Rejected

Jules

Milo stopped and tried to apply some of his now rusty project management skills to the issue. The bow was not the real goal. Getting a large supply of food was the goal; the bow had been a means to that end. He had not thought much past the construction of the bow as to what he might shoot with it. Maybe Jules the Moose? Jules still showed up most mornings to drink from the pond while Milo ate breakfast.

He tried to envision what would have happened if he had actually managed to launch an arrow at Jules. More than likely, he would have missed. Then tried again if the moose had not been spooked. If he had hit it, Milo imagined that his arrow would have missed anything vital, instead enraging six hundred kilos of antler-waving woodlands survivor. In retrospect, it was probably a good thing that the bow had broken and that he had to work on another way to capture the food he would need.

He tried to think of other ways that he could go about killing something as large as Jules. Shooting the moose was out as he did not think that he was emotionally ready to try making the bow again. A sling might have been in his skill set if he had thought to research them back when he had an Internet connection. As it was, he had less knowledge of slings than bows. Another option he briefly considered was using a fire to herd Jules off a cliff. Milo vaguely remembered that prehistoric hunters had done that. Then he discarded the notion: he had no way to control the fire, he was unaware of a steep cliff nearby and a fire was likely to attract firefighters.

Eventually, Milo settled on trapping. He had been successful with traps and thought that he could manage scaling one up to moose size, though it was going to take something more than a trunk liner and a stick. He was going to need to think like those scrappy Ewoks from "Return of the Jedi" with their logs swinging from trees, smashing the Imperial walkers. Something bigger, using the tools that he had available. He thought about it as he watched the bow burn in the fire. He could rope up a couple of trunks and have them smash into the moose when it walked through a trip line, like the Ewoks. Too complicated: there had been many Ewoks available to hoist the logs up and devise the trap. In this forest, there was just himself. Maybe a spiked branch, spring loaded to swing also off a trip line. He thought that was a complicated as the two logs and beyond his abilities. He could try rolling something down a hill at the creature and hope that it did not get out of the way. It was simple, but relied on the moose being slow. Milo figured that the moose was too agile for that method. Finally, he settled on a hidden pit filled with spikes. He had the tools to make it: a shovel and a knife. He had the know-how: dig a hole and fill it with sharpened branches pointing up. Then cover the whole thing with branches and leaves to hide it. This was a plan he could do.

Having decided on a course of action, Milo started applying his project planning skills. There was no need to do a budget analysis as everything he needed was his to forage. Instead he focused on the What and the Where: what did he need and where would it go? The first was fairly simple. He was going to need ten or a dozen sharpened branches, each at least six centimeters in diameter. He was also going to need some leafy boughs to cover the pit once he had finished digging it. Getting all of that together would take him the better part of a day. Fortunately, he figured he could be sharpening the sticks while he waited for the diminishing population of SFRs to enter his trunk liner trap.

Location was going to be a bit trickier. Milo had not spent much time studying Jules the Moose's habits. He knew that Jules entered the clearing just after sunrise, drank from the pond for roughly five minutes, gave Milo the evil eye and then left, returning the next morning. He also knew that Jules came in from the south but left to the east. The pit trap was going to need to be someplace on that short piece of the moose's daily walk. It was also close to his camp and would make transporting all the meat easier.