Never Say It Can't Be Done!

(The Story of the Man, the Moose, and the ... Bicycle?)
I am a desert girl from Southern California, and before I moved to Sweden my contact with wild animals was limited to the smaller variety, like scorpions, spiders, and snakes. About the closest we ever got to hunting was when my dad killed a rattlesnake in our backyard when I was three years old. But we didn't eat it.

So here I am in central Sweden--home of the ubiquitous moose. The annual moose-hunting season is the pinnacle of all things moose around here for those so inclined. However, as a long-time vegetarian and the wife of one of the few non-hunting Swedish males around these parts, I never think about moose much beyond watching for them on the road when the moose crossing signs appear. My husband, however, is a science teacher extraordinaire at the local high school. For him, moose-hunting season has nothing to do with filling our freezer with big hunks of moose meat. Instead it's about the more exciting promise of dissection, and his hunting students are happy to oblige. (For that matter, his students are happy to oblige even with road kill, but I digress.)

Now, many people see Swedes as being dependent on the government and lacking get-up-and-go, but my experience is quite the opposite. The Swedes I know, in particular my husband's family, tend to be stubborn in areas of self-reliance and nearly as hardy as the Norwegians when it comes to physical stamina. So, late one night last fall, when my husband got the call he had been waiting for, he hurriedly got his jacket and bicycle helmet on. One of his students had not one, but four moose heads ready for him to fetch. Ah, there would be glorious dissections in class the next day!

But wait--the bicycle?

"You can't take your bicycle to pick up moose heads on the other side of town. You will never make it home!" I protested. My pleas fell on deaf ears.

"At least take the bicycle trailer!" I tried to reason, although the thought of four bloody moose heads in our boys' main means of transportation did make my stomach do a little loop.

My husband assured me that at least one of the moose heads was a "junior" head, as if that might make a difference. I had only a diffuse idea of how big a moose head might be, so the "junior" distinction was lost on me. So off he went by bicycle to pick up the heads.

Three hours passed.

This is a bicycle ride that normally takes, oh, maybe 30 minutes roundtrip. I began to worry. I stood by the window waiting for him. Finally I saw his bicycle light coming down the street and I threw open the door.

"Where have you been?!" I questioned in the typical fashion of a mother who first worries and then gets angry when one of her charges is late.

Then I saw. His bicycle was bloody. His clothes were spotted with blood. He had four ripped plastic grocery store bags with parts of animal carcasses sticking out here and there. Yuck.

I gave him several big plastic bags. He re-wrapped the heads and put them in the back of our station wagon. Yuck again!

"What did you do that for?" I demanded.

"They are too big for the freezer and they need to be kept cold. In the car, they can freeze overnight."

For the umpteenth time that night, I thanked God that my husband was not a hunter.

And all that blood on my hubby, then?

Well, he had made it up to his student's house and happily taken the four moose heads offered. Each adult head was a good three feet wide and weighed about 40 pounds (and this was without antlers, mind you). The two "junior" heads were only a tad smaller and about half as heavy. So off he had gone on his bicycle, two adult heads hanging from the handlebars in plastic grocery bags and two junior heads tucked into the child seat on the back--fitting, as they were about the size of a small child. He had cycled only about a quarter of a mile before the plastic bags broke from the weight of the heads. Two giant moose heads had gone rolling around on the bicycle path with my husband desperately trying to round them up and back onto the bicycle. He had repeated this drop, roll, retrieve several times before he gave up trying to ride and realized he would have to walk while balancing the heads, four in a row. By now he had gotten rather bloody and the heads looked rather suspicious, so he had thought it best to take the unlit bicycle path along the lake, lest he meet other people out for a stroll and scare the wits out of them. So this is where he had been for three hours, barely balancing the four heads on his bike, inching his way home in the dark.

In the end, his students had a three-day dissection fest, with his pre-med students especially enjoying the eyeballs and brains.

After that night, I made him promise never again to fetch heads with a bicycle and never to bring bloody heads home to us again. I insisted he take the car next time--and to drive straight to the school! There is only so much my vegetarian stomach can handle.