When I was a boy, we lived on a farm. Our house sat on top of a hill overlooking the village of Paris, Ohio, and from our front porch, you could see for miles all around. The whole world spread out from my doorstep.
In our parlor, a moose—or rather just his head—was mounted on the wall. His name was Oscar though I never knew why. In later years, my mother told me Oscar was an elk, not a moose, but even though I was quite young, I remember Oscar’s broad antlers and rounded nose, a moose I am sure, not an elk.
As a young man in the 1890s, my great grandfather was a brakeman for the Northern Pacific Railroad in Montana. He was an avid outdoorsman and hunter. The story goes that my great grandfather shot poor Oscar while he was standing on the platform of the train’s observation car. Years later when my mother related the story to one of her friends, the astonished woman asked, “How on earth did he ever get up there?”
Today when I come across trophy heads of once glorious beasts, I see them staring blankly across the years through glass eyes, and I am sad and grieve for lives cut short by the hunter’s bullet. And I remember Oscar.
Hanging on the wall, Oscar looked after me as I played beneath his ever watchful eyes. I loved Oscar and missed him for a long time after my mother sold the farm, and we moved away leaving Oscar to guard the old house.
At times, such as now, I wonder what ever happened to Oscar. Did he end up on some other wall somewhere? Perhaps on the wall of a fraternal society? Or on a trash heap forgotten and abandoned?
Oscar was from a noble line of sacred animals that were revered by the plains Indians of the land that bore him. I like to think that he was placed on a funeral pyre and his last earthly remains were committed to flames and smoke and released into the sky where he could finally rest among the stars.
I’m pretty sure that is not the case.
But maybe it is.