LIVING THE DREAM

After the author arrives in Maine’s fabled North Woods with a moose tag in his pocket, an adventure he’s been wanting to take his entire hunting life, reality sets in, and he learns a valuable lesson: Be careful what you wish for

- T. Edward Nickens

ALL OF MY HUNTING LIFE, MOOSE have haunted my dreams. Literally, since I was a child, I have had the same dream. The basic storyline never changes, but as I’ve matured as an outdoorsman, the details have become more specific and meaningful.

I’m in a Maine Guide canoe with a long-shafted beavertail paddle in hand. A lever rifle leans against the bow thwart. My guide and I cruise slowly around a sharp bend in the stream, careful to keep the bow from scraping on the river gravel. Brook trout dimple the water. Mosquitoes buzz. The guide grunts and bellows with a rolled birch-bark call, and the sound seems to skip over the water like a thrown stone, mellowing as it reaches the far shore. I scan the dense woods, picking apart the latticed boughs for the glint of an antler or the horizontal line of belly or back. In the dream, I am looking for pieces and parts of a moose and then, suddenly, the bull is right there, complete, at the water’s edge, silhouetted in front of a sheen of sunlit spruce.

And that’s how it ends. Every time. The dream never progresses beyond this point—no matter how many times I have had it, no matter how often I lie in bed trying to fall back to sleep so I can dream my way into slowly reaching for the gun, as the guide braces the boat for the rifle’s recoil. Over the years, I came to accept that a moose hunt might be a dream I would never have the chance to live. But if I did, I didn’t want to scout from a truck and hunt from a road. I wanted my dream— canoes, remote waters, paddling under the early- morning stars, stalking and calling, and nothing easy