I’ve been up close and personal a few times.
When I was a kid, still in school, it was dark when I waited
for the bus. No matter how early the hour was or how late. In the winter, it’s
dark longer here. In grade school, the bus stop was a few houses down at the ‘pump
house’. Everything in my neighborhood, the houses, the ‘pump house’, the street
in general is surrounded by trees.
There were several occasions when I’d walk to the bus stop,
only to find I’d walked right up on a moose, hidden in the dark, cleverly camouflaged
with its dark brown colors to blend in with the trees and the night sky.
Let me tell you, you will probably never move as quickly as
you do when your fight of flight instinct kicks in because you are faced with a
half-ton kicking, stomping, goring death machine. I’m small, but I’ve scaled
ten-foot chain link fences in seconds flat to escape a charging moose. I have
no idea how I did it, but that’s adrenaline for you.
The yard I have now is much bigger than the one I grew in,
it’s filled with trees, forest even. Lots of new growth trees popping where
they were cleared to make way for the house. Very attractive to these
behemoths.
Last night, I had one of these late night visitors in my
yard, just outside my bedroom window, enjoying some of those new growth trees
that have popped up since last year.
Like I said, I grew up in Alaska, and prior to moving out my
home in Wasilla, I’d never truly heard the sound of a moose eating. The first
time I heard it, I’d just gotten home. It was late, dark. I opened the door to
my truck and was confronted with what sounded like bones snapping and flesh
being stripped from those very same bones. It was horrific.
As a writer, my imagination can do terrible things and it
was working overtime, imaging that maybe a bear had found its way into my yard
with a kill and was slowly, methodically eating it right there in the trees, in
the dip of the hill below me.
I tried turning my truck back on and angling it into the
trees to see what I was dealing with, even went out onto the street, but to no
avail. Needless to say, I didn’t exit the vehicle on that side, but parked as
close to my porch steps as possible and then crawled over the seat to the
passenger side that was facing the house and hurried inside.
Later, when I heard this same sound coming from another part
of the yard, this time I was able to get a good angle with my headlights and
identify the culprit as not a bear, but a moose, stripping not flesh from bone,
but leaves and bark from tree limbs and not bones snapping, but twigs being
bitten off.
So there I am, lying in bed at 3 am, the horrific sounds of
something very amiss outside carrying into my room through the opened window,
my dog awake, barking, warning me that there’s an intruder on our property.
Even knowing the sound, having heard it before, in my fight or flight, adrenaline
burning away the fog of sleep brain, I get up to find out who or what is
outside my window, armed, just in case. I flip on the back flood light (sorry
neighbors), open the door and peek out.
There in the small copse of trees, head turned back to look
at me in a lazy, I’m the biggest thing
around so I’m not really worried about whatever is there sort of way, is an
adolescent moose. He almost gives me a shrug and then goes back to munching
away.
I turned on the fan to drown out the sounds that, even
though I know the source, still sound like the worst kind of death to me, and I
went back to bed.
Here is the evidence of his disturbing visit:
 |
| Notice the stripped branches all along the right side. |
 |
| Snapped the tops right off this poor little tree. |
 |
| More branches stripped clean of their leaves and some of their bark. Imagine what that must sound like at 3am. |
