I was once stalked by a moose. On Isle Royale National Park. It was spooky.
I went out to take pictures of the sunset from a lookout tower. With that complete, I got it into my head to stick around past sunset to see the stars. Clear sky, 360 degree view of the horizon, and in the middle of a damn big lake miles away from any source of light (and some leagues from the nearest town), I was sure it would be magnificent. And it probably would have been.
But of course I was a couple miles from camp as well. And after about… fifteen minutes of waiting in the fading light, sanity kicked in. I was like “You know… you’re going to have to walk two miles back in pitch black, down a rocky ridge line, then across narrow boards through a couple of swamps, and through a heavily forested area on a dirt path. Again, in pitch black. You realize how insane that is, right?”
I managed to make it through the most treacherous part of the hike back (through the swamps) before it turned to pitch black, but somewhere along that last mile… well, it was like I heard people talking. Not that I could make out the words, but it was like they were some distance away and muffled by the trees. I kept walking expecting to maybe pick out a word or two before long, but as I continued along and the “voices” seemed no less indistinct than they had at first, I started to consider how odd it was. I mean, here I was with my flashlight, a mile from the campsite, surrounded by forest, and though I could hear them, I could not pick up even a glimmer of light from them. Surely, thought I, they would have had flashlights? They couldn’t be stargazing: looking overhead, the leaves were too thick. They would admit no starlight.
So finally I called out, “Hey, who’s there?”
No one answered. But still there were those muffled voices…
And then I remembered when, a few days earlier, in broad daylight, I had just about come within arm’s reach of a moose without realizing it. The only hint I had of anyone or anything sharing the trail with me was a most unusual sound: like low voices muffled through the trees. That time, too, I had assumed there were just some other hikers around the next bend in the trail. But then a moose bolted out from behind the trees and plunged into the water alongside the trail.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I realized then that I was playing a most dangerous game: the hunting of a man. I was that man, being hunted. And the moose was my would-be predator.
I don’t believe I have ever been so afraid of anything as a grown man. Not in the Navy, not even in Iraq. It was… it was terror. I was so relieved to finally make camp. I honestly don’t know how I made it out of that alive.