The Wildest of Wildlife

The other week my husband and I were driving off a mountain at nightfall. We were on a dirt road in a grazing allotment, meaning, there were cows milling around. And at night, we knew they would clump up on the road and we'd have to drive right up to them to get them to move out of the way. The light was in its last moments, and I looked down the road and saw a black ungulate in the sliver of dirt that was the very rough road. I thought, cow. And then I thought, that's a really, really tall cow. And then I realized it was a moose.

And like a moose, she didn't stick around for us to ease our bumper against her. She was gone. I hadn't seen a moose in years, and it it made me think of when I was a river guide, nearly twenty years ago.

It was summer in Grand Teton National park. I was living my best college life, and I was rowing an oar raft. The raft was built so that six guests could sit on each side of my oars, allowing for twelve paying customers in the boat. They didn't row. In fact, most had very expensive cameras, and they hoped beyond hope, that they would get to see something super cool.

We were in a very narrow channel. It was only a few feet deep. The boat I was in had very low drag and could float in extremely shallow water. It was near the end of the trip, and I heard a crashing from the river left bank. I looked down river and saw a calf moose come barreling out of the willows. It nosily crashed across the river before disappearing into the scrub on the other side of the river.

The people in my boat lost it. They were so excited. I remember one man had a camera the size of a mini cannon (how big is a mini cannon, you ask? It's the same size as a giant camera) and he had the thing pointed at the calf and was clicking away like his life depended on it.

The guests were ecstatic, but I was not. I knew mom would be looking for that baby moose, and mom moose were not to be messed with. The most recent animal vs. human attack in the park had been a moose stomping a tourist to near death. Moose played for keeps.

So while my boat oohed and ahhed over their magical moose encounter, I scanned for mom. And then I heard her.

She appeared, running down the river left bank, paralleling our boat. Again, the guests lost their collective minds, but I did not. I remembered an apocryphal story of a long past guide who once hit a moose and it landed in his boat. Apparently the moose bit him.

I am not a large human, I did not want to have to wrestle a moose. Yet, mom moose was keeping perfect pace with our boat. The channel was so narrow and shallow that there was no where but forward for me to go, unless I wanted to try and land, but I didn't really want to stop if the moose decided she then needed to charge me. But I was between her side of the river and the side of the river where her calf was. This was not ideal.

She sped up, which I liked, except that I saw where she was headed. There was pinch point of cobbles in front of us, where the river narrowed even more, and I knew she was going to cross there.

If she crossed there, and we hit her, we'd hit her above the ankle (do moose have ankles? You know what I mean) and below the knee, and we would take her out and my understanding of physics said she was going to land in the boat.

Part of my safety talk was that people should never get in the water. The water was the most dangerous place one of our guests could be, and abandoning ship was not part of our emergency plans.

I took stock of the channel. I couldn't land. The river was too fast for me to safely do it, but it was shallow enough and straight enough that if people went into the water, they could get out and hopefully quickly scramble to the bank.

"If we hit her," I said, "you need to jump out of the boat."

The guests, who had been almost in tears watching this moose run next to us, looked at me.

"What?" Someone asked.

But I had committed. I had given a preemptive abandon ship order. But she would severely injure us, if not stomp us to death, if she ended up in this boat with us.

"We won't hit her... We can't, right?" Another person said.

Oh we could, and depending on the timing, we would.

The guests did not stop taking photos, but they shifted a little, as if getting into the best sitting position that would let them capture the photos of their lives and potentially fling themselves into the river. The two options weren't really compatible, but it was what we had.

The mom moose cut to cross the river, right where I though she would. I was already pulling back on the oars. I couldn't stop us, but I could slow us down. But I was a small human pulling backwards against the Snake River. There was only so much I could do.

I heaved on the oars, bracing with my feet off the frame. I had to be careful not to dig into the water too deep and pop an oar on a cobble. The guests clicked their cameras as fast as they could. No one spoke. The boat sailed forward, slower than had I not been pulling backwards with all my might, but forward all the same.

And in my memory, the only sound is the mom moose clattering across the Snake River cobbles, the water splashing at her hooves. I remember pulling for all I was worth, the guests leaning in toward the moose, the people at the front of the boat close enough to touch her. I could see her fur so clearly, it wasn't a mass of brown, but a combination of individual hairs.

She stepped just enough forward that we sailed by her, and had anyone on the right side of the boat not had a camera sucked to their eye, they could have trailed their fingers against her hide.

And then time resumed its normal pace. People were laugh crying. People were cheering. The man with the giant camera was already checking the screen. This was the best thing that could have happened to them.

I was struggling to remember how to breath. I probably needed new shorts. I had a trip to finish.

And I did. We got to the takeout safely. I don't remember if people tipped, they should have but probably didn't. Now, looking back on it, I can remember the gut sucking fear that things were about to hit the fan, and then the manic excitement that they didn't. And I have to say, it wasn't just the guests that got an amazing memory. I did too.

But, to this day, I don't mess with moose. They always win the fight.