The Story
Snow is driving across Jackson Hole in October, and a bull moose with his full rack still on feeds right through it, snow settling on his back as he works the frosted brush.
He is one of two bulls feeding about 100 yards off the road on a stormy afternoon, near enough that cars have stopped and a handful of photographers have set up. A cow and a calf are somewhere in the same patch. The bulls mostly eat. Then they lie down in the snow, and nobody on the roadside knows whether they will stand again before sunset.
The field marks read clearly even through the storm. The face is near black, and a black face marks a bull; a cow's face is brown. Under his throat hangs the bell, the flap of skin that is larger and rounder on a bull than on a cow, whose bell looks more like a tuft of hair. Behind the head rises the shoulder hump of the largest member of the deer family.
A moose is dressed for this weather. Under the dark coat lies underfur, topped by long guard hairs. The hairs run 15 to 25 cm long and are hollow, and together the layers insulate the animal from cold.
The storm comes in October, and Minnesota DNR puts the rut from mid-September to mid-October, when bulls spar with their antlers and grunt to challenge rivals. Moose are the least social of the deer, fairly solitary outside the mating season. Here two big bulls share one patch, and the afternoon passes without a clash.
Fall and winter food is large quantities of willow, birch and aspen twigs, and an adult needs about 20 kg of food a day. The rack stays a while yet. Antlers are usually shed in December and January.
Meanwhile the photographer brews a cup of orange spice tea and asks only that the moose stay down long enough for him to drink it.
