In Dec. 1965, a large bull moose that was struck and killed by a Maine Central Railroad locomotive yielded 500 pounds of meat for Williams High School’s cafeteria. Photo courtesy of Paul Cyr

On Monday morning, Dec. 6, 1965, I unloaded my Winchester Model 94 lever action .30-30 rifle on the football field and carried it into the principal’s office. No SWAT team rushed to Williams High School in Oakland. My parents weren’t phoned. Nor was I suspended from school.

It seems inconceivable today that in the 1960s, rural Maine boys, including me, routinely carried firearms to school during hunting seasons. My late friend George Smith — who as an adult became the executive director of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine — hunted woodcock and grouse during his walks to school in Winthrop. Greg Drummond was picked up at home in Sidney by James Bean School Principal Brandon Matheson, to hunt deer and waterfowl with other seventh graders before the morning bell rang.

George, Greg and I stored our empty firearms in the principal’s office or in his vehicle until the school day ended. We’d been taught hunter safety by a father, uncle, or a local representative of the National Rifle Association. (Back then the NRA’s primary focus was administering hunter safety programs.)

Little did I know that on that December morning, my schoolboy hunting skills would be needed. Around 8:45 a.m., Williams High Principal Fred Whitney and Maine game warden Oral Page made a surprise appearance in my class. After whispering to the teacher, the men summoned me and three other teenage hunters into a hallway.

A large bull moose, Warden Page explained, had been struck and killed that morning by a Central Maine Railroad locomotive. He pledged to donate the moose to the school cafeteria, provided Mr. Whitney would allow four students to help butcher and process the meat.

Mr. Whitney hemmed and hawed. Economics — not math, reading or social studies — preoccupied his mind. “Well,” he finally said, “several hundred pounds of meat will help stretch the hot lunch budget.” We were excused from classes.

“I recruited you boys,” said Mr. Page as we walked across the snow-covered football field, “because you’ve demonstrated good hunting skills.” The warden led us down a wooded hill to the railroad tracks where the dead moose lie. “Have you ever field-dressed a deer?” he asked. We nodded yes and chuckled, hearing “field dressed” instead of “gutted” for the first time. Jake, a talkative boy, added, “Yesterday, me and Pa butchered our hog and six chickens.” He and five siblings lived in a tar paper shack without plumbing in a High Street neighborhood overlooked by President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty.

With great effort, we rolled the huge moose onto its back, spread its legs and tied each hoof to nearby trees. Using a Buck knife, Mr. Page cut the hide from the sternum to the anus, emphasizing the importance of “not stabbing the paunch.” Working in teams of two, the four of us helped the warden by peeling the warm hide from the carcass as he sliced its connective tissue. With the ropes loosened, the moose flopped onto one side. Mr. Page then eviscerated the animal and gently rolled its intestines onto the ground. Jake chattered, “Guttin’ that hog and pluckin’ them chickens yesterday weren’t no Sunday picnic neither.” The eighth grader struggled with language because he often missed half the school year helping his father cut birch bolt wood for the town’s Diamond Match mill.

As we stood shoulder-to-shoulder, hunched over the kneeling warden, steam from the moose’s open chest cavity rose ghost-like in the freezing morning air. “This is the heart,” instructed the warden, pointing to it with his bloody knife. “Over here is the liver, and behind the intestines are the kidneys.” He described the function of each organ, and how they had worked harmoniously to keep the 1,000-pound moose upright. Its life had ended when a locomotive split its brain, which Jake and I stared at with morbid fascination as we poked and prodded the pinkish-gray organ with broken antler tines.

Williams High (now Messalonskee High) where the author and dozens of students dined on moose meat in the cafeteria in the school’s basement. Photo courtesy of Oakland Historical Society

Following the warden’s instructions, we took turns using bone saws to cut through bone sockets, tendons and connective tissue. After we’d quartered the moose by severing its legs, Mr. Page crouched down, sniffed the moose’s neck and leg muscles and pronounced, “This will make excellent hamburger.”

Aware that Jake’s father poached deer year-round to feed his poor family, the warden told the teenager he could take home moose tenderloins, ribs, tongue for pickling and bones for soup. Jake was euphoric. “Cut up ribs rubbed with flour and simmered in cider and onions,” he gushed, “makes wicked good biscuit gravy.”

Mr. Page toweled off his bloody hands and motioned me to remove the backstraps. Starting at the cervical vertebra I ran my knife’s blade along the backbone and repeated the cut on the other side, removing both backstraps. By now, Jake kept each knife razor sharp by spitting on a whetstone and rapidly rubbing the knives’ cutting edges at a perfect angle. “No one’s ever done a better job of sharpening my knife,” the warden marveled. Jake blushed and, for once, was speechless.

After the last quartered piece of moose was tossed onto a tablecloth lining the bed of Mr. Page’s Chevy truck, we sat on the tailgate as he drove past our school. With smiling schoolmates waving at us from behind frosted windows, we felt like parading sports heroes.

Michaud’s Market (now Buddies Market) made available its industrial meat grinder to process moose and deer to augment the school’s hot lunch program. Photo courtesy of Oakland Historical Society

In town, the truck pulled up to Michaud’s Market, where owner Leo Michaud made available his industrial meat grinder and a small mountain of beef and pork suet to mix with the lean moose meat. Behind the meat counter our pocketknives reduced moose parts into sirloin, chuck, shank and round steaks, which Mr. Page fed into the meat grinder. By mid-afternoon, nearly 100 five-pound packages of paper-wrapped hamburger were loaded into Principal Whitney’s Ford station wagon and transported to the school’s freezers.

As a light snow fell shortly before sunset, Jake headed home with a gunnysack bulging with moose meat. Overcome with gratitude, the boy stopped, turned and whooped, “Praise the Lord for this early Christmas gift!”

From mid-December until mid-March, dozens of students stood in long cafeteria lines for plates of Tuesday’s sloppy Joes and Friday’s American chop suey — each dish brimming with moose burger. For many of the poorer students, the hearty meals were a godsend. One Friday, David Burwood — our class prankster — eyed the lunch menu blackboard and saw a golden opportunity. By surreptitiously erasing one letter and adding another, he altered the menu, and then informed Mrs. Tibbetts, a cafeteria worker, that she’d made an error. “Excuse me, Mrs. Tibbetts,” he said, pointing to the blackboard, “I think it’s chop suey with moose meat, not mouse meat.” Reading his edit caused Mrs. Tibbetts to double over with laughter, which further endeared her to us.

Throughout the winter, each time moose meat was served in our school cafeteria, we four schoolboy hunters were proud of having transformed a tragedy into a food bonanza for our fellow students.

Ron Joseph of Sidney is author of “Bald Eagles, Bear Cubs, and Hermit Bill: Memories of a Maine Wildlife Biologist.”