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THE MOOSE IS THE WEARY PART OF THE DAY
The graceful bull moose is wading out into bogs, he is reaching down under the water with his long muzzle, pulling up the sodden vegetation, he has grazed for fifty kilometres through the woods, a gigantic swamp donkey with antlers of palm like blades, he dives beneath the surface of lakes, to reach the grey vegetation as deep as five metres, the bull is a winter twig-eater, in summer he is belly-deep in marshes, gobbling water plants, a loner with the fur skin bell hanging beneath his chin, wandering the stony overlapping ranges at dusk and dawn, at higher elevations, or stepping through metre deep drifts along shrubby stream courses, drab colouration makes him hard to imagine, despite the huge free-flowing horns, sexy coughs and bellows along the extreme terrain, he is mentally composing the size and shape of the antlers of other males, as temperature fluctuations boil the bull blood into combat, in the rugged climbing back-country, those vast unreachable regions, where lightweight warmth moves down the stupendous slope of the great brown shoulders, the solitary cow drags through the icy swamps becoming hanging slime, her squashed and enormous face has dropped down to weed the lake, wet vines sticking to slow movement of her legs, the moose is the weary part of the day, the land turns spirit and cloaks itself in white, the first snowfall i saw was like the inside of a cathedral for hundreds of kilometres, the snow eats sound, the central focus becomes a wind chime that is muffled, from the only human voice still audible, we went off the road at thirty kilometres an hour on the black ice, he white-knuckled it all the way home to the next valley in alberta, the dead moose were hanging from the trucks on the highway to calgary, their tongues swelled out and leaking blood, canada moose have walked from heaven to earth, hunters take the trophies to their living rooms, they have made the world weary and dull, the moose cow was licking the salt from the road and coughing, it was a twilight salt binge in the late fall, i was intrigued by her, it was as if a forest clearing had grown legs and stumbled onto the road, 'look out for the moose, they're very dangerous,' he said, there are so many warnings about wild animals killing people, but her rocky velvet head is placid and strong, moose are northern landscapes, the huge antler radar detecting cars and bridge crossings, they remind me of dogs, say the temperamental german shepherd who get that peculiar look, a troubled brown-eyed elegant look, or an unforgiving frown look, how can we make them extinct?, kill everything that looks back at us, showing us what we are as we chose to love or hate, we are reflected in moose wading through snow, the loping jaunty walk, the bounce that keeps her moving as she gains strength and momentum, a sense of endurance and self worth by the second, swimming through the deep snow as though it were a lake, the hunter is reflected in the eye of the moose, the little destroyer in a euphoria of wilderness, the soft brown gaze that leaves us will reflect a landscape of pain, the gigantic bull moose drops to his knees with a dull thud as the place tips upsidedown, by the time the hunter approaches with the gun still smoking, the glazed over eye will show him nothing, now he is alone, as the provinces of extinction howl around him. |
