[alfa] Mooses

[Will Owen <nashwill912@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Moose are very much a fact of life when you live in Alaska. My first
close encounter was when I was driving my first real running car, a tiny
Fiat 500, back to Elmendorf AFB one night in a fairly heavy fog. An
oddly-shaped bit of darkness up ahead suddenly coalesced into a moose,
just as I was about to run underneath it. I stopped, the moose gave me a
walleyed look and went off into the roadside brush, and that was that. 

The most harrowing (and in retrospect most entertaining) moose episode
was a few years after that, when some major work was being done on the
highway north from Anchorage. For some reason, the road was reduced to
one lane going each way, each one sunk below grade by about eight feet,
so it was like running single-file down a ditch. The traffic was pretty
heavy that afternoon, and we were creeping along bumper to bumper at
about ten MPH. A mother moose and her calf had chosen this occasion to
cross the road; unfortunately, only the mother had made the journey. Mom
was on one side, calling to Junior, and Junior was on the other side
calling to Mom, while a whole lot of deeply apprehensive humans in their
cars were praying that neither of these behemoths would attempt a sudden
reunification just yet, not while the Buick is still in the way...

They are truly goofy creatures, but much more graceful on the move than
you'd expect. Delicious, too ;-)

Will
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