Discerning Taste

By Tom Remington

Maurice Gallant from Mexico, Maine was out on his woodlot in the Roxbury Pond area last October doing a bit of trimming and cutting a little firewood. He had been at it for a couple of hours and he stopped to take a break and have a drink of ice cold Moxie. As he sat on a tree stump enjoying his refreshment, he looked down the old logging road that leads up in the direction of Old Blue Mountain and saw a man walking along carrying a shotgun and a grain sack. The man came to where Maurice was and stopped and the two proceeded to have a typical conversation that you might expect from two Mainers - one being a Frenchman.

Basically no enlightening tidbits of information was exchanged and the man was about to leave when all of a sudden around the corner came a Game Warden riding his 4 wheeler. Now three men had a bit of a talk when at last the Warden asked the man what he had in his sack. "Nothing!" was the reply. "Would you mind opening the bag up and dumping the contents out on the ground so I can see?" asked the Warden.

Well, the man was quite hesitant but eventually he tipped the sack upside down and out fell 2 rabbits, 5 partridge and a loon. Even the Warden looked surprised. He looked at the man, then looked on the ground and looked back at the man and then said, "Would you care to explain to me what in the hell you are doing?" The man mumbled some and the Warden asked him to speak up. He told the Warden that he had lost his job about 6 months ago and his wife had turned very ill and was in the hospital. He said the doctors only gave his wife a few more weeks to live. He also explained to the Warden that his children, all twelve of them between the ages of 1 and 13, hadn't eaten in days and he was out finding some food.

"Well," the Warden said. "I'm sorry about your situation but we have a bit of a problem here. I am willing to overlook the fact that you have exceeded your limit of partridge by one and rabbit season doesn't begin for 2 more months but fella, you got a dead loon there."

"I know" the man said. "But did I tell you that my three youngest kids have a rare blood disease and my oldest son has cancer? It is really bad and I can't tell you how hungry my one year old triplets are." "Triplets? Cancer? Rare blood disease?" asked the Warden. "Look, what you have done here is wrong and you can't just go around breaking the law just because your kids are hungry. Don't you know there are agencies out there to help people like you?

The Warden looked at the loon and then looked at the man and over to Maurice who just shrugged his shoulders. After some serious soul searching the Warden laid it on the line with this man. "I am going to believe your story about your hungry kids, sick wife and all and I am going to let you go this time. But if I ever see you with anything like this again I will lock you up and throw away the key."

The man slowly picked up his catch and put it back in the sack and as he turned to walk away the Warden stopped him again and asked, "Have you ever tasted a loon before?" "Well, ya once," said the man. The Warden again looked shocked but the man quickly explained that it was road kill. "What does it takes like?" questioned the Warden. "Well, it is really hard to explain," he said. "It's kind of a cross between a Bald Eagle and a Spotted Owl."