I am pretty sure that in the picture of the canoe trip in Canada in 1921, the second figure from the left is my father, Arthur G. Lambert ’22. When I was a child, I remember my father talked often about this canoe trip through the wilds of Canada with “Buzzer” Hall and Carpenter.
According to him, they entered into an area that had been totally burned out by a forest fire and realized, after a while, there was nothing stirring that they could eat. They planned to live mostly off the land. My father said they went days without food until they were close to starving when someone spotted a moose partly submerged in the water. While they believed that Mr. Carpenter could grab it and wrestle it into the pot by himself, they decided it was safer to let my father have a shot, and he managed to down it. This fortuitous encounter with the quietly munching animal saved their lives, according to my father.
Somehow, they managed to canoe the moose head back where it was mounted. Thereafter, it waited patiently at my aunt’s farm for my mother to allow it into our house. She never did, so story and head never were reunited. My father died in 1992 at the age of 91, but nothing that happened in his life compared to this adventure for him. As for me, I heard the story so many times I wasn’t always sure whether finding the moose was the most happy outcome.