Ode to a Moose

It was late April and we had just experienced another cold snap. Out my cabin door, I could see that the big pond had taken on more ice. The winter ice never really went away, and now that the temperature was dipping down to minus 15 degrees at night, any open water that might have been around, was thickening up pretty quickly. There were some smooth clear patches here and there that were alright for skating. Regarding ice thickness and skating safety on lakes and ponds, I always remembered the little verse I learned during Red Cross Swimming Lessons when I was a kid – “One inch – NO WAY, Two inches – ONE MAY, Three inches – SMALL GROUP, Four inches -OKAY”. Since I was skating by myself, I knew that the ice really only had to be about two or three inches in order to be safe enough for my medium-build frame to be supported as I lutzed and sowkowed around from patch to patch or when I took a slapshot to see how far a puck would actually travel.

One morning, I decided to go out for an early skate. I had checked the ice thickness in a couple of places the day before and every test measured the ice at four inches or more. Since the overnight temperature had dropped to minus 18 last night, I felt pretty confident that I would be able to stay on the good side of the ice no matter where I went. I put on my skates while sitting on the small boat dock just down from my cabin. As I stepped down onto the surface, the ice groaned a deep moan and a crack ricocheted off in the distance. These ice sounds were always sobering but I was very accustomed to them, so after the initial startle response had vanished, I realized that the noises of the lake really meant nothing at all. With hockey stick in hand and puck in front of me, I headed out across the lake and around the bend about halfway to the other end. We always called this lake "our little pond" because it was a slightly smaller version of most of the lakes in the area.

As I rounded the trees on the curve of the shore, I could see a dark object on the ice in the middle of the lake. As I got closer, I could tell that it was some sort of animal. I thought that it might be a bear and I was set to turn around and head the other direction, when all of a sudden, this creature let out a long mournful squawking sound. I can’t say that I have ever heard that sort of tortured call before, but I was pretty sure that it wasn’t being made by a bear. So, I ventured closer. When I came within 30 or 40 meters of the animal, I could see that it was a moose calf. It was fairly young and shakily standing by itself in the middle of the pond, and next to what appeared to be a large hole in the ice. As I got even closer, a black object, under the ice, moved past me in the direction from which I had just come. Normally, a moose calf standing by itself in the wild, would indicate a mother cow somewhere nearby. A moose cow separated from her calf is just a dangerous as a black bear sow in the same situation. I was weary of this. So, I scanned the surface of the pond in all directions to make sure that I wasn’t being pursued by some angry cow. The black object passed under my skates one more time. It didn’t take me long to realize that this moose calf was standing in wait over the hole in the ice that its mother had just recently fallen into. And, the black object swimming around down there, was indeed the mother. I didn’t want the calf to slip into the hole so I did my best to shoo it away, but it just kept coming back. I had to be careful myself not to get to close to the broken ice and end up doing some sort of a deep dive with the cow. Moose are fairly good swimmers and I knew that the cow would be able to swim its way out of the pond if it could only make its way back to the hole in the ice through which it had fallen. I skated around in an attempt to locate the cow and somehow guide it back toward the broken ice by banging my hockey stick against the ice above it. I never did manage to see it again and I can only imagine that she eventually swam back and forth in an attempt to surface, until she finally ran out of air. I imagined that her eyes would be stinging from the cold water and that when she finally succumbed to the clutches of the icy water, her airways and lungs would have filled with this near frozen liquid. The extra weight of it all must have caused her to settle to the bottom of the lake. I have no way of knowing if that is what happened, but later that same summer, I did find the bloated, rotting carcass of a cow moose caught in some deadfall along the far shore of the pond. I assumed that the carcass belonged to the mother who had died that late April morning in an attempt to cross the frozen pond with her young calf. I realized that the little Red Cross Safety verse did not apply to dense bodies like those of a moose. I thought that getting caught under the ice of a frozen pond must have been a terrible way to die. I wondered if the moose panicked when it couldn’t find its initial entry spot. I felt sorry for her. I felt sorry for her calf. I made a call on my cell phone to the conservation officers in the area and let them know what had happened and that there was a moose calf that needed rescuing out on the lake. Then, shaken from the events of the morning, I skated back to my cabin. I found out later that the officers had found the hole in the ice as I told them, but they never found the calf. It may have suffered the same fate as its mother, or perhaps it was found by wolves or some other predators in the mean time. Either way, I reckoned that it was a tough life being an animal in the wild. I felt lucky to be a member of Homo sapiens sapiens at that point. But, I also felt blessed that I lived beside that frozen pond and that I remembered lessons I had learned as a kid. The beat goes on I guess.