CHAPTER 3
You have to think about one shot. One shot is what it’s all about. The deer has to be taken with one shot. – “The Deer Hunter” (1978)
My dad’s nickname for me was Capt. The way he pronounced it sounded like “cap,” but I’d seen it in print on birthday cards and Christmas packages, and it was spelled “Capt” like the abbreviation for captain. I don’t know the origin of it and he never told me, but I always liked the way it sounded whenever he’d shout out, “Hey, Capt!”
He was a handsome man in his early forties and in reasonably good physical shape. With a full head of wavy, black hair and a rugged, square jaw, my father reminded a lot of people of the 1950s film actor Fred MacMurray.
My dad, Ray Cockrell, was from Michigan and moved to California right before I was born. He loved the outdoors, grew up deer hunting, and was a consummate sportsman. It was always his dream for the two of us going on a big-game hunting trip for moose, elk, or bear.
Going hunting was a ritual that countless fathers and sons went through. It was the ultimate bonding experience because it was a chance for a man to pass on his expertise and knowledge of the great outdoors to his son.
Hunting season was always something sacred to my dad and my Uncle Delbert, who we visited every year. They started growing their beards a couple of weeks before opening day and got ready to go to deer camp. My dad and Uncle Del would get their guns out, clean them, and oil them up. They’d go to the shooting range on weekends for target practice and make sure the camping gear, food, and other supplies were all ready to go.
I watched my dad go through this process many times, so I knew what it meant to him. Going hunting with his son was one of the things he cherished most. I went with him a few times, but I’d always been too young to have my own gun. He’d often let me shoot one of his guns but would only let me aim at a tin can or a target. Then when I was about 10 years old, he bought me my first rifle – a Savage bolt-action .22 caliber.
I didn’t have the same passion for hunting that my dad did, but I loved just being with him. Whenever we went on trips together, whether it was hunting, fishing, or camping, it was always great fun. We both really enjoyed spending time together.
“He handed me the rifle and commanded, “Here you go. Shoot him!'”
We had often talked about taking a big hunting trip someday to northern Michigan because he had grown up there and loved going back. Maybe we’d even head up into Canada where the bigger game were.
The time to make that trip was now. We both knew that we might never have the chance to do this again. Dad put the trip together quickly. In a few short days, he had it all worked out.
The plan was for us to fly to Michigan and meet up with my uncle Del, who lived outside Detroit. From there we’d drive north into Canada and hunt for a week. After the trip, I’d fly to New York and continue on to Europe.
The next few days were a blur. I was busy getting everything ready, saying goodbye to friends, and making sure I had their addresses so I could stay in touch with them. I moved out of the Penthouse Apartments. David moved into my room for the remaining weeks he planned to spend in the United States before returning to Ireland.
The hardest part came when it was time to say goodbye to my mother. It was very emotional for both of us. I wanted her and dad to know how thankful I was for their support, not just in this situation, but throughout my life. Now, rather awkwardly, we had a very short time to find a way to say those words. After we said all of the important things we could think of saying, it was time to go. We all cried. Then my dad and I were on our way.
I wouldn’t be able to even come close to imagining what my mom and dad were feeling until decades later, when I’d have children of my own. Only then could I begin to grasp what it must have felt like for them to have their teenage son say, “I just gotta go, mom and dad. I might never be back.”
They still weren’t aware that I had about $3,500 in my pocket. They knew that I’d sold my car and had cashed in my savings, but they didn’t really think I had enough money to last very long. I knew it worried them a lot. They probably thought I’d be back in six months.
My parents may have even suspected that I’d done something illegal, like earning money from dealing marijuana. It certainly wouldn’t have made them feel any better to hear that I hadn’t done that, but instead I’d been an embezzler. None of that mattered to me now; I was leaving the country.
My dad and I flew to Detroit, and we were met at the airport by Uncle Del and his wife Reva. I hadn’t seen my uncle in many years, probably not since I was about six years old. I had always liked him a lot, and I remembered him as a great big bear of a guy. He was the quintessential outdoorsman and sort of a Daniel Boone type.
Uncle Del must have been six foot five, probably over 250 pounds, with a deep-barrel chest of a laugh. He had gray, wavy hair like my dad and about a week’s worth of grizzly, black beard. My uncle was a real gentle giant and always very kind to me.
This time when I saw him, I sensed something was wrong. I was older now, and he didn’t like the long hair I was sporting. He also made it clear right away that he wasn’t very happy with me being a draft dodger.
Unlike my father, Uncle Del was a World War II Veteran. He had served in the Navy, and was a very patriotic guy. As we talked about it – and we had plenty of time to do that on the drive north to Canada – Uncle Del and I eventually came to some kind of an understanding about the events going on in the world.
He couldn’t justify the war in Vietnam to me or to himself. All he could do was echo the same argument that so many others had put before me: you should shut up and do what your government tells you to do. It was that old crap about “my country, right or wrong…love it, or leave it.” I was so sick of hearing that.
Uncle Del finally admitted that he certainly would not want his son to go to Vietnam, and I know that he came to appreciate the dilemma that I and a lot of other young people faced. It was just this resistance thing he was so opposed to. But he also realized that I was no drug-crazed, draft card burning, commie pinko either, even if I looked like one with that damn long hair. Besides, we were going hunting!
We were traveling in Uncle Del’s big Dodge pickup truck and pulling his camp trailer which would be our home for the next week. The excitement about the trip was mounting, and that feeling grew as we crossed through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and got closer to the Canadian border. The destination was a place north of Thunder Bay, Ontario; it was a spectacular drive.
I realized how ironic it was for me to be going to Canada at a time when so many other guys my age were coming here to escape the draft. I felt a little nervous crossing the border, worrying that the police might recognize my name and say, “Hey, aren’t you wanted by the Selective Service System, young man?” I knew this was ridiculous, but I thought about it anyway.
The other thing I couldn’t help thinking about was the contradiction of me, the draft dodger, who wouldn’t go into military service to fight a war, but was now heading off heavily armed into the forest to kill an innocent moose or bear!
I wasn’t going to let those ideas put a damper on the trip. For one thing, I knew how much this meant to my dad, so I justified it all in my mind. Right now, I was having a great time, and I was really looking forward to the coming week.
We’d been driving for the better part of two days and had been off the paved road for a few hours. After creeping along some incredibly rough dirt roads, we found what we thought was a suitable site and decided to set up camp.
It was a beautiful part of the country, way out in the deep Canadian wilderness. There were no other hunters or campers in sight, and we were probably a couple of hours from the nearest telephone. We parked the truck and began to set up the trailer. It was about an hour before dark, and it was freezing cold and raining lightly.
My dad and I decided we’d go for a little drive to survey our new surroundings before dark and left my uncle to finish setting up camp. We grabbed a rifle and some binoculars and drove down an old logging road.
We had gone about two miles along a rugged, narrow, muddy road. It looked like we were the only ones to have been here for quite some time. The freezing rain began to fall a little harder. Suddenly my dad stopped the truck. “Look, up there” he said excitedly, “It’s a moose!”
He was pointing about a hundred yards ahead. On the left side of the road was a moose bending his head down to eat something on the ground. He was off the road by a few feet and hadn’t spotted us yet.
My dad looked through the binoculars and saw that it was a young male with a small set of spiked horns. He handed me the rifle and commanded, “Here you go. Shoot him!”
As he handed me the gun, I could tell that his heart was pounding as hard as mine. He hadn’t put the clip in the rifle, so I knew there was only one shell in the chamber.
I got out of the passenger side of the truck and stood there on the road, carefully taking aim. I looked through the scope for what felt like a very long time, just watching the moose standing there. Dad whispered forcefully, “Come on! Shoot!” I waited a little longer to make sure my aim was true. Then, I slowly squeezed off the shot.
BOOM!
The big Winchester .308 jolted me backwards, and the shot echoed through the woods. When the smoke cleared, I looked up to see the moose getting up off the ground, running into the woods.
“You hit him, Capt!” My dad yelled. “You got him!”
We jumped back in the truck and sped off down the road to the spot where the moose had fallen. We were so excited and were both hyperventilating. Dad was yelling, “You got him! You got him! Jesus Christ! What a shot, Capt!”
When we arrived at the spot, we saw a trail of blood leading into the thick woods which were about twenty yards from the side of the road. We marked it, and then we got into the truck to go back and get Uncle Del.
We knew what we had to do; we had to find that moose. The last thing we wanted was a wounded animal in the woods. This is something that I’d heard my dad talk about many times. He said a hunter must never waste any game. He should always track and locate a wounded animal, either to finish it off or to find where it had gone to die.
In this case, we’d have to track him until we found him, and it was getting dark fast. When we got back to the campsite, Uncle Del was anxiously waiting to hear what the shot was all about.
“Gregg shot a moose!” my dad told him breathlessly, and we all piled into the truck and went back to look for him.
Dad kept raving about it the whole way back. “Wow, what a shot Capt!” he kept saying over and over again.
The bullet had traveled about a hundred yards, and I was glad that I hit him, but now we had to find him. “It would have been a much better shot if I’d just dropped him right there,” I thought. It wouldn’t turn out to be such a good shot at all if we never found him.
We got back to the spot that we’d marked on the road, and each of us spread out about ten feet apart. Then we walked straight into the woods where the moose had disappeared. It was nearly dark now, and I hoped we weren’t in for a long search.
Each of us moved slowly ahead. The ground here was a close tangle of trees, shrubs, roots, and rocks. Every step was a chore. We fought our way along and were about ten yards inside the tree line when all of a sudden, I practically stumbled over the body of the moose! He had fallen not far from where I had shot him, and he was as dead as a doornail.
I yelled out, “Here he is! Here he is!”
My dad and uncle came running over, and we all began to yell, whoop, and holler. I was really excited, but they were just ecstatic.
“Whoa! What a shot!” My uncle yelled.
He got down and showed us where the bullet had hit right in the shoulder. He lifted up the moose’s head by the two spiked horns, each about a foot long.
I stood there for a few seconds looking into the motionless eyes of the moose. Suddenly, I felt so strong, like I had achieved some great victory. A rush of adrenaline swept through me and I understood, right then and there, the thrill of hunting. My dad must have had that feeling so many times before. A surge of power had come over me, as if I had conquered the elements by expertly killing a truly impressive beast.
We kept standing there gazing at the moose, my dad still raving about the shot I’d made. However, it was important to gut and clean the carcass as soon as possible.
I’m sure that my dad and Uncle Del had probably field dressed a few hundred deer between the two of them, but neither one of them had ever tackled an animal this big. It was going to be a large, messy job. Uncle Del took the lead and began to cut the moose open. As he did, he showed us where the bullet had gone. It had been a direct hit and went straight through his lungs. It was a completely killing shot. The moose had still been able to get up and run, just not very far.
I felt a little queasy at the sight of so much blood. It got worse as Uncle Del reached inside the carcass and yanked out handfuls of guts and tossed them aside. I’d never seen an animal this big opened up before, and suddenly the feeling of power that I’d had a few minutes ago was gone. I had just killed something. Something truly magnificent and innocent was dead by my hands.
By the time the moose was gutted and cleaned out, we were all covered in blood, and a huge pile of what had been inside him now laid in a grotesque heap on the ground.
We knew that the carcass was going to be way too heavy for us to carry out of the woods in one piece, so my uncle took out his hatchet and began to quarter it. He hacked away, cutting through flesh and bone until there were four pieces. It was still so heavy that it would take two of us to carry each quarter.
It was nearly midnight now, and we began to hear wolves howling not too far off in the distance. It was a little frightening to be standing in the middle of the wilderness with a freshly killed moose and wolves catching the scent of it and wanting some.
We decided one of us had to stay behind with the carcass while the other two carried a quarter back to the truck. Uncle Del took the first shift guarding the moose as my dad and I carried the first piece. It was a struggle. The terrain was very rough, and the hunk of meat we were lugging weighed about 300 pounds. It took us nearly half an hour to get it to the truck which was only about 50 yards away.
We went back for the second quarter, and this time my dad stayed with the carcass, while Uncle Del and I made our way to the truck with the next piece. By now the smell of blood must have filled the woods because the howling of the wolves was getting closer and louder.
It was really creepy, and when it came my turn to stand guard, I kept my flashlight on, waved it around, and made as much noise as I could. I sang songs, whistled, and talked out loud. It also felt good to have my uncle Del’s .45 caliber pistol on my hip, as each of us had while standing guard.
Several hours later, the job was finished. We were totally exhausted and all covered in blood from hauling four giant slabs of fresh meat out of the woods. It was nearly daylight, and all three of us were completely spent and starving. There hadn’t been any time to eat or even finish setting up the camp.
The temperature outside was low, but the only way to properly preserve the meat was to get it into a freezer. The drive into town was over an hour long, and shifts were split so one of us wouldn’t fall asleep at the wheel. My dad woke up the guy at the nearest store and proudly told him the story. Then we ate!
The owner served us a huge breakfast in the small restaurant attached to his store, and we headed back to camp even more exhausted. Once again, the driving and napping was done in shifts. It was late in the morning when bedtime arrived. We never stopped talking, laughing, and marveling at what a day it had been right up until the moment our eyes closed.
For five more days, the three of us stayed at the hunting camp but never saw another moose or any bear. Near the end of the week, it seemed like a good idea to go bird shooting since there were birds everywhere. Hunting partridge with our shotguns was easy and made for a delicious feast on the final night.
The drive home was as incredibly scenic as the one coming north. We stopped in two small, picturesque Canadian towns that I will never forget. One was the village of Manitouwadge and the other was Thunder Bay.
Everywhere I looked in any direction was the perfect view for a postcard. I thought for a moment that maybe I should just stay here. Could I ever find a more beautiful place than this? At least it felt good to realize that I now had the freedom to do that if I wanted to, now that I had cut the cord between America and me.
I will always remember that trip and how perfectly it went. Who would have thought that I would bag a moose, exactly the prize we were hoping for, in the first hour and with a perfect shot that we’d all be talking about for the rest of our lives? I’ll also remember how excited my dad was, and how much he enjoyed seeing it play out just the way he had dreamed of for so many years. That thought made it easier for me to justify what I’d done in my own mind. I was feeling somewhat guilty for having killed such a magnificent animal.
The moose I killed was a young buck that weighed in at fifteen hundred pounds. We wound up taking around five hundred pounds of meat home, all professionally butchered and wrapped with each piece marked roast or steak or hamburger.
Canada really gouged us coming back over the border! They charged us some outrageous price according to the weight of the game we were bringing in. Based on the cost of the entire trip, including the hunting licenses (which were very expensive for non-Canadians), storing the meat, having it butchered, and bringing it back to the United States, we joked that the meat must have cost us about five hundred dollars a pound!
That wasn’t true, of course, but it became a running gag with us for years to come. It was expensive as hell, but nobody doubted for a minute that it was worth every penny.
As it would turn out, my dad, mother, Uncle Del, and many of my friends back home would eat moose burgers and moose steak long before I would ever try it. It would be about a year later when I finally ate what they said was some of the best meat they ever had.
The three of us returned to Detroit, and once again stayed at my Uncle Del’s house. We were all still just buzzing about the trip and how perfect it had been.
Then, Uncle Del told me that he wanted me to have his duffel bag, the one he had been issued in the Navy, to take with me on my trip. This meant a lot to me, and I accepted it gratefully. It replaced the sort of dumb looking backpack that I was planning to use. This made me look like more of an experienced traveler, too.
Uncle Del and I hugged, and we said a truly heartfelt goodbye to each other. I was pleased about the way I was leaving him, especially compared to the icy reception I had received when I’d first gotten to Detroit. I believed I’d won him over to an extent, and that made me even more confident in what I was about to do.
Then, my dad and I flew to New York from where my flight to Europe would take off later that day. He wanted to go as far as he could with me. We said a very emotional goodbye at JFK Airport. I can still remember the exact words he said to me.
“Well, Capt, I wish I had some words of wisdom to give you,” he started, “but I feel as if I’ve told you all the really important things I needed to tell you. If I haven’t said them by now…” His voice trailed off.
“You have said them dad. You’ve said them, and I’ll always remember them.” I assured him.
We hugged each other tightly and we both began to cry. Then, it was goodbye, and I boarded the plane. I was off to Europe!
