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By NATHANIEL T. WHEELWRIGHT 12/02/2007

It was my dentist who persuaded me to enter the Maine moose lottery. For years, whenever I'd lay captive in his chair, he would regale me with hunting tales as he cleaned my teeth.

"Don't worry," he assured me, "just list me as your alternate. If your name gets picked, I'll do the rest." Since the odds of having your name drawn in the moose lottery are only 1 in 125, I didn't give it another thought -- until he called to say we'd won.

Now, I had never shot anything bigger than a squirrel and that was decades ago when I was a boy. But, as a 48-year-old guy, I thought that going on a moose hunt was as sensible a way as any to front middle age. It also provided me an opportunity (to use Thoreau's phrase) "to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life."

By his own account, Thoreau's introduction to moose hunting was unsettling if not traumatic. The year was 1853 and he had been invited by George Thatcher to join a hunting expedition to Chesuncook Lake led by Joe Aitteon, an experienced Indian guide. Thatcher, a Bangor lumberman who was married to Thoreau's cousin Rebecca, had accompanied Thoreau on his 1846 trip to "Ktaadn."

Neither Thoreau nor Thatcher had ever laid eyes on a moose, although Aitteon in years past had killed as many as 10 in a single day. The trip had scarcely begun before Thoreau's conscience began to prick him. But despite his misgivings he decided to continue as "reporter or chaplain to the hunters."

If you are contemplating going on a moose hunt yourself, let me recommend that you spare yourself reading Thoreau's heart-wrenching account of the "tragical business." After Thatcher shot a cow moose, Aitteon tracked it, dispatched it and skinned it. "The ball," Thoreau wrote, "had passed through the shoulder-blade diagonally and lodged under the skin on the opposite side, and was partially flattened. My companion keeps it to show to his grandchildren."

Perhaps it was Thatcher's eagerness to look for yet another moose to shoot that soured Thoreau, or Thatcher's boast of once having shot 60 partridges from his buggy, or the fact that "our Nimrod" (as Thoreau referred to his cousin-in-law) tended to fire in haste even when he "did not know what kind of creature it was."

"I had had enough of moose-hunting," Thoreau wrote. "The afternoon's tragedy, and my share in it, as it affected the innocence, destroyed the pleasure of my adventure."

When I came back from my own moose hunt, one of my brothers, who was familiar with "The Maine Woods" and Thoreau's distaste for the whole affair, asked how I had felt at the conclusion of the successful hunt and whether I, like Thoreau, had felt compunction.

Here's what I remember. While night fell and my companion drove back to camp to fetch his trailer, I stayed by the moose. The black sky was flecked with cold stars. The scent of firs mingled with hide. I thought about the black bear that had lumbered across our snowy path that afternoon and the coyote we'd watched lit up by the sunset. The silence of the northern forest that night was so expansive and absolute that it felt like a solid, like ice.

It's almost embarrassing to admit, but I also remember an unexpected sense of pride in playing the provider for my family, a rare feeling in the 21st century. The 165 pounds of hormone-free meat that was my share of the hunt lasted us two years. Maybe I imagined it or maybe they were humoring me, but I remember the special look they gave me every time moose meat was served at dinner.

After my grandmother died, we found a small jewelry box in the bedroom bureau of her Orono farm with a note on it: "Nat would like this."

Inside was a lead slug the size of a lima bean and shaped like a dumbbell, rounded and smooth on one side, and roughly concave on the other. It weighs just under an ounce, about as much as a sparrow. Around it is tied a stained paper tag that reads in brown ink in her own grandfather's florid 19th century script, "A Moose shot with this bullet on Pima Stream by Geo A. Thatcher see Thoreau."

Next to Thatcher's slug, the bullet that killed our moose looks small, an indented copper cylinder with jagged petals like a wilted flower. I keep them both to show my grandchildren.

Nathaniel T. Wheelwright teaches ecology at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine

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