If you're a moose, don't call 911

If you are a moose in Alaska, don't go running to the tourists for protection from wolves.

They'll call the Alaska State Troopers, and the troopers will shoot you because, well, they can.

Must be that I've been doing something wrong all these years. I've been treed by moose. I've been chased by moose. I once played here-we-go-round-the-mulberry-spruce with an enraged cow moose for what seemed like a day and a half.

And yet I never shot a moose in defense of life and property. Hit one between the eyes with a shovel once, but that's another story.

Wanted to shoot a few. Never did. I didn't think I could get away with it.

But then I never knew that if you shot a moose in defense of life and property, you could take "a shoulder and a hindquarter'' and call a charity to get "the rest.'' Or at least that's what has been reported, erroneously it would appear, in the wake of last week's Great Crescent Lake Moose Shoot on the Kenai Peninsula.

In case you missed the details, a couple of Ohioans hiking to the U.S. Forest Service camp at Crescent Lake, where they planned to stay and do some snowboarding, encountered a moose under attack by wolves. This sort of thing happens in the wilds of Alaska.

Unlike the socially caring, friendly, familial wolves known to urban Americans, Alaska has wolves that grab other animals with their teeth and try to rip out chunks of flesh until the animals die. Anyway, the Ohioans ran into this process in action.

Their story, if it is to be believed, is that they encountered a moose charging down the trail in their direction with a wolf clinging to it, fangs embedded the moose's neck. The wolf, they say, saw them, let go of the moose and fled, which makes them a whole lot luckier than the Western Alaska teacher recently killed by wolves.

Yes, I know, wolves don't kill people, people kill, yadda, yadda, yadda. Or it at least there are no "recorded" instances of wolves killing people, which might have something to do with the holes in the record-keeping for the period before humans all but exterminated wolves in most of North America. Suffice to say, there isn't an American Indian tribe out there lacking oral histories of wolves laying waste to people, and there is no reason to doubt those stories.

So the Ohioans were probably lucky the wolf, in their version of events, let go the moose and fled. The moose, however, was still there, and it was agitated. You would be, too. And when a moose is agitated, it does one of two things:

It flees or it stands its ground and tries to kick the snot out of whatever threat it sees.

To the moose at this point, those Ohioans must have either looked like two-legged wolves or salvation, as in "Hey, they scared off the wolves trying to make lunch of me. Maybe if I stay close to these guys, they will scare all the wolves away."

Staying close to the tourists was easy, too, given one had shimmied up a tree and the other had dived under a blowdown. Had the visitors known much about moose, they might have known you can usually be quiet and wait this situation out. Moose are not the smartest animals in the world. Their attention span doesn't last for long. If you sit there quietly and don't get the moose all riled up again, they will usually just forget about you and leave.

The tourists, however -- again if we can believe their reports -- kept harassing the moose, apparently thinking that would make it go away, which it didn't. So finally after what they say was four hours but could, for all we know, have been four minutes, they got on the cell phone and called for help. Thank heaven for those cell phones.

If a moose ever gets you up a tree, just call for help.

Enter now, two Alaska Wildlife Troopers and an agent of the U.S. Forest Service, who, according to an Associated Press story getting considerable play back in Ohio, "decided to kill the moose ... for the men's safety.''