The Winter of Rocky, Bullwinkle and Cow-Winkle
A story Greyfox read to me as I was waking up this morning reminded me of the moose-winter fourteen years ago. Not every winter around here gets its own name, but anyone who has been here at least fourteen years will know what I mean if I say “the moose winter.” Most of them would also get it if I were to call it “the year everyone gave up on shoveling their driveways.”
Anchorage Daily News | Unnatural foods can kill moose
Unnatural foods can kill moose
DEADLY DIETS: Handouts from people, such as hay, can be fatal to native ungulates.
By TIM MOWRY
Fairbanks Daily News-Miner
(Published: December 29, 2003)
Every year, moose end up eating hay, chokecherry, crab apple, mountain ash and other ornamental trees people grow in their yards, sometimes with deadly results. (Photo by ERIC ENGMAN, Fairbanks Daily News-Miner / Associated Press archive 2002)
Click on photo to enlargeFAIRBANKS — Wolves, bears, hunters and motor vehicles aren’t the only moose killers in Alaska.
A bale of hay can bring down a moose just as effectively as a pack of wolves or a Suburban.
“Last year we had a call about a dead moose on Chena Hot Springs Road, and I went out there to check it out, and that moose had about 200 pounds of hay in its gut,” said wildlife biologist Tom Seaton at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game here.
“It was all in little mouth-size balls, like someone had stuffed it in there by the fistful. That moose starved to death with 200 pounds of hay in its gut.”
Distributed by The Associated Press.
By the end of 1989, there was already a few feet of snow on the ground, somewhat more than usual. Snow up in the Talkeetna Mountains was deeper than it was down here in the Susitna Valley, so moose were coming down here in greater numbers than usual, to forage for the willows that make up most of their winter diet. The highway department maintains signs in several areas which they update occasionally, telling how many moose are killed on the highway. Most winters the numbers hadn’t gone over a hundred, but it was soon up to over three hundred that winter, and kept climbing.
I grew accustomed to hearing the five-toot signal from the engineers on the railroad, with which they let the troopers at the Sunshine substation know that they were dropping another track-killed moose at the crossing just north of here, to be picked up and transported to a jail or other institution to feed inmates. Before the snow melted the following year, an estimated thousand moose died just on the railroad tracks in a forty-mile stretch right here around Willow and Talkeetna. With snow more than belly-deep for them, they tended to stay in the plowed roads and the Alaska Railroad’s roadbed. Driving the subdivision roads here often meant, for me, creeping along behind a moose in my ex’s truck as it loped or moseyed ahead of us. For some of my less moose-loving neighbors, it meant chasing moose or hitting them with the truck.
The deep snow was hard on every creature, I guess. In January, my cats started reacting to a squirrel that was hanging around on the little roof overhanging my front porch. They could climb to the roof of the house, but couldn’t get out on the slick corrugated fiberglas that covered my makeshift porch greenhouse. The squirrel clung there and chattered at them, clearly laying claim to some territory.
It was an annoyance, just sleep-disturbing noise for me, until the squirrel decided it was going to come in the house. It started prying at some loose edges of the roofing material. My first response was to whack the inside of the roof with a broom handle and make noises indicating that this primate did not approve of a wild rodent (many sourdoughs here call them tree rats) making holes in her roof.
That didn’t work, so I leaned a 2X4 against the house as a ramp to let the cats get at the critter, but it was more nimble and more fierce than they were. After a couple of cats came thumping down on the porch and one showed up with a wounded face, I shot the squirrel. I took some good-natured kidding from my ex- and from our neighbor Duane, a professional hunting guide, for shooting a hole in the eaves on the wannigan, but that’s where the damned squirrel was hanging, chattering challenges down at me and at the cats milling around my ankles. I took the only shot I had, and it only took one shot. Better one little bullet hole out there in the eave, than to let a squirrel pry the roof off.
In March, the real snow started. Before it quit, it was over eight feet deep on the flat. Berms beside the roads where snowplows had tried to push it back were from twelve to twenty feet high. It got so that the plows couldn’t push the hardened berms back any further and roads started narrowing down to a single lane. The compacted berms were hard enough to support a moose’s weight and it wasn’t unusual to see them up there eating the tops out of trees. Each time now that I walk past a certain big tree and see the scar about thirty feet up, I recall watching a moose tear that bark off with its teeth.
Everyone in this neighborhood had a close-encounter story:
Charley, my ex-, was living in a little cabin a couple of miles off the road, beside the railroad tracks. The roof over its doorway shed snow and made a little bowl right there at the door. One morning he opened the door to go out and pee, and shut it again immediately. A cow moose had bedded down, curled up in that little snow bowl against his front door. He waited a few hours and began to grow impatient when she didn’t get up and move on. He opened the door and gave her a poke with the business end of a broom and she got up. Since she got up facing him and looked more inclined to come into the cabin than to go away, he slammed the door. He says he thought about shooting her, but decided he’d rather not have to deal with a dead moose in the doorway, or with a live one thrashing around inside the little one-room cabin as she died. Sometime that afternoon, she moved on and he walked out to the lodge and told the story. By then he and many other people had started leaving their cars and trucks either in the lodge’s big lot or at plowed turnouts by the highway because side roads and long personal driveways were choked with snow.
Ralph, another neighbor, was all the way out to his truck one day when he noticed that there was a cow moose on one side of it and her calf on the other. He describes a classic comedy routine, where he goes one way, the moose gives chase, then turns and circles the truck the other way. Finally, he vaulted into the bed of the truck, cow and calf were reunited and moseyed away, but not before she had body-slammed him against a fender and broken some of his ribs. Scars, bruises and dings were showing up on people, dogs and vehicles up and down the valley. Ordinarily, moose are shy creatures who amble calmly away if approached by a human. That year we learned that starving moose become aggressive.
Avoiding moose became an obsession for us. When the snow that Doug and I kept shoveling off the flat roof of our trailer piled up and covered the windows in the living room, we smoothed it into a ramp for easy access to the roof. Each time we prepared to go anywhere, we climbed to the roof and scouted out the location of the local moose. Getting some elevation was the only way to see any distance at all, what with all that snow everywhere. (That was during the five years that Doug and I were without a vehicle of our own, so unless someone came and gave us a ride or we hitched one, we went everywhere on foot. Most weeks, “everywhere” was just two trips a day to and from the school bus stop at the highway about a quarter mile away, and maybe one or two across the highway to the general store another quarter mile or so on the other side of the highway. In summer, we had our bicycles and put many miles on them riding up to the ice cream store at Montana Creek seven or eight miles away.)
One dark morning as we walked in the deep, narrow channel between the snow walls, we surprised a cow moose bedded down at the T-intersection about halfway out to the school bus stop. We eased over to the side of the road and tried to skirt around her, but she spooked and ran… the way we needed to go, of course, not the other way. We’d gone about another forty yards, and I’m sure she thought we were following her, when she turned and took a stand. She huffed and snorted, and did a little threat-charge at us, then turned and moseyed away.
When she looked over her shoulder and saw that we were still there walking behind her, she stopped again and turned our way. She tossed her head, whuffed and snorted and showed her teeth, and I told Doug to get to the top of the berm. He scampered up the packed snow just as she started charging at me. I recall the moist feel and woody smell of her breath, the sight of the wide tan expanse of her belly in the beam from my big Mag-Lite as she reared up over me, and the gurgling sounds of her digestion. Then, next thing I knew, she was back on all four hooves, Doug was giggling at the top of the snow berm (he was eight years old then), and I’d somehow teleported about forty feet back the way from which we had come. That was the first day that winter that Doug missed school on account of moose, but he wasn’t the first kid to offer the moose excuse.
In April, when it had already begun to show a bit of dawn light by the time we went out to the bus, my pre-walk climb to the roof revealed the presence of three moose in the road right at the mouth of our driveway. After my earlier close encounter, Charley, Doug’s dad, had convinced me to start carrying the .357 with me everywhere. He said what I really needed was a pump shotgun, but the Ruger magnum revolver was better than nothing. He had given it to me a few years previously, as a deterrent to the two-legged predators who started sniffing around after he moved out. It had worked like a charm. After we spent a Saturday afternoon target-shooting in the nearby gravel pit I checked the gun with the bartender when we entered the lodge with its big afternoon crowd. Charley bragged rather loudly to a few of his friends about what a “natural” shot I was. From then on, the guys left me alone. I’d left the gun in its holster on a hook ever since, until I started carrying it in my coat pocket at Charley’s urging when the moose got bad that winter.
I fired one shot into the air, and the moose looked up at me. A second shot into the ground between them and me, which kicked up some chips of ice, sent them moseying off toward that T-intersection I mentioned earlier. That meant we couldn’t follow our usual route along the subdivision street. We slogged out through the direct trail we’d packed with our snowshoes instead, and scrambled up over the twenty-foot berm at the edge of the highway just as the school bus pulled up. Having twisted an ankle and pulled a thigh muscle in the uneven path, I decided to take my chances in the plowed road on my way back to the house after Doug left on the bus.
At the T-intersection, I saw that those three moose had moved back to about halfway between the intersection and the start of my driveway, so instead of going that way, I opted for the longer way, around a block and up to the driveway from the other direction. I’d gone a block past the regular turn and made the first left and gotten almost to the next corner when I heard the telltale clops of an accelerating moose. There was barely enough dawn light to show me a pair of ears accelerating toward me over the top of the berm along a neighbor’s plowed driveway.
I headed for the berm on the opposite side of the road. About halfway up it, my foot hit a soft spot and that leg sank in to the hip. Trapped there, with the BIIIG bull moose still accelerating in my direction, I remembered the .357 in my coat pocket. The only effect my first shot had was to blind me with the muzzle flash. The next three shots were aimed as best I could toward the big black shape I could hear more than see as it approached. It’s a six-shot revolver, and I had alread used two to scare moose away from the driveway. One of those three rapidly squeezed-off shots hit the moose. It slowed, turned, and went off into the woods beyond the next intersection.
When I managed to free my leg from the berm and get back down on the road, I saw a blood spray and a trail of drops leading into the woods. I was shaken emotionally and shaking physically from the adrenaline letdown as I started back the way I had come from, deciding it best not to follow that blood trail. At the corner, a neighbor and his wife stopped their car for a little conversation. The guy asked me politely to “put that thing away” as I gestured with the .357. I explained as I stuck it in my pocket that it was empty. From then on, when I carry the .357, I also carry two full speed loaders for it.
The neighbors gave me a ride home, which was great since we had to mosey along behind those three moose for about a block and a half to get there. I got on the phone, reported the wounded moose to Fish & Game as required, and left messages at the lodge for Charley and for Duane. They showed up with one other friend later that day and tracked the wounded bull, finished him off and salvaged the meat. My other friend Charlie came around right after the butchering and offered to take a haunch in to Alaska Sausage for proper processing. My only taste of Bullwinkle was some of that sausage, which made me ill–Bullwinkle’s revenge.
That night as Charley, Duane and their friend sat in my living room telling the story of the stalk and kill, Doug was sitting on my lap, arms wrapped tightly around my neck. I was alternately teary and giddy with relief at my close call, feeling sorry for the moose, guilty for just wounding it–I grew up in a culture where you don’t just hurt animals. If you shoot them, you shoot to kill. After the guys told me about their afternoon’s work and I told them all about my morning’s scare, I said, “I feel awful. I didn’t come here to kill moose. I love them–love seeing them out there in the field, hearing them crunch the willows around the house…” Doug gave me a hard squeeze and interrupted, “Mom, I’m glad you got the moose before the moose got you.” Okay. I can live with that.
So, that’s the Rocky and Bullwinkle part, which only leaves Cow-Winkle’s story to tell. She was a rare light tan moose, almost blonde. She showed up at the mouth of our driveway in May as the snow was starting to melt. It was still deep, but packed. The state had given up plowing some of the roads and were only clearing up to inhabited residences, which meant the plowed road ended at our driveway. Cow-Winkle bedded down there at the dead end. When she was up on her feet, her limp showed that she had a broken hind leg. Her ribs were showing, and she was a pathetic sight, unable to get off the road or up the steep berms to reach the willows to eat.
State biologists, after their spring census, estimated that we had lost 90% of our moose population in this valley that winter, and virtually all of that year’s calves. As the thaw came, to the usual scents of defrosting dog droppings was added the heavy, choking smell of rotting meat. Before the trees and bushes leaved out I could see from the road, as I walked from home to the school bus stop, five separate moose carcasses off in the woods. As the thaw started that year, the U.S. Army, in a misguided too-little-too-late-and-the-wrong-thing-anyway stab at trying to alleviate the moose’s starvation, had brought hundreds of hay bales to the valley. They plowed out wide areas beside the railroad tracks and the roads and left hay there. A truckload of National Guardsmen had left some baled hay there at the end of our plowed road. The smarter moose knew it wasn’t food, and used it as bedding material. That was where Cow-Winkle lay down, with I suppose the intention of dying.
I couldn’t stand it. I called Charley. He came over and he laughed at my soft heart, but he helped me. We strapped on snowshoes. Several days we walked out on the deep snow. He used a machete to whack the tops out of some trees that stuck up out of the snow, and loaded my arms with the branches. I slowly and cautiously approached the cow and offered them to her. She ate each day’s fresh offerings and soon accepted my approach without apparent fear. Then one day she was up and gone, and I never saw her again. End of story.
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