The Moose Kill List or How Much do I Really Love my Husband?

Hunter's office happens to be closest to East Hill Road so that's the one I take to drop him off in the morning and pick him up at night. East Hill's got it's quirks. There's the hairpin turn that faces the winter sun and gets slick with ice from about 4pm onward. I grazed a guardrail with the bumper of the truck there one evening in a gentle yet out-of-control slide. Weee.

The other night, at around 6:30, I drove down East Hill Road to pick up Hunter. I successfully negotiated that slippy hairpin then quickly came up on the flashing lights of State Troopers cars. As I got closer, I saw a massive moose lying on the ground and a dented car nearby. They say everything's bigger in Alaska...Guess that applies to road kill, too.

I later came to find out that Alaska has a road kill list. If a moose gets killed on the highway, the Troopers pull up the roadkill list and call the name at the top. This lucky person presumably grabs their gear and goes out to get their moose, guts, windshield bits and all. I learned a lot about guts in Dillingham. You can't just leave a gut pile by the road, that's bad manners in Alaska.

How you'd heave a 1,100lb dead moose into the back of a pick up eludes me, though perhaps not for long. When I told Hunter about the road kill list he enthusiastically exclaimed that we need to be on it. "What a great way to score moose for the winter," he said.

I asked him to please think through what he was proposing. He works up to 12 hours a day, four to five days a week. If we're on the list and the troopers call, how likely is it that I would be the one to take the call? Very likely. Too likely for my liking.

I'm calling all my manly math friends to help me here...I need to present a man-case against being on that list. I don't want to heave a gut-filled, partly crushed moose into the truck on some snow-blown piece of asphalt. Hunter says I'd be easy. I beg to differ. Besides, what would we do with a pile of moose guts?