"50 First Weeks"--Moose Subsistence, Our Subsistence

After a whirlwind weekend of performances and memorial, we're on the road again and my workload is still on "critical," so I may be working while Phil drives and be distracted from beautiful things I like to focus on in other ways too.

With that in mind, although I have lots to share, I'm going to keep this post brief, and focused on our bull moose visitor who was back and persistent yesterday, acting very entitled around our trees and raspberry canes.

It's unusual for there to be so many moose at our low elevation this early in the winter. Usually, they're up high until March/April. The huge snowfall this year has evidently driven them down early.

People in the know are encouraging those who can to cut down cottonwoods and other forage trees for the moose to eat, because the fact that they're down here this early could very well translate to lots of starving moose in a couple months. A sobering change of perspective from feeling protective of our raspberry canes and carefully nurtured trees!

This guy was quite undeterred by the cage around that little birch. And undeterred by yelling. Running toward him (which I've done before to chase them off) seemed like a super-bad idea: he turned around and looked threatening. This morning, he growled at Phil.

He was right on the path between our cabin and the car when I needed to leave to go perform in the show. The snow was too deep for me to work my way around him (without going back indoors and changing clothes), so I was walking up the path very slowly and gingerly, with the big guy just a few feet (not yards) ahead of me. Occasionally I'd yell and stomp, and he'd move forward a bit, but it's never taken me that long to get up to the car!

And I was scared. I've never been really scared of a moose before. I didn't like being that close to him, I didn't like feeling like I had to herd him up out of the way, I didn't like how he looked over his shoulder at me, and I didn't like that his butt was higher than my head--those legs can kick, and they have a range.

I happen to enjoy performing music and poetry, but if there had been any possibility of stage fright, the idea of being scared of anything else after those few minutes would definitely have been banished.

And as I do my little "50 first weeks," try to do better, screw up, re-resolve every Monday, I think of the cycles in a moose's life--how complicated in such different ways, how simple in other ways. It is a sort of honor to be living in such proximity with a being that neither knows nor cares about the vast majority of what bothers me in life.