Thursday, September 10, 2015

In Alaska, you have to pay attention all the time


By the time I got back with the camera and a long zoom lens he was
moving on.
Years ago my neighbor, an electrician, helped me install a darkroom in my basement. At one point he bent a piece of conduit the wrong way. When he noticed it, he shrugged his shoulders, looked at me a little sheepishly and said, "You've got to pay attention all the time."

It's a phrase I took as my own and I have repeated it many times over the years as I shook my head and examined a mistake I had made.

The phrase is one particularly to take to heart when moving about in the Alaska Bush. When there could be a grizzly bear around the next turn or a horny moose standing just off the trail as you pass by, you really want to be aware. Paying attention all the time is a matter of course. Even when I am splitting wood right near the cabin, I stop every once in a while and look around, listen for any noise out of place. That time I had the run-in with the bear on the porch I had heard a larger twig snap in the woods maybe half an hour earlier during one of those attention-paying interludes.

Deeper in the brush but antlers visible.
So, today I am outside cleaning up the garden, potting the rose and geranium to bring indoors and taking down the chicken wire that I use to support tomato and pea plants. All of this involved facing the house for the most part with my back toward the yard and the street. Around here I seldom stop to look around or listen. I haven't seen a moose in the yard in two or three years. Today I probably should have paid better attention.

I was immersed in wrestling a 10-foot length of chicken wire into some sort of form where it could be stored. When I finished, I stood up with it and turned around to take it to storage. That's when I saw the moose.

A young bull, still in velvet, he was nibbling at leaves in a tree next to the driveway not 20 feet away. He barely flinched as I laid down the fencing, backed away slowly and headed for the house. Mind you he made no threatening movements toward me and the hair never rose on his neck and I wasn't running from him. I was slowly racing for my camera.

Of course it had the wrong lens on it but there was no time to change. I managed to snap a few shots, but spooked him at least a little. He ambled off into the pucker brush and disappeared toward the deeper woods with me following carefully behind him.

That's when I started to wonder how an animal that big could sneak up on me that close without making any noise. It wasn't a predator stalking, it was a clumsy moose nibbling his way through the trees, but very quietly. As I think about it, I never heard anything as he meandered off into the woods either.

While it was a thoroughly enjoyable encounter, it reminded me too, yet again, that I need to pay attention all the time.

4 comments:

  1. Stealth moose stories -- a good one here -- you have a new niche! – Sharon Wright

    ReplyDelete
  2. This ignorant Californian would like to know if moose are dangerous. We have plenty of bears, mountain lion and deer around here, but no moose.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Suzy,
    Yes, moose are dangerous. A cow with a calf or a bull in the rut, which is going on now, will charge and stomp. I have even had them get belligerent when they don't want to get off a trail. Just a few years ago a cow moose killed a man on the University of Alaska Anchorage campus. My first worry when I saw this one was a rutting bull, but then judging by the tiny antlers I figured this one was pretty young and not aggressively in the rut.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Yikes! Note to self: beware of moose!

    ReplyDelete

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Never debate with someone who gets ink by the barrel" — George Hayes, former Alaska Attorney General who died recently

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Normal is how somebody else thinks you should act.

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My friend Gail: All waitresses are cute when you're hungry.

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A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity. – Franz Kafka

We are all immortal until the one day we are not. – me again

If the muse is late, start without her – Peter S. Beagle

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. ~Mark Twain Actually you could do the same thing with the word "really" as in "really cold."

If you are looking for an experience that will temper your vanity, this is it. There's no one to impress when you're alone on the trap line. – Michael Carey quoting his father's journal

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It’s nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of. – Shirley Hazzard

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence -- Bertrand Russell

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If you attack the arguer instead of the argument, you lose both

If an insurance company won’t pay for damages caused by an “act of God,” shouldn’t it then have to prove the existence of God? – I said that

I used to think getting old was about vanity—but actually it’s about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial. – Eugene O’Neill

German General to Swiss General: “You have only 500,000 men in your army; what would you do if I invaded with 1 million men?”

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Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.—Gloria Steinem

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It is a very simple mind that only knows how to spell a word one way.—Andrew Jackson

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Hunting is a “critical element for the long-term conservation of wood bison.”—a state department of Fish and Game official explaining why the state would not go along with a federal plan to reintroduce wood bison in Alaska because the agreement did not specifically allow hunting

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