At lunch yesterday, a friend of mine said she’d almost run into a moose last weekend, on a back road in the Berkshires. It wasn’t till later that I remembered a moose tale told to me by a college classmate, along about 1940. Heading home to Maine on the evening before Thanksgiving, he’d been riding in a local Bangor & Maine passenger car, up in Hancock County, when there was a bang and the train came to a halt in a stretch of silent woods. They’d hit a moose. It took almost forty-five minutes before the crew could get the carcass off the track, and they started up again. Twenty minutes later, the train stopped again, for another twenty minutes or so, then resumed its leisurely journey to Ellsworth.
When the conductor came through, a little later, my friend asked why there’d been a second halt, and the conductor said that by state (or maybe it was county) law they were required to inform the local game warden about the dead moose, and that the engineer had waited until he spotted the lights of the first nearby farmhouse before he stopped once again. He, the conductor, had then walked across the field, knocked on the door, and conveyed the news by phone. My friend asked why he couldn’t have done this at the end of the line, and the conductor smiled and told the rest of the story.
Another state or county law specified that any fresh meat taken from animals accidentally offed on the right of way went first of all to residents of the nearest state poor farm, but after that it was first come, first served. The warden he’d reached said that the institution in question had only two residents at present, and that their teeth were not in great shape. They’d get some bits of tenderloin, all right, but the rest of the moose would now be divided up between the train crew, the farmer with the telephone, perhaps the warden, and also the nearest butcher, who was probably already headed for the scene.
“We’ll be picking up our shares, cut and wrapped, on this same run, come Friday,” the conductor said. “Don’t happen often, but it’s always nice when things work out.”
Happy Thanksgiving!
Post, November, 2010