Got Melk, Or Is It Half And Half? Hunters, Game Agents Taken In By Tale Of The Melk

The telephone calls to Mike Gondek’s office are steady. Hunters, even wildlife agencies, want to hear his elk hunting tale. But mostly they want to see pictures of the bizarre creature Gondek bagged.

It’s not a moose. It’s not an elk. It’s a melk - a supposed new species that is a cross between a moose and elk. The beast is at the taxidermist’s now. But the animal isn’t actually being mounted, it’s being created.

The melk is a hoax. It’s a way to drum up publicity for Boundary County’s gun and horn show at the end of this month. As absurd as a melk may sound, the story has duped many.

“People who should know better are calling, like wildlife agencies,” said Debbie Willcox who works in Gondek’s office. “These are not just avid hunters from the county calling. These are agency people asking if he’s got pictures,” she laughed.

Spokane’s KHQ-TV heard of Gondek and his melk and wanted to put them both on the news. The station lost interest when informed the melk was fake - the brainchild of the Boundary County Sportsman’s Association.

“They (the television station) started to bite until I said, ‘You know this is not real?’ They backed off real quick after that,” said Mike Weland. He’s the county’s public information officer and wrote a press release about the melk discovery.

The sportsman’s association asked for Weland’s help. They had a taxidermist mixing some elk and moose mounts, they just needed a semi-believable hunting story to go with it.

It should have been clear the melk was made up, said Weland. He quoted experts from around the country and Europe who studied DNA samples of the new moose-elk hybrid. One quote was from Freud O. Haagendaaz. That’s a credible name for ice cream but not a French historian, Weland said.

“I’ve been getting quite a few comments from people asking if it’s for real or not. I thought it was pretty obvious it was phony,” Weland said.

He did have several avid hunters go over his prose to add some convincing detail. Locals starting surmising about the melk after the story ran in the Kootenai Valley Times. The weekly paper didn’t note the melk was a publicity stunt for the horn show.

A letter arrived at the paper after the story appeared. The reader claimed the government knew about the unusual melk and tried to cover it up. Weland suspects the letter was written tongue-in-cheek.

Gondek is a real person. He works at the Natural Resource Conservation Service and happens to be a superb hunter - a fact well known in Boundary County. That likely added credibility to the melk story. If Gondek said he got a melk, well then, maybe he did, Weland said.

“This is believable because Mike (Gondek) is the kind of person who never tells anyone where he hunts.

He never tells anyone his secrets,” Willcox said.

So far, Gondek has refused to admit to any callers the melk is made-up. He’d just better hope the tale doesn’t go too far.

Boundary County already is home to endangered woodland caribou and grizzly bears. Roads and portions of the forest have been closed to protect the critters.

A real melk could very well turn the county into a national park, Weland joked. If so, Bonners Ferry would have a ready made slogan for tourists - “Got Melk?”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo