Hunting Old Moxie: The Largely True History of the Specter Moose of Lobster Lake, Maine

By Al Michaud

Fifteen feet high.  Twenty-five hundred pounds.  Grayish-white in color.  This was the common description of Old Moxie, otherwise known as the Specter Moose of Lobster Lake, Maine.  His antlers spread twelve feet across and were spiked with over forty tines.  His hoofprint measured ten inches wide.  He had a double

• Language: English
• Publisher: Antlerian Press
• Release date: Apr 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9780578489568

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Mon Onc’ had a head like a crockpot, one filled with a slow-cooked batch of lumber camp tales and old family legends that he would gamely dish out to anyone hankering for his particular brand of nourishment.  Some tales had the flavor of truth to them, others were best taken with a grain of salt, and still others required the whole blamed shaker.

You can judge for yourself which parts of the following story are salt pork, what portions are seasoning and garnish, and how much is just sweetening molasses.  Perhaps you’ll conclude the whole thing brim to bottom is full of beans.

No matter.  Mon Onc’ never aimed to please all appetites.  Be forewarned, though, that his stories were generously spiced with an ingredient of the supernatural.  In fact you could say his cookbook didn’t contain a recipe without it.

Mon Onc’ was my granduncle on my father’s side.  The repast that follows—a hunting tale with a strong savor of the otherworldly—concerns Joseph-Rosaire Michaud, who Mon Onc’ called Pépère José.  He was his father’s father, and so my great-great-grandfather.  According to Mon Onc’, Pépère José had three close encounters with the Specter Moose of Lobster Lake, Maine.

Now, when Mon Onc’ served up his narrative fare he never complemented it with side dishes of corroborating evidence or anything that might constitute proof.  Nothing of the broader history of the Specter Moose was ever supplied.  No allusions were made to its celebrity or long and storied career, from its origins as a local scandal to its launch upon the national stage.

In order to provide a taste of the bigger picture, I’ve elected to increase the spread by bringing in legends from the oral tradition, surviving folklore, and articles from newspapers and journals.  In other words, my granduncle’s original recipe—his one crockpot of homecooked grub—will now be rounded out, plated differently, and paired with fitting spirits.  As Mon Onc’ would say, a tale worth telling is worth embellishing.

My role here is to simply serve as your talebearer—one who comes bearing tales, not inventing them.  The veracity of all things said and heard over the years I cannot vouch for, but I bring them to the table anyway.

Again, be cautioned about this informal dinner.  Those with delicate tastes might find its stranger elements a bit too rich for consumption.  Others may swallow a bite or two before concluding the rations are well-nigh indigestible.  Many will know at once that even a quarter-spoonful is far too liberal a helping.

But if you’re one who relishes the weird, and are unsatisfied with mundane fodder, then just maybe you’ll find this strange collation of the Specter Moose palatable enough.

So now, let’s sink our teeth in.

PART I

Something Antlered This Way Comes

CHAPTER 1

Shooting the Bull

Autumn of 1889.  That was when the whole thing started.  Pépère José went hunting near Little Hathorn Pond.  He sighted a bull moose wading through the reeds on the opposite shore.  The animal was noteworthy in two respects: first, it was ashen-colored, nearly white; second, as Pépère soon realized, it was enormous.  What he initially took to be a moose calf feeding in the reeds beside it was in fact a normal-sized cow moose.  Pépère took aim at the bull and fired.  It wasn’t a longshot.  The bullet should have found its mark.  But the bull reacted in no way at all.

Pépère fired again.  This time the bull coolly tromped off into the forest with its mate, none the worse for wear.  Pépère returned to camp at the foot of Hathorn Mountain and told the others what he had seen.  Everyone chalked up his story to the inspiration of excessive drink.

Right then Pépère resolved to prove out this phantom moose.  The following season he returned to Camp Hathorn with the same dismissive companions.  The party went about scouting the woods in search of moose signs.  They first found browsed twigs and buds on the foliage, the usual telltales.  Then enormous hoofprints were discovered by Onc’ Tommé (this would be Pépère’s own uncle, Chrysostôme Martin Jr.).  Not long after they spied several small patches of bark gnawed from the trees overhead.

A moose will rise to its hind feet before a large tree, place its forward knees against the trunk, and gnaw away the bark as high as it can stretch, typically reaching some ten or twelve feet in the air.  These gnaw-marks were over twice that height.

The time for moose calling runs from mid-September to about the middle of November.  When the party found a clearing with several good shooting lanes, they began cutting down any obstructing branches.  Once done, Pépère rolled up a fresh strip of birch bark to fashion a moose call.  Wetting the tip, he fitted it to his mouth and began crooning the plaintive refrain of a lovesick cow.

The art of moose calling requires patience.  For several hours Pépère sounded his call.  During that spell a few members of the party claimed to hear timber breaking nearby.  Others heard nothing.  Some heard the low, guttural grunt of an answering moose, while the rest did not.  The direction of the sounds seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.  After nightfall a definite huffing was heard by all, followed by the thrashing of antlers.

Everyone stood, guns at the ready.  They positioned themselves to cover all possible entry trails to the clearing.

Then came a sensation that raised the hairs on the backs of their necks.  One of the men cried out.  The others spun around to find l'orignal-fantôme—the phantom moose—practically on top of them.  By means unknown it had materialized inside the clearing without having traveled down any of the lanes.

Three of the men stumbled back in terror, bowling over the others.  For a moment the moose stood broadside to them, its pale fur casting an eerie glow under the moonlight.  Then it vanished as suddenly as it had appeared.  Not one of them had even fired a shot.

That was enough for Pépère.  He returned to his home in the northernmost part of Maine, resolving to steer clear of the south-lying T4 R8 W.E.L.S. (that is, Township 4 Range 8, West of the Easterly Line of the State, the wildland tract where Little Hathorn Pond is located).  The next hunting season would instead find him in the familiar forests up the St. John River, far from Hiram Hathorn’s camp and its neighborhood spook moose.

When September 1891 rolled in, Pépère kissed Mémère Zité goodbye and departed for Fort Kent to meet up with his cousin Sifroy Nadeau Jr. of Eagle Lake.  The two paddled their bateau to the wilderness regions beyond the Allagash, where civilization has never been known.  In this place the deer, moose, and caribou had learned little fear of man, nor had the bear, catamount, and wolf.  Pépère and Sifroy remained in this hunters’ paradise for weeks on end.  They hunted by day, and by night, with the evergreen boughs spread over the ground for their bedding, they slept beneath the starlit sky.

On one such night in early October, Pépère was listening to the snap and crackle of the campfire when he drifted off to the Land of Nod.  His sleep, soothed at first by the crackling firewood, became gradually disturbed as the noise seemed to grow louder.  A glow penetrated his eyelids, and soon his nostrils burned.  He threw off the blanket and leaped to his feet.  All around him the towering firs were engulfed in flames, their trunks blackening and warping like nearly-spent matchsticks.  The forest was everywhere ablaze.  Smoke gushed skyward, eclipsing the stars.

Their campsite alone was untouched by the wildfire, an oasis in the inferno.  Pépère raced over to Sifroy and shook him violently, but his cousin refused to wake.  If the smoke had robbed him of his consciousness, then perhaps it was for the best; looking around, Pépère could find no possible escape route to save them from a fiery demise.

As the conflagration closed in, the odd thought struck him that the scene was almost beautiful, with the world all aglow, with the soot and embers contrasting sharply in darkness and light.  Large peels of ash drifted down upon him in gentle swirls like soft gray snowflakes.  Though he did not feel it, the wind must have picked up, for the tumbling ashes began to career through the air in circular patterns.  The heat from the fire, he reasoned, was creating unusual drafts.

Teary-eyed from the smoke, he looked on in amazement as the ash-flakes danced round and round in their delicate currents, collided to form larger eddies, until finally all joined into one giant vortex set against the backdrop of the burning woods.  Beyond the mouth of the gray whirlwind was a funnel of indeterminate depth, extending through the forest like a portal to another world.

For a moment he dared hope it was a miraculous exit.  Then he saw, at the remote end of the tunnel, a nebulous shape materializing from the void.  It grew larger as it approached, gaining distinction despite the camouflage of its pale coloration in the spinning flurry of ash.

It was a living thing, that much was clear: spindle-legged, heavy-gaited, narrow for its extreme height.  Here and there wind-borne cinders sparked brightly as they careened into what appeared to be broad antlers.  With a paroxysm of dread Pépère realized what was about to emerge from the unnatural maelstrom, a creature he had seen before: Le Roi Orignal de tous les Orignaux du Maine—the King Moose of all Maine Moose.

The giant interloper stepped over the threshold, crossing into the ever-dwindling circle of forest as yet untouched by fire.  Like a fawn paralyzed by the sudden arrival of a wolf, Pépère stuck fast, powerless to fight or flee.  The gray behemoth came to him and stopped, looming for a moment.  Then it lowered its great muzzle and nudged Pépère in the chest, driving him back a step.  Again it nudged, harder, forcing him to stagger even more.  With the third nudge it gave full power, launching Pépère in the air.  He landed flat on his back in his own bed of evergreen boughs.

The moose advanced with an unhurried gait, hanging over him momentarily before rearing up to strike the ground with its massive fore-hooves.  Pépère, rendered hors de combat by the prior assault, could do nothing but cringe, certain he was trampled underfoot.  But the width of the moose left its forelegs splayed far to either side of him.  Half-crazed with fear, Pépère tried scooting out of harm’s way, but the moose pressed its anvil-like nose against his chest, pinning him in place.

Pépère flailed his arms about until a hand rested on his gun.  Gripping it tightly, with all his strength he swung the stock against his attacker’s muzzle, hammering the mass of flesh aside just enough to bring up the barrel.  Taking quick aim, he fired.

"Sacree!" cried Sifroy, startled from his sleep by the sudden report.  The moose retreated a step, dropping to its knees.  By the time Sifroy joined him, Pépère had placed a second bullet in the beast, finishing it for good.

Now, with his senses alert and the confrontation past, Pépère could see that the surrounding forest was not on fire at all, and the pines were still lush in their greenery.  There was also no smoke to obscure the heavens above.  Even the vortex of ashes was gone.

The whole incident, he suddenly realized, had been a dream.  Except for the moose.  It alone was real, but the lifeless bull lying at his feet had a blackish brown hide, not grayish white.  And its size, though impressive, was nowhere near the proportions of the monster in his nightmare.

This go-around Pépère had battled the Specter Moose only in the Realm of Somnus.  But elsewhere that same October, in a place not too far distant, others met the Specter Moose in the flesh.  It is their story your talebearer takes you to next.

CHAPTER 2

The Forest’s Prime Evil

In the hour of fading daylight, Sachem Joe Francis, Chief of the Penobscot Indians, mounted an old beaver dam and seated himself upon its crown.  There he sat cross-legged into the night, playing an enchanting tune on his bibigwadi, a little flute of cedar wood.  In olden days such flutes were said to possess ktahando, magic, with the power to call in game.  His was just for song.

Since sunrise he and his brother Charlie had toiled at setting trap lines for the season’s fur hunt along a stretch of forest some twenty miles north of the moose runway between Ch’sebem and Beskabekuk Lakes.  Charlie stood beside him now, gazing down from the dam at a hundred-acre city below.  It was a marsh-city, with muskrats as its citizenry, a thousand rodents strong.

Their cone-shaped huts, looking so much like the wigwams of old, lined a vast network of narrow channels fashioned through the reeds, forming precincts and neighborhoods up and down the water-filled lanes.  The beavers that once lived here had abandoned their engineering venture seasons ago, or perhaps they’d been trapped out; either way, the brook had since broken through where the dam was in disrepair, lowering the water level of their manufactured pond.  The marsh that resulted from the beavers’ past industry had laid the foundation for the muskrat metropolis.

Charlie handed a bow to his brother and set the quiver of arrows between them.  This night would be spent in a contest of skill.  From their vantage point they could look nowhere upon the moonlit marsh-meadow without seeing the endless comings and goings of muskrats.

Nocking an arrow in his bow, Charlie cast his eyes about for a target.  Muskrat meat was a particular delicacy of the Penobscots, and the pelts a prized commodity.  The rodents were so thick that a single well-placed shot might even bring down two.  Sighting a pair close together, he drew back the bowstring and trained on his mark.  But before he could let the arrow fly a passing cloud buried the moon, plunging the world into darkness.

As they waited for the light to return, Joe took up his bibigwadi again and fluted one of the ancient lonesome songs of their people.  Time stood still.  When illumination began its slow steal back over the marshland, the brothers were surprised to find the watery avenues of the city now empty of traffic.  By all appearance the citizens had deserted.  Except for one muskrat.  It was perched atop a derelict beaver lodge, watching them in silence.

Neither could say how they’d failed to notice this particular high-domed lodge before.  It rose above the murky water like some ancient pagan temple, dominating the fen and dwarfing the cattail huts around it.

Since childhood Joe had heard all the strange stories of m’teowlinwak, witch-men, who were said to once gather clandestinely within a besegikan or dark wigwam, which he envisioned resembling something like this oddly mysterious lodge.  And no witch-man was ever without his baohigan or instrument of mystery, a tutelary spirit-helper in the guise of an animal.

Not all m’teowlinwak were considered wicked, of course; the word could just as easily be rendered in English as the more innocuous-sounding shaman.  Joe’s own grandfather had been m’teowlin, in fact, and his tutelar, a wolf, was only directed to the workings of good.  But there seemed something malignant, even perverse, about the muskrat sentinel watching them now.

The sachem’s imagination conjured visions of a hag-like m’teowlinaskwe, the female counterpart of the witch-men, curled up like a wood-grub in the innards of the dank, rotting lodge as she surveyed her quagmire realm through the senses of her beady-eyed baohigan.

He called to mind Pukadjinkwesu, the fiendish crone of their folktales, or, within his own living memory, the cagey sourpuss Molly Molasses, who used to hurl an evil eye from under the broad brim of her top hat.  And hadn’t Old Molly retained a muskrat such as this as her totem deity?  His imaginings, though admittedly fanciful, chilled him to the bone.

"Nidabe, nidabe," said Charlie, elbowing his brother.  Joe broke from his reverie, quickly looking heavenward to where Charlie was pointing.  The moon, full this night, was still completely obscured by the scuttling cloud.  How then was there light enough for them to see by?  A glance across the meadow revealed an eerie radiance beaming from the woods.  Its source was a pale sphere of brightness, akin to a fireball but without the irregular flicker of flame.

The light bobbed to and fro, then stood perfectly still.  At length it grew larger, appearing to advance toward the edge of the marsh.  The brothers held their eyes to it, unblinking.  Both had observed orbs of this kind in marshy places before.  The phenomenon of marshlights is well attested; what exactly they are, what causes these ephemeral brilliances, has inspired a thousand theories from a thousand cultures.  The Penboscots called them Artoosoqu’.  But the source of this light, as revealed to them now, could not be explained by any known magic or science.

Sachem Joe Francis was a famous wilderness guide, a famous woodsman, a famous riverman, and a famous Indian chieftain.  He was a man unexcelled in all matters of woodcraft.  There was nothing of nature in the Maine Woods he had not seen.  But what entered the marsh-meadow at this instant was a thing of the forest altogether new to him.

The muskrat that so jangled his nerves slid down the side of the lodge and disappeared in the murk as a moose stepped into the open.

"Alemus waladesis!" cried Charlie, voicing a native expression that loses all sense in translation.  Before them stood the extraordinary.  A moose, but much more than a moose.  It was silvery-white all over, though the brothers took no immediate notice of that.  It was also incredibly tall; where it paused in the marsh the water was surely waist-deep to a man, but the moose was submerged barely to the fetlocks.  This, too, they hardly noticed.

What transfixed their gaze so completely was the great ball of light hovering between its sweeping antlers.  The luminous sphere shone a blinding white with faint scintillations of red and green.

The beast moved at a tangent toward them, unhurried, then stopped in the deepest part of the marsh where the water reached only to its hocks.  The dazzling light, fixed firmly in place between its antlers by some unseen force, described the arc of a figure-eight as the beast tossed its head from side to side.

To Joe there was meaning behind the movement, a reality that transcended the merely factual.  The Penobscots were Eastern Woodlands Indians of the ancient Algonquian stock.  They were Abenaki, Dawnlanders, People of the Rising Sun, Children of Light.  The land, and the things of the land, spoke to them.  But a marvel like this...who could interpret it?

Not so long ago his people still had nebaulinowak, riddlers, the sages and puzzle-makers of the tribe who offered their wisdom in parables and riddle-speech.  The wizarding m’teowlinwak held on, but theirs was a dying art.  And there were yet a few living kiugwasowinu, dreamers, those who tracked about in dreamscapes.  But could the present-day dream-questers still stalk the ancient blazed trails of Ancestral Awareness without losing their way?

To Joe, to his people, hunting was a holy pursuit.  The taking of quarry always required much in the way of responsibility; conscientious intent and sacred conduct toward the animal world had to be observed at all times, as a debt was owed for every sacrifice of life made on the hunter’s behalf.  This reverence was in no small way deepened by the Penobscots’ belief in family totem-animals.  The forest creature encountered on the hunt might in reality be a messenger from the spirit realm, or even an ancestor appearing in veiled form.

Telling the difference between a mundane animal and a spiritual one was a matter of discernment.  But not all such visits were considered providential.  The manifestation of a white beast was believed to foreshadow ill luck, and only by properly felling the creature could that fortune be reversed.

Joe was not unmindful of the Prophecy of the Sacred White Moose, whose coming would serve as a reminder of things forgotten, or as a forewarning of things to come.  That particular revelation, however, had been given to the Micmacs, and this was not their territory.

Besides, this moose, though white for its kind, was nearer the color of dirty snow.  It more resembled the monster from the old Abenaki epics, the giant moose slain by Glusgahbeh, the mythic First Man, the Man From Nothing.  According to the parable, when Glusgahbeh had gutted his terrible foe he threw its innards across the mouth of the Panawapskek River, and wherever the entrails landed they transformed into streaks of white stone.  From this allegory derived the name of their people, the Panawapskewiak or Penobscot, meaning People of the White Rock Country.

In the end Joe concluded that yes, there was more the spirit of malevolence than of benevolence in this not-quite-white moose.

The brothers exchanged no glances.  By unspoken agreement they set down their bows and picked up their rifles.  Drawing a bead on the heart of the moose, they fired.

The slugs did not miss.  The beast neither fell nor flinched.  Its globe of light did not even dim.  The brothers lowered their barrels.

Pomolah, Charlie whispered, a quavering reference to the evil spirit that inhabited the heights of Katahdin, the greatest of mountains in Maine.

Joe turned cold at hearing the demon’s name said aloud.  Not long ago he had promised to guide his Yankee friend Fly Rod Crosby to the summit of Katahdin; had Pomolah caught wind of this commitment?  Ascending the mountain was considered taboo by the Penobscots, and those who attempted it were said to incur Pomolah’s wrath.

Unlike the baohiganal spirits of the witch-men, the indigenous thunder god could not be dispelled by mere bullets.  But if this moose was Pomolah in creaturely guise, the vengeful god made no retaliatory strike in answer to the injury attempted on it.  Instead, with a final toss of its head, the beast lumbered away quietly into the woods.

The brothers realized the danger had not yet passed, however.  The moose was clearly circling around them; they could track its movements by the eerie shafts of light beaming from between the trees.

That was enough.  When the moose had reached a point north of them, Joe and Charlie snatched up their belongings and headed south.  Fortunately, the moon had returned to offer its sallow light.

As they raced through the forest, Joe’s thoughts raced a course of their own.  He could not shake the sense that theirs had been a spiritual encounter, that the moose represented more than they presently understood.  As though some form of bad medicine had infected the land.  A negative energy.  A disease of imbalance.  Was the moose a symptom, or the source?

He would have to leave it to the shamanic healers to diagnose that.  Once back at Indian Island, the tribal capital and seat of his governance, he would reach out to the sachems and sagamores of the Passamaquoddy, the Micmac, the Maliseet, those neighboring Algonquian tribes that had joined the Penobscot long ago to form the historic Wapanahki Alliance against the dreaded Iroquois Confederacy.  Perhaps together they could contend with this moose-spirit, and if need be, muster a curative to dispel its darksome energies.

When day dawned, the brothers found themselves passing through the moose runway near Northeast Carry.  To the west of them lay Xsebem or Ch’sebem, the largest lake in Maine.  The White Man had renamed it Moosehead Lake because of its rough resemblance to a moose in profile, at least as the shoreline appeared on the more imaginative maps.

The smaller lake, which the Red Man called Peskegebat or Beskabekuk, lay to the east.  Less imagination was needed to see in its contours the crusher claw of a lobster.  This had earned it a new name too; the White Man now called it Lobster Lake.

Before the end of the decade, newspapers across the country would identify Maine’s most remarkable creature as the Specter Moose of Lobster Lake, forever linking the animal and the little body of water in legacy.

CHAPTER 3

The Lobster Lake Legend Begins

In the days these things took place, nothing ever happened in the Great North Woods of Maine without word of it passing through the Bangor House.  The port city of Bangor, lying thirty miles inland up the Penobscot River, served as the gateway between coastal Maine and the multi-million acres of wilderness stretching northward.  The Bangor House was that city’s premier swanky hotel.  Not only was it the most palatial hostelry in all of Maine, it was also the nexus of backwoods intelligence.

Reception hall, smoking room, reading room, ballroom, barroom, dining rooms, gentlemen’s parlor, ladies’ drawing room, luxury suites galore...all this served to network the community in a local communication of news items.  Captain Horace Crockett Chapman was the hotel’s proprietor.  He was there the day Clarence Duffy tumbled into the smokers’ lounge like a man on the verge of yelling flood! and fire!  A half-dozen patrons were on hand as well, enjoying their after-dinner cigars.

It’s said of Duffy that he couldn’t have played to a more captive audience.  They also say his performance cannot be appreciated in the retelling of it.  Without preamble he launched into an epical soliloquy concerning his recent adventure at Lobster Lake.  The drama featured a white moose of truly laughable proportions.

With Irish grandiloquence Duffy recreated the scene.  Upon later reflection there didn’t seem much for him to tell beyond his mere sighting of it, but what he had seen was expressed in such a lengthened and superbly energetic manner that his audience was wholly dumbstruck.  Every plot twist was pantomimed, every revelation punctuated with a brightly-colored profanity, and somehow the entire oration was delivered in one unbelievably long, drawn-out breath.  The finale he clinched with an acute Gaelic expletive.

His onlookers stared, shocked into submission by his comical seriousness.  After a half-minute of unbroken silence, Capt. Chapman released an odd hiccup of glee, followed by an irrepressible chuckle.  By the time his amusement manifested into a belly-shaking guffaw, the entire room had joined him.

Everywhere patrons doubled over in their couches with uncontrollable laughter.  Of course none of them realized that eight years later this episode would lead newspapers nationwide to credit Clarence Duffy with the first-ever sighting of the Specter Moose of Lobster Lake.

The Bangor House was now informed.  That was the inauspicious start to how the world at large would learn there was something peculiar roaming the upcountry forests of Maine.  The tale told by Duffy made him a laughingstock, the reality of his unlikely moose was roundly dismissed, but the idea of its existence was lodged nonetheless.

The ensuing weeks brought to the hotel more hearsay of the creature, coming in dribs and drabs; vague, irrational descriptions which unvaryingly had an Indian or Frenchman as its source.  Capt. Chapman, skeptic-in-command, dismissed every anecdote that made it past the lobby, scoffing at any man gullible enough to believe such foolishness.

But Chapman’s skepticism received a hard blow when one day he overheard a conversation taking place in the gentlemen’s parlor.  The subject of discussion began as nothing out of the ordinary—a recent timber cruise around Lobster Lake, the latest spell of weather, something about Wentworth Maxfield’s lumber operations—until a giant moose was remarked upon.  Chapman sidled up to the door to listen.

John Ross was the speaker.  Chapman recognized his voice.  Picking up the exchange midsentence:

...plain as day, and traveling at a good clip when we clapped an eye on ’im, said Ross.

All white, ye say? one of his listeners asked.

A shade off’n white, came the reply.  Both of us noted a particular bough which he had passed under, where his antler had brushed against and knocked down the snow.  By and by we scaled the ridge to assess the height of that bough, so as to gauge his size.

How tall?

Our appraisal proved him to be forty-five hands high at the withers.

Gorry!  A moose that size must tip the beam at a hunnerd an’ fifty stone.

I calculate as it would.

Chapman stepped into the parlor, effectively ending the conversation.  Ross, may I see you in my office?

Nodding a laconic farewell to his listeners, Ross rose from the couch to join Chapman in his private chamber where they could speak alone.

Have a seat, said Chapman.  He positioned himself in a chair behind the desk, facing Ross.  I understand you were cruising around Lobster Lake.

I was, Ross replied.  The artful science of locating and estimating a stand of timber for harvest was known as cruising, and Ross was Maine’s foremost bushranger, as the cruisers were then called.

Heard you mention a white moose.  Clarence Duffy was here a few weeks back, said he saw a white moose out that way, Lobster Lake.  Caused a hullabaloo.  His estimates of its size were, well, beyond preposterous.

Don’t know what Duffy saw or didn’t see.  The moose we clapped eyes on was pale enough to call white.

"We.  You had someone with you?"

I did.  He answered like a man who knew he needed no one to back him up.  We both took the measure of him by the environs, fairly exact.  Forty-five hands high.  To the withers.

John, that’s fifteen feet, said Chapman, trying not to sound incredulous.  P.T. Barnum only billed Jumbo the Elephant at thirteen.

Ross practically shrugged.  I saw what I saw.

Chapman leaned back in his chair to ponder.  John B. Ross was a man of mark.  He was hailed far and wide as the most famous river driver in the world.  His exploits were legendary, his reputation unimpugnable.  Born in the Maritimes, raised from infancy in Orrington, Maine, he had entered the woods as a stripling to support his poverty-stricken family.  Starting out as a cookee and errand boy for the lumber camps, he quickly rose through the ranks.

Camp clerk, chopper, sawyer, swamper, scaler, filer, teamster, cantdog man and river driver, camp boss, walking boss, timber cruiser and woods surveyor; there was no job in the logging business that John Ross hadn’t done, no job he couldn’t still do.  He was the old master of the Penobscot Log Driving Company.  Lumberjacks brawled in defense of his name, woodsmen-poets composed ballads about him, lumber barons and timber titans sang his praises.

When the dwellers at Chemquassabamticook Lake realized the aboriginal name of their place was cumbersome, they renamed it Ross Lake.  Boys roughhousing in the streets of Bangor would get each other in headlocks and shout, Call me John Ross or I’ll kill you!  Fifteen years ago Ross had led his motley crew, the Bangor Tigers, on the great Connecticut River Drive.  People flocked to witness it.  They said it couldn’t be done.  Ross did it.

Last year a new side-wheeler towboat was built at Northeast Carry and run down the West Branch to service the lumber operations at Chesuncook Lake; it was named the John Ross.  The man was a legend in his own time.  If river driving was an odyssey, then John Ross was Odysseus.

Chapman found himself at a loss for words.  Several people before now had attested to seeing the colossal white moose.  None of them merited the least credibility.  The Frenchmen and Indians who roved Maine’s woods were famously superstitious; when it came to signs and wonders, their testimony was unreliable without question.  The affidavit of Duffy, an Irishman, was no better, and for the same reason.

But John Ross was a horse of a different color.  He was the embodiment of Yankee practicality, a man ungiven to flights of whimsy or fanciful notions.  To be sure, there was no shortage of backwoods Yankees who virtually made a living at leg-pulling, but Ross wasn’t one of them.  He was a straight-shooter, a square-dealer, honest to a fault.  Most of all, he was not the sort of man to invent fearsome critters.

If Chapman felt in his bones that the troubles brought on by this great white moose were just beginning, then those bones had served him well.

CHAPTER 4

The Van Ness Necessity

Fall of 1892.  Four New Yorkers are hunting along the Seboeis River several miles north of their base camp at Norcross Landing on the Twin Lakes.  One of the men, Howard Van Ness, separates from the party.  His decision to go it alone is rewarded with the hot-blooded fantasy of every sportsman: the real-life vision of a game animal destined for the record books.  In this case it is a white moose of mind-boggling proportions.  Van Ness takes aim, fires.  The moose is killed with a well-placed shot, but somebody forgets to tell the moose.  Van Ness hides from the rampaging fiend, then flees when the moment presents itself.  A night of terror follows as the moose hunter becomes the moose hunted.

For those keen on geography, the arena of Van Ness’s nightmarish hunt was wildland tract T4 R7 W.E.L.S.—same township, one range over, from where Pépère José first met the Specter in 1889 and again in ’90.

Lobster Lake is about forty miles west of there.  The terrain between the two locales is thick with natural hindrances: tortuous watercourses and lonely lakes, fiddly topographies like The Travelers, Squaw’s Bosom, Windy Pitch, Ambajemackomas Falls, and the volcanic cliffs of Fat Man’s Woe.  The dominating monument of the region is Mount Katahdin.

After passing a season at Lobster Lake in 1891, the moose evidently trekked back across this strong-featured landscape to reoccupy its domains of the previous year.

News of Van Ness’s thrilling encounter was not long in reaching the Bangor House.  As it happened Flavius Orlando Beal, Mayor of Bangor, was taking his dinner in one of the hotel’s private dining rooms when a party of excited gunners from the