It was the morning of Friday, Dec. 10, 1965, an hour before my social studies quiz, when Principal Fred Whitney and Maine Game Warden Oral Page made a surprise appearance in study hall at Williams High in Oakland. The imposing men whispered to a teacher and then summoned me and three other teenage boys into a hallway.
A large bull moose, Page explained, had been struck and killed 40 minutes earlier by a Central Maine Railroad train near school property. He pledged to donate moose meat to the school cafeteria, provided that Whitney allowed four students to help with the butchering.
The principal feigned interest in our schoolwork by asking a few perfunctory questions. Economics, not social studies, preoccupied his mind. “Well,” he finally muttered, “hundreds of pounds of meat will stretch the hot lunch budget. Let’s not look a gift moose in the mouth.” We were excused from classes.
“I recruited you boys,” the warden said, “because you’ve demonstrated exemplary hunting skills on school mornings.” In the 1960s, it was not uncommon for rural Maine teens like us to hunt deer while bushwhacking to school. No SWAT team or fleet of law enforcement vehicles stormed school grounds. Our rifles didn’t even raise an eyebrow.
In the neighboring farm town of Sidney, Bean School Principal Brandon Mathieson combined education and hunting. Most November weekdays he transported several boys to school and hunted deer with them 90 minutes before the morning bell rang. Mathieson was a visionary, teaching students hunter safety two decades before it became mandatory in 1986.
Page led us across a snow-covered football field and down a wooded hill to the railroad tracks where the moose laid dead. “Have you ever field dressed a deer?” he asked. We nodded yes and chuckled, hearing “field dressed,” instead of gutted, for the first time. Jake, a talkative boy, added, “Me and Pa butchered our young hog and six chickens on Sunday.” He and five siblings lived in a dirt-floor shack without plumbing in a wretched neighborhood bypassed by President Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty.
Jake chattered as Page eviscerated the moose: “Pluckin’ them chickens forenoon weren’t no Sunday picnic neither.” The eighth-grader struggled with language because he was stuck at the third-grade reading level. Each winter, beginning on his ninth birthday, Jake missed a month of school cutting pulpwood with his father and uncle.
Industrial arts was Jake’s refuge, and it’s where his love of woodworking produced beautiful basswood duck decoys and maple flutes. In 1966, when a Yale University music professor heard him playing “Amazing Grace” on a violin at a summer music camp concert in the Belgrade Lakes region, he praised Jake and inquired about the make of the instrument. “I made it,” Jake replied, “from a seasoned red spruce top in shop class.”
We hunched over the crouched warden, shoulder to shoulder, as steam from the moose’s open chest cavity rose ghost-like in the freezing morning air. “This is the heart,” the warden instructed, pointing to it with a bloody knife. “Over here is the liver, and behind the intestines are the kidneys.” He described the function of each organ, and how they worked harmoniously to keep the 1,100-pound moose upright. Its life ended when a locomotive split the brain, which we stared at with morbid fascination.
Page peeled the skin from the neck, smelled the muscles and announced, “This will make excellent hamburger.” Jake reacted with unabashed enthusiasm: “I knowed it’d be fit to eat. Pa always preaches waste not, want not.” Aware that Jake’s father poached deer year-round to feed his poor family, Page told the teenager he’d send him home with moose tenderloins, ribs, tongue for pickling and bones for soup. Ribs rubbed with flour, Jake boasted, and simmered in cider with onions made the best biscuit gravy.
The warden towel wiped his bloody hands and motioned us to skin the beast. Working after school on dairy farms, we were adept with pocket knives from severing grain sacks and hay bale twine. Jake removed a flat, round whetstone from his bloodstained overalls — he kept each knife razor sharp by spitting on the blade and rapidly rubbing its cutting edge at a 45-degree angle on the whetstone’s coarse surface. “I’ve never seen anyone sharpen a knife better,” the warden marveled. Jake blushed, and he was speechless for the first time that any of us could recall.
When the last quartered piece of moose was loaded onto a tattered white tablecloth lining the bed of Page’s Chevy truck, we sat on the tailgate as he drove past our two-story, red brick school. With smiling schoolmates waving hands behind frosted windows, we felt like parading sports heroes. On Main Street, the warden’s truck slowly rolled past the Oakland barbershop and its window sign, “For a haircut becoming to you, you should be coming to me.”
Kitty-corner to the barbershop was Michaud’s Market. Leo Michaud, the store owner, made available his industrial meat grinder and a small mountain of beef and pork suet to mix with lean burgundy-colored cuts of moose sirloin, chuck, shank and round steaks. By mid-afternoon, nearly 100 five-pound packages of butcher paper wrapped hamburger were loaded into Principal Whitney’s Ford station wagon for transport to the school’s freezers.
An hour before sunset, as a light snow accumulated, Jake began walking home with a gunny sack bulging with cut-up moose ribs, tenderloins, tongue, heart, liver and two meatless femurs. Overcome with gratitude, the boy stopped, turned and spoke emotionally, “Praise the Lord for this early Christmas gift.”
From mid-December until mid-March, students stood in long lines for a plate of Tuesday’s sloppy Joes and Friday’s American chop suey, each dish brimmed with moose meat. For Jake and other poverty stricken students, the hearty meals were a godsend. One Friday, classmate Paul informed Mrs. Tibbetts, a cafeteria worker, of a lunch menu blackboard misspelling, “It’s chop suey with moose meat, not mouse meat.”
For us four schoolboy hunters returning to class from a cafeteria littered with empty half-pint milk cartons and balled-up paper napkins stained orange with tomato sauce, we were proud of helping transform a tragedy into a winter meat bonanza.
Ron Joseph of Waterville is a retired Maine wildlife biologist. His work has appeared in the Down East magazine, and Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors magazine.