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| Two trails converged in the wood … |
allowed quite a speed, up to 20 mph much of the time, as good as it gets around here. There’s one spot on the trail, no matter how good it is where I slow down to a crawl. If there’s ever an accident on this trail that‘s where it will happen. Going out you climb a short but steep hill out of a creek bed. A lot of people speed up there to make the hill but I slow down, because it’s a blind spot. You have no idea who could be coming toward you. I go slow and crowd the right side of the trail in hopes no one is approaching. So I crawled up to the top and once I reached it with no one in the way as I looked down at the trail I hit the throttle to speed up again. I should have looked up into the woods. Just as I was hitting some speed I looked up and saw the moose standing right next to the trail about as surprised to see me as I was to see him. A quick mental search for how to handle it went through my mind and I decided to hit the throttle and go faster, hoping to get past it as fast as I could while it was still sorting out fight or flight. Mind you this all happened within less than 20 feet of trail. The moose didn’t move until I had almost passed it and in my peripheral vision I caught some movement of his front legs away from the trail and I roared past. I swear I passed under its chin and could have reached out and swatted it on the nose. I didn’t even stop until I was well down the trail to make sure he wasn’t chasing me, but when I did I could see him moving slowly into the woods, stopping to look in my direction a couple of times. Shaking a little I went on down the trail a little slower.
Later, on the way back, I stopped to look at the tracks. He definitely had one hoof in the trail when I passed. Whew, even closer than I thought.
But that was yesterday. This morning when I first walked out onto the deck with the temperature at minus 8, I looked up the hill and saw new moose tracks. Later when I looked closer they showed it was moving uphill. Most often I see tracks heading down the hill. I followed them a little and saw where a second set of tracks joined the first and confirmed they were both heading uphill. The first set of tracks came within about 10 feet of the deck.
A week or so ago I had noticed tracks crossing my trail down the hill. For a couple of days before that I had heard something crashing around in the woods up the hill, probably a moose but I never saw it. Then I came on these tracks and noticed a second set, these much smaller. It’s early but getting close to the time and I’m betting that was a calf she birthed on the hillside. Given the early arrival and the colder temperatures lately I’m guessing the calf won’t survive. The second set of tracks today had been put down by another adult.
Then there's this too. During the week I heard a radio announcer introducing a talk with a some kind of nature expert. It was the announcer who said this, not the expert (I sure hope). What he said was something like " in the area with moose and pelicans." Now I ask you, where in the world would moose and pelicans abide together? Maybe he was referring to the town of Pelican in Southeast Alaska, and there's that book I read years ago where the author put pelicans on the deck of an Alaska fishing boat in the Bering sea. Not likely. Maybe a zoo?
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