Mesmerized Momentarily by Masticating Moose

This just happened.

“Moose! Moose! There’re two moose!” R shouted. He never shouts, so I had a flash of a thought of that somebody’d left the front door open and a couple of thousand-pounders had wandered in out of the cold.

“Where?” I shouted back from under my comforter where I was sipping a second cup of coffee and reading Alaskan author extraordinaire John Haines’ Living Off the Country: Essays on Poetry and Place.

“Come, Darling! Hurry!”

I ran into the extra bedroom R uses as his office when we live at my daughter’s home in Fairbanks. Just outside the window (and hard to see because the sun, at 9:30 in the morning, was not due to rise for another 40 minutes) were a mama moose and her yearling hoofing slowly through the snow. They paused, and looked directly at us. For a long time. It was weird. I ran for my camera and snapped away until they moved on.

 Mama Moose and Little Moo Munching on Willow and Birch Twigs

“We’re outta here, Hon!”

After that, I got to thinking about moose and remembered watching Arlo Guthrie recite a poem he’d written for his children about these substantial ungulates. Here it is:

And I’ll leave you with this Brainy quote from Tom Bodett:

It’s not like Alaska isn’t wilderness – it mostly is. But most Alaskans don’t live in the wild. They live on the edge of the wild in towns with schools and cable TV and stores and dentists and roller rinks sometimes. It’s just like any place else, only with mountains and moose.