Just Another Jim's

Alaska Journal

Ch. 12: Road Kill

Posted December 1, 2006 by James E. Nelson

State law in Alaska says that wildlife killed by accident (which generally means they were hit by a vehicle) or illegally belong to the state. In turn, the state authorities have developed a network of volunteers to recover the meat from dead animals for the purpose of giving it to the needy. In most non-Alaskan’s minds this conjures an image of flattened possum straddling the center stripe or a bloated and rotten deer laying on the edge of the road. This is completely the wrong image of the road kill program, mostly because most non-Alaskans have the wrong sense of scale.

In the Delta area, road kill meant either moose or bison with an occasional caribou far to the south. Cars and pickups rarely drive away under their own power if they’ve hit either animal. As a result the State Troopers are generally on the scene a short time after such an incident and the appropriate people are called immediately so the animal recovery process can begin. Because the animals are so large and their hides so thick there is usually not much damage to the meat. Typically one quarter (the front or rear leg that came in contact with the vehicle) is bruised to the point that it’s only good for hamburger. The hide protects the rest of the meat from significant damage. It is also a large amount of meat involved, and well worth the effort. A big moose can fill the average size freezer to overflowing and keep the local food pantry stocked for months.

In Delta, as was the common pattern in most communities, each church got a turn at recovering the meat. It was traditional in the Presbyterian Church for the pastor to do this job. When I first came to town Jeff had been taking care of it until the new pastor got settled in. About 2:00 a.m., a month or two after I arrived in town, Jeff called and said we had a moose to clean up.

That was the easiest road kill job I ever did because Jeff had all sorts of equipment that made the job easier. We went to the scene of the accident, backed his trailer up to the dead moose, hooked a winch cable onto his back legs, and twenty minutes later we were headed back to town before the tow truck arrived to clean up the remains of the car. Once in his shop he lifted the moose high into the air using his block and tackle normally used for pulling engines. He had a chainsaw set aside for cutting meat. (It used vegetable oil rather than petroleum based bar oil to lubricate the chain, thus not ruining the meat with petroleum by-products.) Within a couple of hours the moose was cut down to manageable pieces. We spent the next day butchering and wrapping the meat.

By 10 a.m., the desperately needy (nearly all of them have police scanners, and therefore knew about the road kill, typically before I did) were knocking on my door saying they were a bit short this week and wondering if we might perchance have some moose meat available for them to eat.

Road kill recovery was all uphill from there. The men of the congregation were loathe to go out on the highway with me in the middle of the night and I lacked persuasive powers of my predecessor, so more often than not, I had to go to the scene by myself. Furthermore, I had neither the equipment nor the know-how when it came to field dressing a moose or buffalo. I quickly learned that it’s not a one man job.

The most critical task is skinning the animal. Even in bitterly cold weather. Moose and buffalo hides are such good insulators that if the animal isn’t skinned in a reasonable amount of time, the meat spoils from the excess body heat. Skinning a moose is a combination of cutting through the connecting tissues between hide and meat and then pulling the hide away from the body. But when the moose weighs many hundreds of pounds and the hide itself can weigh 100 pounds, and the whole mess is laying on the side of the road instead of hanging by its hind legs in a freezer, getting the skin off is near impossible. Of course (and this next sentence is not for the squeamish) this is all done in the midst of a bloody mess because the very first task is gutting the animal and the moose are so big that you can’t very well gut it and then drag the carcass fifty feet away from the offal to finish the job. The offal is so extensive and weighs so much it’s typically not practical to drag it away from the animal either. Everything—hide, meat, entrails—is right there in one big smelly mess.

I had a hack saw, a cross cut saw, and a hunting knife. With those tools I managed to get the animal into six pieces and pulled into the back of the pickup in about three hour’s time. Ideally the hide is removed from the animal in such a way that it forms a protective mat. As the carcass is cut up it lays on the hide protecting the meat from dirt as well as the hair on outside of the hide. But, my tools were not ideal. When I finally got the sectioned carcass into the pickup bed it was so covered with dirt, pine needles, pebbles, hair, and the occasional piece of asphalt that I suspect I could have dragged it home behind the pickup and it wouldn’t have looked a lot worse for wear.

As an aside, in the previous chapter I said that I had little interest in going out into the woods to hunt moose. The reason was a combination of experiences on the caribou hunt and with road kill. If it took me three hours of back-breaking work to field dress a moose laying ten feet from my pickup, I can’t imagine how much work it would be thirty miles from the highway with only a four-wheeler for transportation.

The next day we washed all the meat down with salt water to remove the grime, cut off the outer layer, and packaged the meat. Although a great deal of meat went to waste, what with the embedded asphalt and pine needles, there was still an amazing amount of clean, unbruised, and very edible meat left to put in the freezer. A single moose is an overwhelming source of bounty.

Nearly everyone who was ever blessed with a package of meat that I had prepared complained about my lack of butchering skills. (I failed to take that particular course in seminary.) Not knowing how to cut the meat for maximum usage I generally managed to ruin the steaks or cut slices with the grain rather than against the grain. When Pastor Jim was the butcher, pretty much everything was stew meat in the end.

One bitterly cold winter night Betty Bonkers was over at the house for dinner and a movie. Betty was an enigma. She was a professional woman with a successful business in Delta that she had built from scratch. On the other hand, she was one of the most entertainingly eccentric people in town. We always enjoyed our evening when we were with Betty. On this particular night she was getting ready to go home and Chris was getting ready for bed when I got a call about a road kill moose up in the foothills of the Alaska Range.

Betty suggested we should make a party of it and all four of us go together. Brenda and I pointed out that tomorrow was a school day and it was already past bedtime. Besides, the temperature was already -30° and dropping. She said that was all the more reason to make a party out of it, and besides we could turn it into an educational field trip for Chris. How can you argue with a successful professional woman? We gathered supplies, put on our parkas and headed up the mountain.

Fortunately this particular moose was fairly small so it wasn’t the overwhelming task that my first solo moose was. On the other hand, the tow truck and Trooper were just leaving when we arrived, so it was a dark, desolate, and windy night up on the mountainside. But by the glow of the headlights we were able to get the job done. After gutting the animal, I began to remove the hide while Betty dragged a reluctant Chris over to entrail pile. They began sorting through it and identifying all the parts. Once that task was complete she was ready to cut the stomach open and begin to identify what this moose had been eating before its untimely demise. Both Chris and his mother put their foot down at that point; the educational portion of the field trip was over. Class was dismissed and they went back to the pickup cab to warm up.

I was close to having the carcass skinned and ready to start quartering it when Chris came over and asked if those were eyes glowing in the not too distant dark. Sure enough, wolves were hungrily watching our every move. The scent of blood had attracted them and they were ready to clean up the mess as soon as we left. We never did see the animals, but a dozen or so sets of glowing eyes kept us company for the remainder of the evening.

Working with knives and saws in bitterly cold weather requires a lot of care. I had a set of neoprene fishing gloves that I used on such occasions, but even with the gloves, my fingers got cold. When fingers are cold it’s much easier to slip with the knife. Gloves also make the hands bulky and it is much more difficult to do what needs to be done. In spite of the challenges, we managed to get the moose field dressed and quartered. Since there was snow on the ground, the meat remained remarkably clean through the whole process. It was also much easier throwing the moose quarters and hide into the back of the truck with two people handling the pieces. After about 90 minutes on the side of the highway, accompanied only by the moon, the wind, and the hungry eyes of the wolves, the task was done and we were on our way back into town.

Being a minister was physically hard work in interior Alaska. Along with dead moose on the road, there were the other tasks that inevitably came up: cutting and chopping firewood for an injured parishioner, hauling a truckload of produce and groceries from the Second Harvest warehouse in Fairbanks down to Delta for food distribution day, digging postholes for railroad ties to put around a garden. I had to choose how to respond to each of these tasks along the way, tasks that were often dirty and time consuming for people who were often ungrateful and critical of how I did things. Road kill had to be near the bottom of my favorite pastoral tasks, but Betty Bonkers taught me how to treat such tasks as an adventure and a field trip. Being a pastor in Lincoln, Nebraska was a lot like buying meat at the local safeway: clean, bright, and hermetically sealed. In truth, neither had much to do with the realities of how things actually got done in the real world. I learned a lot of things in seminary, but I got my pastoral education on the side of the road in Alaska.