A Moose Story

I once when 'hunting' with my uncle and my cousin,

we planned on seeing a moose.

We knew it was a rare thing,

even in Vermont,

but we knew we'd see one.

We silently walked through the woods,

trying to mask our footsteps over

the crunching of the fall leaves

still on the ground,

but who can ever be that quiet?

He told me to make a plan:

memorize the ground beneath you

while looking straight ahead

looking for moose.

So I did.

My cousin and I tried to talk to him,

but he said we were going to scare

the moose away, so we stopped.

We sat down for lunch

on a bank of a little pond,

and had some delicious kettle popped

popcorn with some cookies.

We hid the bag of popcorn in our pockets,

and every so often,

we would leave a popped corn or two

in our trail...maybe the moose would follow us!

They didn't.

It turned out to be a bad idea

cause now we had no more popcorn to eat.

I don't know if my uncle ever noticed

the popcorn was all gone...

I bet he did though- he seems to notice everything.

And so we continued,

on and on through the trail in those woods.

We were almost to the place where my uncle

had seen them before but,

I guess I got excited

and I stopped looking where I was walking.

This huge rock seemed to appear out of nowhere,

my foot caught on the edge and down I went.

I guess I yelled pretty loudly too.

My uncle looked back, then shook his head,

and kept on walking.

"Nice going," he said looking back over his shoulder,

"I think the moose heard you."

That was the last time he ever took me out moose hunting.

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