Moosing around again

It’s happened again. I don’t know why I’m surprised. It is Alaska, and our woods are crawling with moose, increasingly hungry and annoyed, with snow up to their bellies and their living rooms below zero.

So to wake and find that one of the monster fiends had broken into the nursery to cause havoc and gleefully destroy our livelihood should be no surprise. The warning signs were there.

The few days preceding the discovery of a plethora of uneaten goodies behind the giant fence, the eventual hoodlum and his mother had been eating the larch tree, the dead spruce on the hill, nasty-looking dead brush and just about anything else in their wake. Needless to say, the mountain ash, while large enough to withstand the onslaught, has now been mouth-pruned into an interesting shape. The Ginnala maple will be years in returning to its former beauty!

Fortunately, the hedge was so far buried beneath a snow bank that it received only a tiny haircut. The same pair of beasts had cornered my husband in the car on one occasion, and in their general surliness made a point of hanging around the yard to growl at us every time we poked our noses out of the house.

At any rate, the youngster now happily found himself checking out the fodder behind the fence. He must have thought he’d landed in heaven! What to do? Some of you may remember a column several years ago where I confessed of going inside the same-said fenced area in the dead of winter to chase a moose around with a shovel — with near disastrous results. It was only the bravery of my big dog Rosemary that allowed me to eventually scurry out, strangely shoeless, but generally unscathed.

That experience lingers somewhere near the surface of my mind, so we went back to the drawing board. There had to be a better approach. After first shedding a fearful tear as I envisioned a fabulous crop of 7-year-old Patmore ash — finally ready for sale — being munched down for morning snack, we set to serious, if not quick, deliberation on a plan.

It appeared that the young rascal had found his way into heaven by way of a high snow drift at a slightly leaning (thus lower) point in the thousand-mile fence. That’s the problem with such devices — they are somewhat arduous to maintain with a weak link almost always present. All large gates were securely snowed shut for the winter and we thought it unlikely that we could herd the beast out the small walk-in that we kept shoveled. The solution? To rely once again on our doggie friends.

It occurred to us that the little one, 40 pounds of solid, alert muscle, might be able to stay above the drifts and travel quickly enough to coax our big visitor to depart. His annoying high pitched bark would be a bonus. How and where the departure might take place we figured would just have to evolve. And so it was that, on the last really cold day of a cold spell that just never seemed to end, we let little Jacob Marley out to do his job. And did he ever! Three minutes later the fence on the lower end of the nursery had a barn-sized hole in it, Marley was prancing around like he’d saved the human race and the young beastie had headed for quieter snow banks.

This, of course, is not the end of the story. A section of unused picket fence stood on end, sufficed as a temporary mend to the broken fence, and hours later the nursery was sadly, but effectively ensconced in bright orange plastic environmental fencing. It such a fabulous look! The idea of seeing orange plastic each time I step out of the house is no thriller, but when faced with the option of growing trees for years to feed angry moose, ones standards take a sudden dive.

Ultimately, it was weather that brought the hungry monsters to our door, and weather that took them away. At 65 degrees warmer today, one week after the attack, those high snow drifts that allowed Mr. Moose to breech security are gone. We haven’t seen a hairy beast in several days, and we have orange décor for the rest of the winter. And a final bonus: those lovely Patmore Ash are now threatened with drowning. I suppose next it will be mice swimming up for air! Another tale, another time.

Sally Koppenberg is a garden and food designer. She is the owner of Stonehill Gardens and The Red Beet, nursery & catering companies specializing in Alaska Grown foods, trees, shrubs, perennials and native plants. Contact her at gardener@gci.net.