Encounters on the trail

 Imagine my unease and downright trepidation when my daughter — the one who lives in the moose-infested wilds of Alaska, namely Anchorage — leaves the following voice message on my cellphone:

“Mom, I’m out walking on a trail behind my apartment and there’s a moose four feet away from me,” she says in little more than a whisper. “Oh, my God, this moose is freaking me out. I gotta go. I’ll talk to you later.”

Click.

Would she talk to me later or was she being pummeled by the moose?

I called her back a few minutes later and she was fine, thank goodness. It was no use lecturing her about the dangers of moose encounters. She’d already been briefed by co-workers and neighbors who had instructed her to steer clear of the big-antlered beasts. She knows enough to try and keep her distance.

Still, Heather has been a little too fascinated by moose since she moved up north. The first animals she wanted to see when we visited the Anchorage Zoo last fall were the moose.  Thankfully they were far off in a fenced area.

She had her picture taken in front of a gigantic set of moose antlers at the zoo, so it looked as though she had sprouted horns. The photo became her Christmas card, with the greeting: “Merry Christ-moose!”

One day she sent me a cellphone photo of the moose in the parking lot of her apartment building.

I sent her the news story about the wiry, 97-pound, 85-year-old Alaskan woman who beat off a moose that was stomping on her husband at the Willow Airport near Anchorage. The woman grabbed a shovel from their pickup truck and began whacking the large critter until it backed off.

Heather always was intrigued by the moose that used to wander through our backyard when we lived near downtown Whitefish in the early 1990s. I’d never let my girls go outside if we’d spotted a moose nearby, but don’t think Heather didn’t try. Danger is that girl’s middle name, much to my chagrin.

I decided to educate myself and hopefully share some tidbits of knowledge with my daughter on just how dangerous moose can be, and one of the first stories I happened upon was a piece from Animal Planet titled “Why are moose more dangerous than bears in Alaska?”

Apparently much like bears are drawn to trash cans here in Northwest Montana, moose are lured into Anchorage by residents’ garbage. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game said moose nosing through “abandoned cuisine” has steadily escalated in the past 15 years.

And March and April are the worst months “because the winter food supply in the wild grows scarce and hungry moose lumber into the city in higher numbers.”

With this being perhaps the coldest, snowiest winter on record in Alaska, I have visions of the place crawling with starving, cantankerous moose.

Another article titled “Co-existing with Moose” noted that each year in Alaska more people are injured by moose than by bears. And this statistic didn’t thrill me: Each year there are at least five to 10 moose-related injuries in the Anchorage area alone, with many reports of charging moose in neighborhoods or on ski trails.

I’ve read enough to put me in a frenzy. I know moose encounters hardly will be Heather’s biggest adventures in Alaska. She already has journeyed to the Arctic Circle and off the grid to cover stories and lately has spent weeks crawling around the backcountry to track down Ididarod sled-dog racers for feature stories.

But I am going to send her a piece I found on reading moose “body language.” It might be useful for her next close encounter of the antlered kind.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.