Mooseburger

"Mooseburgers" were the order of the day at Lyndon Hill Junior High School, Seat Pleasant, yesterday noon.

"It's mooseburger tonight," Mike Oakes said, rubbing his gloved hands together in the 20-below cold and giving one last shove to the rump of the dead moose hanging off the bed of his red pickup truck.

A friend of many years standing flew down from Fairbanks, Alaska, bringing with her as many presents as old St. Nick himself might have carried – steak knives carved from walrus tusks, and, among other things, a fresh moose roast and a package of mooseburger!

How to gut a moose without slicing the organs and making a green, smelly mess out of the process, and how to cut it so that you got roasts and steaks instead of, as happened on her first two tries, a winter's supply of mooseburger.

From Alaska, I flew to Newark with moose meat one time— actually, mooseburger, given to me in a five-pound block by Ed and Ginny Gelvin, who lived in Central, about a hundred miles northeast of Fairbanks.