Bob makes skidding a 760-pound moose look easy as his owner, Marc Farrow of Holland, takes a break early Saturday morning. Behind him hunters Dan O’Leary of Dorset and Mike Herrick of Pawlet compare notes. Photos by Paul Lefebvre
By first light the rain had stopped and the sky was promising a clear start for the first day of the 2007 moose season. Officially, the season opened at 6:41 Saturday morning. But at the weigh-in station in Island Pond the only movement at that hour was over in the town highway garage, where volunteers for the fire department were getting food ready to sell to the onlookers who in a few hours would be arriving in droves. But now the lot was quiet. Only the presence of two horse trailers hitched to pickups parked on the far side offered any clue that a fall ritual was about to unfold.
The horses belong to Marc Farrow, a teamster from Holland who a week or so ago was pulling pine one day and kids the next. No kids or logs today though. Throughout the weeks hunters have been calling in, wanting to know if he is going to be on the job this year and if he’s going to have a horse in Canaan as well as Island Pond. A cell phone in one hand and a bale of hay in the other, he checks the signal on his cell and feeds his horses.
Unseen, their presence in the trailers is as daunting as that of a moose in the wild. A white Percheron named Joe steps out of the head trailer. At
Marc Farrow and Bob strike a timeless pose as they wait in Island Pond early Saturday morning for hunters to call for their services.
1,700 pounds he is a magnificent animal. He throws his head back as if he were taking the air and warming up like an athlete for the business at hand. Soon, he is back in the trailer and on the road, headed for the Pure Country Motel at Wallace Pond outside of Canaan. It’s the same place they set up last year, says Marc as he watches horse and driver disappear down the road.
He pulls his trailer into the lead spot and climbs out of the pickup, noting that his cell phone reception has improved by two notches. Now it is Bob’s turn to take the air. A leaf-brown Belgian with a white mane and tail, Bob is 20 years old and the first horse Marc has owned.
“I never had a horse until I bought this one; didn’t come from that background,” he says, leading the horse around to pose for the camera. “Now I don’t know what I’d do without him.”
Last year the two horses pulled 52 moose out of the woods. Marc has been at it eight years, although he almost hung it up the first year after a rough day on the trail. He and Bob went into the Yellow Bog at Lewis to yard a moose up to the road. The hitch was made, but as Bob started out over the lightly frozen bog, it gave way under the combined weight of horse and moose. All forward motion came to a halt. Bob was stuck.
Luckily, says Marc, there were plenty of hands to help. Ropes were fastened to the moose, and inch by inch the men pulled the critter onto solid ground. Unhitched from his load, Bob swam his way out and picked up his load again. Meanwhile Marc was having second thoughts.
“I almost changed my mind that day about pulling moose,” he says.
Bob and Marc Farrow get ready for the first pull of the day.
Unlike houndsmen who run bear with dogs for the thrill of it, teamsters skid moose for a buck. Marc gets $75 an hour, and like a taxi, the meter starts running as soon as truck, trailer and horse leave the curb. On average, he figures he makes between a $100 and $150 on every moose he pulls, and he believes that teamsters who want to charge big money for their services come to a quick end.
He recalls a teamster from Maine who showed up one season with an asking price of $140 an hour. The Mainer got a call late in the day to go after two moose shot side by side. But with the coming darkness came complications, and by the time the moose were out of the woods and loaded, the bill was hovering around $800. Soon, said Marc, there was one less teamster skidding moose.
“That information got back to the weigh-in station, and he was gone by Tuesday.”
By 7:30 activity around the state highway garage in Island Pond Saturday morning has picked up. It’s the first day in the biggest season planned since Vermont started to issue moose permits in 1993. Thirty permits were issued then, compared to 1,250 for 2007. But now, as then, the most permits and the best hunting are found in the Northeast Kingdom.
A Fish and Wildlife biologist, dressed for the day’s work, comes by and talks to Marc and another teamster from Sutton who has pulled in with a pair of horses in his trailer. The Sutton fellow says he only used the pair as a team once last year to pull a moose that had been shot and fell over an embankment. The hour feels like something is about to begin.
“Any calls yet,” asks the biologist.
“Not yet,” says Marc.
A couple of early risers with more than a passing interest in the season come by to shoot the breeze. The conversation is easy and topical as the men
In the woods, Bob holds still as Marc Farrow makes the hitch to the base of the bull’s antlers. The pull out of the woods goes flawlessly, prompting one in the hunting party, Ryan Downey of Dorset, to observe that nothing can top Bob, not even a four-wheeler.
pick their way through subjects as likely or not to come up over a camp table: the impact the unusually warm weather may have on the hunt; the wisdom of giving names to farm animals you plan to eat; the cell tower formed to look like a tree on Interstate 91 between Orleans and Newport; and the likelihood of Vermont having a good deer season. The conversations oil the teamsters’ memories of past pulls.
Marc recalls the big winds on his second year out. “There were trees coming down every moose I pulled that day,” he says. Another story tells of how a successful hunter who didn’t know how to use his GPS — the directional finder that is keyed to satellites — and took horse and moose in circles until Marc found his way out by following a brook. And then there was the story about the guys who shot a bull moose late in the day and had to leave it overnight. Fearful that predators might make a banquet of their kill, they emptied their bladders in a ring around the moose and hung their underwear off its rack. When teamster and horse arrived the next morning, neither the undisturbed carcass nor the flying underwear spooked the horse.
Time waiting is tired time. And conversation is languishing when a man in a mid-sized pickup pulls into the lot a few minutes after eight, spots Marc, and rolls down his window.
“You busy?” he says.
He leads Marc east out of Island Pond and into the Seneca mountain range onto a side road that dead ends at a gravel pit. “Just about the same place as last year,” he says recalling the moose that he shot in the same neighborhood. Now it’s his buddy’s turn. Marc harnesses Bob and gets him ready for the pull. Bob stands nonchalant; it’s the teamster’s turn to work. Together they are about to embark on the first leg toward a milestone that came up in conversation earlier. “If Bob gets four today, that will be 100 moose that he’s pulled,” Marc says.
The day’s first pull has every appearance of being an easy pull. Marc seems to like it — even though it doesn’t measure up to the challenge that makes a teamster’s blood run hot and entices him to bring his horse into the woods during hours that can be ungodly dark, and have him pull over every type of terrain imaginable, through mud and snow and swamps and bogs and up and down and over fallen trees and banks crowded with puckerbrush or raspberry bushes that grab at your clothes. All to see your horse pull. “It’s pretty neat,” says Marc.
Dan O’Leary’s moose looks to be all head and antlers as he is weighed in Island Pond. Ryan Downey hit the weight right on the money when he guessed the big fellow would come in at 760 pounds.
A 15-minute walk or so down a skidder road free of ruts and layered with decaying limb wood puts Bob alongside a prize bull moose shot at 7:33. He has been dressed out and is ready to go. The hunter, Dan O’Leary of Dorset, watches approvingly as Marc makes the hitch around the bull’s antler. A command from Marc, and Bob is off at a twitching, get-out-of-his-way speed.
“That horse is smart,” says Dan. “That’s how smart they get when you work them every day in the woods.”
Bob brings the moose back to the gravel pit where Marc has him stop at the cusp of a bank. There, with the aid of a wooden pallet, the men swing him into the back of a pickup. A bull appearing to be in its prime who will tip the scales back in Island Pond at 760 pounds.
Marc fetches a bucket of water from a nearby stream, and Bob goes back into the trailer. It’s approaching 9:30, and only three more to go before he reaches 100 pulls.
