Amongst the things I watch early in the morning while I work are the sky lifting with light and the runners going by and my next-door neighbor heading off for her morning bike ride and our shared paper delivery woman bounding up my next-door neighbor’s front walk as if her hurrying then will mitigate the fact that she’s arrived with said paper much later than my neighbor would like her to.
The other morning during that stretch between darkness and full daylight, I saw something in motion—dark, too brief an appearance to make out any particulars, more like a fast dark blur—go by the wide bay windows of my dining room. I walked to the back window to catch another glimpse of the mysterious blur. It was a moose trotting on my walkway, behind the house (leaving a mushy offering on the stones), continuing behind the house past the climber and behind the bottom barn toward the neighbors.
Bears have been known to cut a similar swath through our property.
I live right in town, in a residential neighborhood. I do not exactly live in a neighborhood suited for bears, and certainly not for moose.
Even from the brief look at the moose I got, I could see this wasn’t a fully-grown creature. I mean, it was big, but not gigantically so. Still, it thundered through my yard and any kid in its way would have quite obviously been trampled.
I was reminded of one of my favorite toddlers ever, a kid I helped care for the year I worked as an assistant at Nonotuck Child Care Center during college. Ben was a huge toddler, a solid and very blond guy towering over his teetering peers. When he wanted to get across the room, he barreled across. He did not stop for smaller toddlers or toys strewn on the floor; he just went. I always thought of him as Ben the Bomber, or Ben the Gentle Giant. Knowing more about physical development, I can see that this little boy couldn’t exactly recognize or feel the boundaries of where he ended and others—things or people—began. That’s why he pushed through space the way he did.
Not so the moose, accustomed to being the biggest, heaviest creature in its path, the moose barrels along as moose are meant to do.
Shaken all day, I realized that when the bears, who seem to make appearances in the neighborhood each year, almost seem commonplace and acceptable—in comparison to the moose, mind you—things are not all that good. As my nearly eight year-old asked, so smartly, “I know what to do if I see a bear in the yard, but what about moose?” I didn’t know the answer. I did know, by the time he asked the question, that antlered moose (this one was) charging around at this time of year are in rut or rutting and the short version, nasty, mean and you shouldn’t get in their way (well, duh; seriously, nothing but nothing makes you want to approach a moose in a backyard).
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Here are a few pertinent moose facts: a moose, even in its first year, weighs 300-400 pounds, is aggressive in late September and October, and if it tramples you may come with front hooves first. Avoid moose. Yet if you see a moose, unlike a bear, run and get behind something; you can maneuver around a tree or door faster than a moose and moose generally don’t chase far. If a moose has been spotted in your neighborhood (according to the Wildlife folks in Alaska) then kids should not walk in the paths in the woods nearby (where there’s no escape from a moose using the same paths).
Well, now I have something to tell my kid.
Also, Google if you see a moose, the second thing to come up is the title of the (I’m sorry) annoying-if-cute If You Give a Moose a Muffin. Recently, we pondered a parody, If You Give a Teenager a Bag of Potato Chips. But the book that sprung to mind and didn’t leave all day long? It was Sandra Boynton’s impossible-to-shake But Not the Hippopotamus. I mean, really, if something conjures, “A moose and a goose together have juice,” you are pretty much doomed to go all the way to “But not the armadillo” each and every time.
