Missing Moose

My wife Kristen and I are spending the Labor Day Weekend in Greenville on the shores of Moosehead Lake. At 5:30 a.m. this morning our kind hosts at the Lodge at Moosehead Lake arranged a "moose safari" for us. We drove to First West Branch Pond and then paddled through a cold but lifting fog in search of moose.

Alas, the big animals didn't make an appearance for us (they tend to lie low before the annual fall rut, so it was no surprise), but we did see some great birds, including a family of solitary sandpipers (evidently not so solitary after all), a merlin, sharp-shinned hawks, and a young wood duck that rocketed out of a beaver flowage. As Maine natives, Kristen and I have both seen dozens of moose so we were content just to spend the morning in a canoe on a remote North Woods pond taking in the scenery.

Probably the highlight of the trip for me was when our Registered Maine Guide described a bull moose during rutting season as "Bill Clinton with four legs." That was one joke I hadn't heard before.

One True Sentence

"It was wonderful to walk down the long flights of stairs knowing that I'd had good luck working. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was started on a new story and I could not get going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.' So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut the scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written."

—Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

Poaching As a Way of Life

You don't need to talk with a game warden to learn that poaching is a widespread phenomenon in rural Maine. If you live in the sticks, it's not uncommon to hear gun shots in the woods at night, and every fly fisher I know has witnessed someone poaching fish. Today's Portland Press Herald carries a story about one recent episode in Mount Abram Township — not far from the setting of The Poacher's Son — that is noteworthy in only one regard: the poachers here were caught, literally red-handed.

Testing My Title

The Web is a wacky and wonderful thing. Spend enough time browsing, and you're bound to come across some elegant time waster. Recently, I stumbled across Lulu.com's Title Scorer, an app that uses algorithms to determine whether the proposed title of your novel will increase or decrease the chances of it being a national bestseller. Of course, I plugged in "The Poacher's Son" as a test. According to Title Scorer, my book has a 35.9% chance of hitting it big. That's not very reassuring, although it could be worse. Then again, Lulu (which specializes in self-publishing and print on demand) thinks Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets has only a 14.6% chance of being a bestselling title, so maybe there's hope for me yet.