One Less Moose :-(

I feel like this could be a long post. Only nine words in and I can’t be sure, but I feel a buildup inside me, the same feeling of urgency to expel one has after four Americanos (Venti) riding in a car on the interstate and the road sign says: Next services, 25 miles.

Why the buildup? Been grant writing again is why, revising really, which takes the concerted focus of every neuron and synapse I have left. Talk to me when I’m in grant writing mode and my reply, assuming I could muster one, would be like Jabberwocky. Think Joe Biden on the campaign stump. Needless to say blogging stops until the grant gets submitted. Tomorrow!

Let’s begin with the weather! Bluesky lately and warm, that is warm in the sense we living here at 61° north in late March mean warm. Which is not what most anybody else in America would call warm; they may be generous and say warm-er or less cold or okay but room for improvement, but not warm like an Alaskan means warm: “43°! No way! Shut up! That’s awesome. Let’s go crust skiing in shorts and tank top!“

A moose was struck by a car and eventually killed by a state trooper the other morning. Not a hundred feet from our house. I was still in bed, Happy Wife tending to her morning ablutions, when I heard two loud cracks one right after the other. My first guess was gun reports, so I ignored ’em — irreconcilable differences at the neighbor house, maybe. Harry heard it too, he went off with a few dozen throaty barks stopping only after I shouted at him, Dude, Chill! For some reason he responds to Dude. A few minutes later I was hop-stepping downstairs, simultaneously (and unwisely) trying to thread my legs into my morning comfys, when I  looked out the front window and saw the traffic in the street had slowed, and then I saw the moose lying in the left lane, barely alive, a miniature fog rising from its nostrils. The two loud cracks I’d heard earlier were moose bone breaking against glass ‘n steel.

I walked back upstairs to notify Happy Wife, who was crestfallen at the news, and then back downstairs to the front window. By then a trooper was standing over the moose, gun pointed, another trooper farther down the road waving his arms to halt traffic, and then two reports from a handgun in close succession. .45 cal, possibly .44 mag.

Less than a half hour later the moose was removed, perhaps by the moose salvage people. A sad fate to contemplate, really, one minute you’re struggling to sustain 1500+ pounds during the wee days of Spring subsisting on frozen twigs and buds, and the next you’re in pieces somebody’s freezer.