Kevin Jackson - Moose

Series editor: Jonathan Burt

Kevin Jackson

REAKTION BOOKS

For Monty

Published by
REAKTION BOOKS LTD
33 Great Sutton Street
London EC1V 0DX, UK
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 2008
Copyright Kevin Jackson 2008

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publishers.

Page references in the Photo Acknowledgements and
Index match the printed edition of this book.

Printed and bound in China

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Jackson, Kevin, 1955

Moose. (Animal)

1. Moose

I. Title

599.657

eISBN: 9781861896285

They are Gods own horses...

Thoreau, The Maine Woods (1864)

Moosehead Lake, Maine, a chilly September evening, about a decade ago. My wife Claire and I had travelled in from the coast to join one of the commercial moose watches that are a mainstay of the local tourist economy. The trip had not been a great success. A couple of hours of puttering around on the placid waters in a small motor-boat had yielded no more than a single sighting, and not a very satisfying one at that: in the gathering dusk, a solitary bull moose, off in the distance, just about perceptible through binoculars. It hardly amounted to an epiphany.

Then the boats motor cut out. Our guide tried to radio back to base for help, but either no one was monitoring his calls or his radio was dead, too. It was all starting to look a bit grim. Maine nights can already be dangerously cold in September, and none of us was wearing proper outdoor gear. Fortunately, one of the other aspiring moose-watchers was a former US Marine with a knack for mechanics. He took the motor to pieces, fiddled with it for a while, and within half an hour or so we were all having cocktails and looking forward to a hot dinner.

So the drive back to our motel was a mixture of relief and disappointment, right up until the moment when I drew Claires attention to the life-sized statue of a moose on the roadside wed noticed it earlier, in full daylight. Slight pause. It slowly dawned on both of us that the statue had been on the other side of the road...

We stopped, turned the car round, went cautiously back up the road in first gear. There, a good 6 feet (2 metres) or more tall at the withers and nonchalantly chomping on foliage, was a fully grown cow moose. The species is famously timid, with the exceptions of males during rutting season and mothers with their young, so we were surprised at how little she seemed to care about our presence. We edged the car forward until she was barely 3 or 4 feet from the headlights, turned off the engine, and watched.

Many of those who have written about the moose comment on how comical, even grotesque the beast is a gift to cartoonists. Their muzzles (one cartoonist irreverently called the moose muzzle a schnozzola) have been judged preposterously long, their tails ludicrously short, the humps above their withers Quasimodo-ish, their expressions foolish. Ted Hughes, in a comic poem for children, calls them dopes of the deep woods, and many people assume that the poor moose is as stupid as it is bulky.

But this cow moose did not look silly at all. Majestic doesnt hit the right note, since there was nothing overpowering about her largeness. Quite unexpectedly, the feature that enraptured us most was her ears: large, delicate, constantly in nervous motion as she picked up on the many noises of the night-time forest. (Thoreau, I later found out, compared them to a rabbits ears.) Their sensitivity, their quick movement, seemed expressive of an intense alertness. She was anything but clumsy and sluggish and dumb. She was a beauty.

I have seen plenty of other animals in the wild dolphins and whales in the Atlantic, porcupines and martens in Italy, wallabies and camels in Australia but I have never experienced such a sense of privilege and enchantment as I felt watching this peaceable she-creature. After about twenty minutes, she ambled away into the foliage and was gone. In the following days, we saw several more moose at close range, including a frisky youngster cantering down a roadside. But you never forget the first time.

This, then, really was something of an epiphany, and all the more telling for its unexpected timing. But why had I come in search of this particular epiphany? A full answer would, I suspect, not be particularly interesting to anyone but me. Enough for now to say that, some time around the early 1980s, it began to be obvious that, though interested in many species of animal, I was developing a fascination for moose above all other beasts. Were I more of a New Age type, I might perhaps want to make the embarrassing claim that the moose declared itself as my totem animal, my spirit creature, or what have you. Perhaps. All I know is that I was more and more drawn to images and tales and lore of moose.

Friends and colleagues began to call me by the nickname Moose; they still do. For one of my birthdays, I was given an adoption share in a bull moose at a London zoo. (It died soon afterwards, allegedly in mourning for its mate.) When I founded a small poetry imprint in the 1990s, I called it Alces Press