Seeing a moose

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By Glynis Hart

Walking the dog last week, I saw a moose. A tall gray shape stepped silently across the road near our place in Unity, down in the dip of Center Road where the stream curves close to the road. No antlers, so at this time of year that must mean a female. The dog and I stopped and one of us held her breath as the moose cow finished crossing and melted into the greenery by an old apple tree. Then another gray shape came out of the woods: a calf, following its mother across the road.

Points to my dog for not making a big bloody nuisance of herself, but instead of continuing our walk I thought it best to turn around. I’m glad to see two moose in Unity, so the best welcome I could think of was to let them alone. They were coming from a pond, most likely, and heading upstream. Not foraging, but moving.

I did some reading, and found out when moose get too hot, they stop eating. I can relate to that, although my cutoff point is probably a lot higher than a moose’s. A really hot summer can mean the moose don’t get fat enough to get through the winter, because they spend their time trying to stay cool instead of browsing. They settle into a pond or a lake and literally chill, waiting for the air temperature to go back down.

Warm winters are also bad for moose in several ways. A warm winter extends the tick season, and as you probably know already, moose calves can die from tick infestation; they can also rub off their fur trying to get rid of the ticks, then they’re not insulated from cold weather. Moose choose their pathways according to snow cover: they don’t like deep fluffy snow, because they can’t run away from predators, but they like some snow because their big feet are made to travel well on it. Warm winters also favor deer, which spread brainworm to the moose. It’s not fatal to deer, but it is to moose.

I also didn’t know moose exist all around the Northern Hemisphere. There are Siberian Moose and moose in Norway, Sweden and Finland; the Caucasus moose is extinct but there are Russian moose, too. According to NH Fish and Game, prior to the state’s colonization by Europeans, moose were more common in New Hampshire than deer. They were hunted out until, by 1870, there were only 15 moose left in the state.

The moose is a formidable opponent: it can kick in every direction. “Moose are unafraid, not friendly,” according to NH Fish and Game. “A moose that decides someone has crossed into their ‘personal space’ will knock down the offender and kick and stomp until the threat stops moving.”

Frankly, that seems a little alarmist to me: searching for “moose attacks” online I found just a few: a photographer that approached too close, a woman whose dogs were bothering the moose in her yard, and a guy at the University of Alaska. Most people are smart enough to give moose a respectful distance, and if you run away they’re fine with that. Where moose are really dangerous is when they encounter your car, so most moose-related fatalities have to do with moose-car collisions. “Moose Alley,” US Route 3 north of Pittsburg to the Canadian border, is your most likely place to see moose but also the most likely place to hit one.

There are around 4,000 moose in New Hampshire, but around 60,000 in Maine, so they must have their own Moose Alley to travel between states. They can go 50 miles a day on those long legs, so the cow and calf pair that was in Unity last week could easily be in Maine or Canada by now.

Some years ago a writer, Andrei Codrescu, wrote a book called “The Disappearance of the Outside.” Codrescu (who lives in Louisiana) was talking about the loss of freedom in modern society as well as the disappearance of places where people are not under observation or control by other people. It’s true that there are now hardly any places you can go to get away from the sounds of combustion engines, the hum of power lines and the marks of human passage. Other writers, like Bill McKibben, are concerned with losing the wilderness as itself: trees, moss, snails, cattails, moose.

I’d like to offer a further thought: humanity has gotten too big for its britches. Like the builders of the Tower of Babel, humans aspire to conquer all they can see by the marvel of working and communicating together. It’s a wonderful thing, the internet, the modern world. And yet our advances seem to be hurrying our species toward apocalypse, while we seem to lack the maturity, the foresight, to set aside these shiny objects and clean up after ourselves.

Have we lost a sense of our smallness in time, our smallness against the planet? Perhaps a moose or two is a good reminder we’re not the biggest beast out there. Or perhaps, like Hardy’s darkling thrush, the moose knows something that makes it feel hopeful, of which we are not aware.