all around, bright sun, he was breathing, had a pounding pain in his forehead — it reminded him of the plane crash — and had what appeared to be an entire cow moose in his lap.

He twitched when he looked down at her. Her eyes still looked mad, and her head plowed against his chest. But he realized she was dead. He started to examine his own situation.

Nothing seemed to be broken. He could not at first believe this and moved his arms and legs several times to make certain, then squirmed his way out from beneath the moose. She was lying half on him, her head on his chest pushing him back, and when he stood it was the first time he got a long look at how big she was.

From nose to back end he guessed a good eight or nine feet, maybe more. He paced her off and came up with four paces in length, counting her legs, which were sticking out a bit.

Maybe ten feet. And she was taller at the shoulder than he stood.

He wondered for a moment if she was the same moose that had attacked him earlier in the summer and tried to feel that she was, tried to feel some animosity toward her. But the truth was that killing her made him sad — elated and sad all at once, as he had been with the wolf-killed doe.

She was ugly and beautiful at the same time, lying there in the snow, blood from her chest wounds smeared where she lay — an ugly beautiful animal, and she was ended now. He had killed her, ended her life so that he could live, and he felt as bad as he felt good.

He turned away for a moment, shook his head and then turned back. There was much work to do and for a moment he thought it would be impossible. It was perhaps half a mile back to camp and there was absolutely no way he would be able to drag her.

He tried lifting a back leg and it was all he could do to get it off the ground. Dragging her would be simply impossible. She must weigh six or seven hundred pounds.

He would have to cut her up here and take her back to camp in pieces and that nearly stopped him. How, he thought, do you cut a moose up? Never in all his life had he ever thought about cutting a moose to pieces. Where did he start? There were no dotted lines the way there were in the diagram at the meat market…

He thought on it a full five minutes, looking at her lying there, and finally realized he could do nothing until she was skinned.

He used the knife to slit the hide from the neck, down the chest and belly to the back end. He had to cut around the lance — which had broken off after driving into her — and the arrow shaft still sticking out because they wouldn’t pull free.

The skin came away harder than with the doe, was thicker and had to be cut loose as he skinned, peeling it back a half inch at a time all along her body. When he cut along the belly the knife slipped and cut the membrane holding the stomach in and her guts fell out on his feet, steaming, and he went ahead and pulled them the rest of the way out, amazed at how much there was inside her. The liver alone weighed more than two rabbits and he set it aside to cook later.

With the guts out of her she was easier to move — still very hard, but some easier — and he quickly developed a rhythm for skinning. Pull on the hide, slide the knife along, pull, slide, pull, slide. In half an hour he had lifted the hide completely off her right side, cutting it around the neck just under her head, and folded it over her back, completely exposing her right side.