“Do…Not… Move,” I said to Brad in a voice that no one ever wants to hear in the woods. That tone, those words: they conjure images of man-eating sharks, fire-breathing dragons, boogey men, ax murderers, serial killers and maybe, clowns. Brad’s mind raced to thoughts of grizzly bears with cubs, but what I saw over his shoulder was potentially much worse. Running down the hill toward us was the massive form of a cow moose—and a calf. Seeing a mother moose and baby is normally cause for celebration, but this was anything but normal. Close encounters with bears are nothing compared to a face-to-face meeting with a mother moose defending a young calf. Having one of these 1,000 lb deer unleash a flurry of crushing hooves on you is nothing sort of a disaster; stories of deep bruises, broken bones, concussions and even death come to mind.
As the cow closed in on us, Brad turned his head slightly. The subtle movement brought the moose to an immediate halt. Now in the open, there was nothing separating us and nowhere to go. At a distance of less than 20 feet, a span she could easily erase in the a fraction of a second, she turned and gave us a wild-eyed stare. Our fate was now entirely in her hands, or hooves. Climbing a tiny Englemann spruce was a remote possibility—with its thousands of blood-letting needles—but now it seemed miles away. With one great swing of her head, the mother moose turned and trotted away, calf in tow. The two of them were gone as fast as they had come; the whole experience was so fleeting, so surreal. That’s the interesting thing about these sorts of events, they end up sticking with us for a lifetime. I could rattle off a dozen or more situations that fall into this category; they move us, not in the slow, persistent manner that a stream wears away stone, but like an earthquake, a bolt of lighting; they hit in a instant and leave us forever changed. Moments like this morning’s hike with a moose shape us; they literally restructure the way we see an animal, a landscape and ultimately, ourselves.