A few nights ago a moose took out one of our strings of outdoor Christmas lights, and I was reminded of this story from several years ago. It’s in Walking Wild Shores, but it seemed like a good time for a repeat appearance. As I first tried fixing and then wound up replacing the lost string a few days ago, it suddenly occurred to me that the moose must find it odd that us humans will occasionally light up the buffet so nicely.
The Moose That Stole Christmas
With only about four hours of sunlight these days, and with day length still decreasing by four minutes each day, Christmas lights mean a lot to some of us here in the great frozen north. Last Sunday it dawned on me that it was dark just about every time I looked out the window. We go to work in the dark; we come home in the dark. Life outside is beautiful, but we just don’t see it very often anymore. So I decided it was time to put some Christmas lights up out on some trees in the yard so the windows weren’t just inky black surfaces. With a flashlight and boots it was a fairly pleasant task in the fluffy snow, and the small white lights looked great when I finally got two lines plugged in with a new fifty foot extension cord. It was all very cheery and festive.
Moose are common backyard occupants in the Fairbanks area. They are the bane of gardeners in summer, but we hadn’t heard of them being winter pests. We have at least two that spend time in our yard, munching their way through the woods at irregular intervals, usually just leaving their tracks behind to let us know they were there. One of them likes to roam out across our deck, but it doesn’t seem to have figured out yet how to eat sunflower seeds from the birdfeeder. It did seem to enjoy the new young tree that Rose planted out in back, and occasionally we see it, a very large female, smiling and nodding at us as we each go about our business. It’s still amazing to me that our deck holds this huge animal.
Last Saturday in at the lab a couple of the graduate students were passing around a picture of aliens stealing Christmas lights. One of the students had printed it from a web site, and I was a little surprised that anyone had the time to seek things like this out. It’s still not entirely clear, but I gather that when they have a little spare time during a molecular procedure they make up unlikely strings of key words, plug them into a web search engine, then enjoy the sites that pop up. Geez. And we used to just listen to rock and roll and run other procedures.
Well, the picture of those nasty little aliens came right back to me on Monday night when I went out back to plug the lights in—and couldn’t find the cord! I could see little drag marks in the snow, but it was late, near zero, very dark, and I only had on a shirt and house shoes. The unlikely mystery had to wait. Tuesday was skinning night, and some Bluethroats (Luscinia svecica) and good music kept me away until late, so it wasn’t until Wednesday evening (which was just as dark, with light snow) that I finally had the chance—and the clothing and the boots and the flashlight—to figure things out. Moose tracks. Everywhere. And moose beds. There had been a little moose party in our back yard, and the lights and the cord had been carried away by the partygoers. Half an hour of running a hook across every moose trail I could find in the snow gained me nothing but an appreciation for the cleverness and sheer ruthlessness of the culprits. The spirit of our meager Christmas has been stolen by moose.
What can be done about these large, ungainly creatures? First, everyone should know just how dastardly they are. They seem to strike when it’s dark, and now when I look at our inky black windows I imagine them reveling out there, laughing as they look in on our pale, cheerless lives. I don’t know. Maybe if we had a Cindy Lou Who doll to put in a lighted window the culprits would feel guilty and bring back our lights just in the nick of time for us all to sing Yahoo Boring (or Abu Dabi or whatever it is they sing in Whoville) around the tree on Christmas Day. In the meantime I’ve fluffed up their beds in the backyard, hoping they might drag the damned lights back and I won’t be left hunting for them after the snow melts next April. And I might ask around about moose-proof cords and lights for the long, dark nights between now and then.
