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knives are for defence. This one in my vest is an attention getter. It’s a conversational piece. Some people carry a knife on the back of their neck too – on the back of their vest. You just reach up, grab it and come down. But most times, if you pull your knife out, that means you can’t get to your gun. But that’s why I also have a second, back-up gun. I used to keep it on my left side, under the shirt. Now I keep it on my right side. It’s a 40 calibre.
    I’ve had one time where a guy tried to get my gun and I’m holding my gun in the holster to stop him from pulling it out whilst I’m fighting him. But I couldn’t get my second gun because if I went for my backup I’d have to release the other gunand leave it open. So now I keep it on this side where I can reach it and shoot through my shirt. Bang, bang, bang. I’ve done that before - I have shirts with holes in them – just to practice.
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    We have moose accidents quite a bit. There’s certainly a lot of wildlife in Alaska and it seems that moose have a habit of going out on the roadway when you don’t want them to be on the roadway, especially if you’re in a little car.
    One of the accidents I dealt with – where someone hit a moose – was a teacher on her way to the school. It was still wintertime and it was dark out and she was in a little four-door sedan car and ended up hitting this moose that had run out into the road in front of her. The moose just came up and hit the car, smashed in the hood and after it hit the hood it rolled up and smashed the window and started to cave in the roof a little bit, so it was certainly a scary moment for that driver. Kind of like, ‘Oh my God! Here’s a moose! And now it’s crushing my car!’ That driver escaped any injury but it sure did a number on her car.
    A lot of time with the moose, we’ll have to shoot them and put them down. But we’ll call a charity to come salvage the moose meat and the moose meat will get dispersed to different people that the charity feels are in need of moose meat. It’s quite a thing up here – we have our dispatch centres that usually have a list of who the on-call charity is for the night, in case we end up dealing with a moose accident. So we’ll call them up and say, ‘Hey, we have a moose accident. We’ve got a moose here on Mile 90 of the Sterling Highway, come meet us and pick up the moose.’ Andthey’ll have a couple of people come out and do their thing, pick up the moose and take it back to where they have a place set up. Then they’ll butcher the moose and take care of it.
    I’ve shot moose a couple of times. Sometimes the moose are pretty badly injured when they get hit by a vehicle - but they’re still alive. So we would dispatch the moose, call the charity and have them come pick it up. The troopers, they issue us a shotgun, so they give us a large enough weapon to dispatch a moose.
    It’s interesting because I’m not really a big hunter; my idea of getting meat is going to the store. I get my meat there. So it was quite a different experience for me when I started dealing with these accidents involving moose and I had to shoot the moose. I’d look at that poor injured moose and I’d have to kill it so it’s not suffering. But it was a different experience for me not being a hunter or having killed an animal before.
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    On one side of the street is the city and the other side of the street is the county. So a lot of the times we will donate our problems to the city. And it’s literally, ‘Get the fuck out of the county and go across the street if you want to be a dickhead.’
    Or we’ll put them in our car and drive them ten or fifteen blocks up the road into the city and kick them out, or something like that.
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    Prisons – a lot of them are not rehabilitating people. A lot are actually making them better criminals or harder criminals or smarter criminals, stronger criminals. And they do it with taxpayers’money.
    I believe people