Spruce Moose

hazy Martian sunset

skies clearing a bit at Lost Lake

You know how delicious moose tracks ice cream is?  It’s so satisfying mining those surprise veins of fudge, crunching on the ‘lil peanut butter cups, the salty-sweet combo melting around the edges as you devour bowl fulls.  Actual moose tracks in the mud are pretty neat, too, shockingly large dinosaur-deer hooves, prints that pique the imagination.  Witnessing their making, however, is rather alarming: before your very eyes, 10,000 pounds* of sinewy muscle, deployed with the agility and speed more commonly associated with pumas or sharks, press those angled toes into the ground.  (*Okay, more like 1,000 pounds.)  There is a particular fellow (gentleman moose?) (bulls are extra intimidating) who frequents the bog alongside our property.  There is a gravel path next to the highway that we use to travel between base camp and additional tent city housing.  Mr. Antlers greatly appreciates the ease of movement afforded by this path, the better to nibble on grasses.  I hadn’t seen him for some weeks when, about midnight, a companion and I chanced upon him in the dusky gloom.  Without meaning to be rude, he made it clear that he wished to occupy the path undisturbed, and we were only too eager to oblige.  The distance across the highway, however, proved inadequate to soothe his wary distemper, and so we prudently retreated to formulate an alternative campaign.  Each passing vehicle caused Mr. Antlers to nervously toss his head, like a horse but with a giant bone-chandelier-cudgel.  There was no choice but to appeal to our species’ superior technology.  I flashed my brightest smile and hailed the next car, and explained our predicament to the two confused fisherman within.  That fifty yards was short ride, but just as life-affirming a hitch as any I’ve ever landed.

Mr. Antlers (or an associate, perhaps) still felt a lot of consternation that evening, and trumpeted or roared or moo-ed or whatever, back and forth with a cohort, in the pre-dawn.  It was an arresting sound, reverberating through the night air, that animal bellow of simultaneous aggression and defensiveness.

I could tell you about our 4th of July In-Depends-Dance party wherein we donned adult diapers and drank ham-aritas in a clearing in the woods, but it’s really fun writing about moose encounters.  The other day I walked several miles to the big bridge and back, and just as I approached said bog, I heard strident splashes.  I hustled to a break in the trees and—quick!—peered down the slope to spy Mr. Antlers clomping around his backyard pool, squelching his hooves in the muck and snacking aimlessly before meandering back behind the spruces.  None of the cat-calling SUV idiots or doughy RV tourists had any idea what a kingly creature they motored by.