Little bit of backstory, a friend of mine who lives in Alaska shared pictures of her landlord standing in her yard with bloody hands and holding a ziploc bag with a moose liver in it that he brought over for her to eat. The liver was unsolicited and she did not know why he brought it. I couldn’t stand not knowing the story either, so I wrote one:
“Damnit” Roger cursed as he hit the radio so hard that the seek button fell off.
Doesn’t matter anyway, he thought. He knew that soon he would be out of range of even the AM talk stations. Truth be told he enjoyed the hum of the tires on the worn asphalt and the flapping of the headliner in the breeze. The cold was starting to set in, and in a month he wouldn’t be able to drive without the windows up and the heater going. As he drove along he couldn’t help but keep an eye on his prized possession, the massive bull moose he had spent 3 days tracking out in the wilderness. This moose would be enough to last him the full winter.
As he approached the end of the road, Roger slowed down to a crawl. The storms had washed the roadway and it was almost impossible to traverse without four-wheel drive. He was still 130 miles from home and the sun had begun to set.
“Gonna be a long night”
…
An hour later, the sun had set completely and Roger was driving down the pitted roadway using only the dingy yellow light from the headlights on his Chevrolet. It had been slow going, but uneventful.
Suddenly Roger saw a sparkle up in front of him. It disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. Then, a pair appeared, and another. His heart sank in his chest as he realized it was a pack of wolves. He immediately thought of his moose in the back and reached for the shotgun he kept hung in the back window of his pickup. He knew this close to winter that the pack would be extra aggressive as they prepared themselves for the lean times that lay ahead. He also knew that he couldn’t outrun them on this road without risking breaking something on his truck and becoming stranded.
He fired a couple of shots out the window to scare them away, but it was to no avail. As he pulled the gun back into the cab to reload he heard one of the wolves jump into the bed of the truck. He heard the gnashing of teeth as she ripped into his kill. With the gun reloaded, he opened the back window and fired blindly into the bed. The only indication that his shot hit its mark was a yelp from the dark. He quickly pulled the gun back into the cab and slid the window closed lest the wolves try to climb in with him. He cursed as he hit a bump and his open box of shells fell into the seat and mixed with the fast food wrappers and coke bottles. He felt around blindly in the darkened cab until he found two more and loaded them into his dad’s old side-by-side. He slid the window back open and fired again.
The night continued like this as he ran out of shells. With every shot fired he grew more desperate, remembering the days of stalking he had done. How he had laid on the ground for hours waiting on that one perfect shot. How, even in the dead of Summer, he could still feel the wisps of the coming Winter in that same ground. If he couldn’t scare the wolves away, he would have to do that all over again.
He put the thought out of his head as felt around blindly on the seat for more shells but all he came up with was the detritus that comes from living in a truck for a week. At this point, he resorted to weaving back and forth and laying on his horn trying to scare the wolves away. The results were the same as the gun; the wolves had tasted blood and weren’t going to give up. The sun started to peek over the horizon and the attacks slowed as the wolves disappeared back into the forest. As the dawn broke, he looked back at the bed to see the tattered remains of his kill. The carcass had been picked clean by the overnight attack.
He pulled up to his house and opened the creaking door as all of the shells from the previous night spilled onto his driveway. He thought about how he might as well have saved the shells for next trip for all the good they had done him last night. As he climbed out of the truck, stiff from seven hours of sitting, he lit a cigarette to get the gunpowder taste out of his mouth. He walked gingerly around the truck and opened the tailgate to pull the carcass out. He knew that he would need to go back out if he had any chance of lasting the winter. As he was dragging the carcass out of the bed he noticed that the wolves had run off before getting to most of the organs. A small smile crept up as he pulled the liver out.
“I know who’ll appreciate this.”
30 is the new 50 