Rich Landers: Teacher meets her match with mischievous moose

Big-game animals can be trouble when they are alive – as a black-and-blue runner tells us this week – and even when they are dead and butchered, according to a hunter who called Wednesday noting that his van smelled awfully ripe.

Liz Hively, a teacher at Chattaroy Elementary, enjoys running for exercise, and now she can honestly say she gets a kick out of it, too, after a recent morning run on Wild Rose Prairie southwest of Deer Park. As usual, she was accompanied by her three Labs.

“I’ve been running these trails with my dogs for 20 years,” she said.

At a steep slope, Hively said she put down her head and was power-walking uphill until she came to her younger dog, who’d frozen in the trail.

“I looked up and saw a cow moose take after Bella,” Hively said. “She chased past me and when I looked up, another moose – a bull – was coming at me full-bore.”

The bull smacked Hively with his chest, knocked her to the ground and stomped on her with his huge hooves as he continued forward and disappeared into a thicket.

As Hively scrambled to her feet and tried to gather her dogs, the cow moose came storming back. “This time she took after the old dog, and she nailed him,” Hively said.

The old dog was freaked but OK as Hively gathered two of the three Labs and took refuge in a doghair stand of young pines.

“The third dog showed up, and here comes the cow charging us up the trail a third time,” Hively said. “She was running right at us in the trees and veered off at the last second.”

When the moose disappeared again, Hively headed the other direction down a steep slope with the dogs and ran the best mile of her life. “I’m 55 and I’ve never run downhill like that,” she said. “I’m bruised on the hips and other places from the bull, but I realized the next day my quads were wasted. That’s from the running.

“No one was seriously hurt, but the whole event changed my life a little. So much for going out on the trails, running on a beautiful fall day without a care in the world.”

Hively said she erred by putting her head down and losing track of her surroundings.

She said she should have been more alert to the tracks and the warning her dog was giving by its reactions. “And I should have realized that moose are in the rut. That can make things weird out there.”

Dev Stutsman of Cheney also had a close encounter with a big-game animal, but he wasn’t worried about getting hurt since his high-powered rifle had done a good job of rendering the deer harmless. He just wanted to get rid of what was left.

Stutsman succeeded in bagging the deer during the hunting season that opened last weekend. With the help of his son, the disabled hunter butchered the deer at home and stored the meat.

“We took what was left and put it into garbage bags and took it to the Waste-to-Energy plant,” he said. “But when I got there, they told me I couldn’t dispose of it there. I was shocked.”

Stutsman said he returned home and started calling officials from waste management and the Fish and Wildlife Department. “Somebody read me an RCW (Washington state law) that said to properly dispose of a dead animal, you have to go out and dig a hole 3 feet deep and bury it,” he said.

Concerned and confused, he called me and said he had to figure out what to do. “The carcass is still in the back of van and it’s starting to stink,” he said.

I became concerned and confused, too. Like most hunters, I’ve never buried the remains of the big-game animals I’ve bagged in Washington.

In fact, I’ve always equated field-processing a deer, elk or antelope with preparing a smorgasbord. The boned-out carcass and entrails left in the mountains are quickly picked clean, gnawed, swallowed and digested by scavengers, including beetles, rodents, ravens, eagles, coyotes and even grizzly bears.

After final butchering at home, I’ve often done just as Stutsman, sealing the remains in garbage bags for a proper waste management disposal.

And I’ve always been perfectly legal.

What got Stutsman turned away from the waste-to-energy plant was a simple misunderstanding.

There should have been no problem if he’d have said he wanted to dispose of the bagged bones and remains from butchering a deer. But apparently he arrived at the solid waste transfer station and was turned away after he told the operators he had a “deer carcass.”

“We’re not allowed to take large-animal carcasses (at the waste-to-energy plant), although we can take large carcasses at the Northside Landfill,” said Monica Bramble of the Spokane Solid Waste Management business office.

But the butchered carcass remains are acceptable at both facilities as long as they are sealed in bags to avoid a mess, she said.

I checked the Revised Codes of Washington, and found a law that pertains to domestic animals that die of disease. In that case, the disposal must follow state rules for burial, incineration or other methods.

Big game killed in 12 states or provinces outside of Washington fall into a different category for disposal.

In an effort to keep chronic wasting disease out of Washington, the state Fish and Wildlife Commission has banned the import of skeletal remains from deer, elk or moose taken in areas where CWD has been detected. Those areas include: Colorado, Illinois, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, South Dakota, Utah, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Wyoming, Alberta or Saskatchewan.

Capes and finished taxidermy mounts are not included in the ban.