Somewhere in the background you can hear a Red Queen shouting

This particular moose was only about 10 feet from the pavement.

This headline came up today: "Someone is stealing dead moose from the sides of Alaska's roads." Now at first glimpse it seems like a story where you ask why and go on. But, this is a deadly serious issue in Alaska as attested to by an adventure from the early 80s.

To begin with generally when a moose gets mowed down by a car, truck or train, Troopers call a charirty group and members come out to butcher the moose and pass the meat on to folks in need. But the butchers sometimes don't get there quickly enough.

One winter in the early 80s I found myself living among a group of dog mushers near Willow. Three dog lots were involved and my main chore involved a shovel.

One night we were flopped out watching television after all the chores had been completed. The phone interrupted us and one of the fellows jumped up and answered. This guy was a nervous excitable type who spoke with a thick Eastern European accent. All he spoke into the phone was: "What? Where?" Now, understand this is an excitable guy, so almost anything would have sounded like a major crisis. He pulled on his jacket and raced for the door, the word "moose" lingering in the smoke of his hasty exit.

All went quiet for almost two hours until we heard the guy's truck race back into the yard and onto the dog lot. By the time we got there all we could hear was a string of what must have been serious swearing in that Eastern European language. He had already jumped out of the truck and was kicking at something on the ground  That turned out to be a moose head and part of a neck and our friend kicked it as far as he could. Immediately the gang of puppies roaming the yard attacked and that was that, except for the story.

In between guttural thickly accented grunts of profanity this is what we discerned listening to our friend. He had arrived at the moose dead by the roadside before the charity butchers, but in dog mushing country word of mouth was faster than today's internet. Another musher pulled up at the same time and apparently quite an argument ensued.

Neither of them would give up claim to the moose nor could they arrive at a fair way to split the meat between them.

In the end the other musher hitched the hind end of the moose to his truck leaving our friend to latch onto the head. Then they drove off in opposite directions. Apparently the weak link in a moose carcass is the neck because part of that and the head were all our friend came away with. In his anger he didn't even stop to load it into his truck, just dragged it home bouncing along the road behind him.

Three of us started laughing and making bad jokes, which only infuriated him more. Our friend stormed off and we didn't see him until the next morning. 

Out in the dog lot while he was feeding he came across the head where the puppies had dragged it. He gave it one last kick and it disappeared into the woods never to be spoken of again. Until now.

Dead moose along Alaska's roadsides is serious business, but stealing might be too strong a word for the aftermath.