Spectator Sport. Who knew?

The young man who delivered our firewood last week could barely contain his glee. His name had been drawn in the annual moose hunting permit lottery held with great festivity in late June. After 15 years of trying, he'll at long last be among the 3,140 permittees who take to the north woods in late September.

Moose hunting’s one of those things that drive home what a big state Maine is, of how swathes of its northern and western reaches remain foreign to me. Ensconced on the Downeast shore, I still know little about the “other Maine.” About the region often simply referred to as The County, where roads known only by township numbers stretch for miles across nearly uninhabited terrain. Or about old shuttered mill towns and dying out logging communities. I’m only somewhat familiar with the inland lakes and mountains. There, at least in photos, moose are forever chest-deep in one of those clear and achingly cold lakes, and, as cameras click, they lift their heads, antlers and muzzle dripping. Or, with their surprisingly long legs they stride up a wooded path, their backs dappled with late autumnal color or early spring light. 

For this non-hunter, the desire to bring down one of these huge and oddly majestic animals is hard to fathom. Likewise, I can’t attest to the culinary appeal in moose flesh though some folks do swear by a hot bowl of moose stew or chili, preparations that I’d have to guess require a long (a mighty long) time in a simmering pot. And I can only assume that in some households, a dressed moose in the freezer locker most importantly assures there’ll be meat on the table come winter.

But I do know that something fundamental surely separates me from the folks featured in a Bangor Daily News front page story a couple of years ago. There, in a photo beneath the headline caption"Spectator Sport,” a 91-year old Belfast man checks out a dead 860-pound moose at a popular tagging station in Greenville. Writing about the queue of pick-ups waiting at the tagging station, the reporter observes “the sight of the burly critters quickly becomes routine”– leaving it a bit unclear (to this reader anyway) whether he means the hunters or the dead moose draped over truck beds.

In any case, the arrival of “moose after moose” is apparently of great interest to hundreds of people who come to watch them hoisted inside an airplane hangar. As their weights are announced, many onlookers cheer. Others – often strangers to the hunter and certainly no friend to the moose – pose for pictures, but only next to the biggest moose, the others being merely dead. “Oh look at the size of its nose,” one woman is reported exclaiming, something that could’ve as easily been said on the other side of binoculars or camera.

"We don’t have any of these down there,” admits the fellow from Austin, Texas who brought down the pictured moose and is something called a sub-permittee, suggesting, I guess, that the actual number of people shooting moose exceeds the number of permits given. But, as the reporter reminds readers, no permit is required to be “part of the festivities,” the festivities in this case being butchering. Even the reporter, writing for the sports page concedes butchering isn’t typically a spectator sport. But the boys from Windham Butcher Shop make it one “because they are very, very good at what they do.” They are, in fact, “eight minutes good.” Assisted by an invention of the butcher shop owner, the Windham crew hoists a moose and within minutes virtually peels away its skin.

Just imagine, the reporter requests, “an 800-pound banana.”

Um, I don't think so.