Mr. Moose is Looking For Love
By Shea Andersen, New West Unfiltered 9-19-05
My mother-in-law in Bozeman tells me the bears are getting rambunctious.
"They're gorging," she said. Getting themselves ready for the long winter's nap.
Which means, for the residents of Bozeman, that the bears have lost all sense of culinary discretion, and are looking for garbage. That puts a whole new spin on garbage night, when unwitting citizens lay out the buffet for bears just jonesing for a little game of swat-the-can.
Hereabouts, we don't see many bears, but I've definitely noticed some dang colorful piles of scat on the local trails. That lack of flavor sensitivity the bears seem to be going through just now leads them to new heights of scarfing. Is there a berry on that branch? No? Really? Maybe I'll just strip the whole thing, leaves and all, just to be sure...
So jogging around here becomes more than just dodge-the-dogdoo, it's leap-the-large pile. And then wonder where its owner is.
In Ketchum, they've got more to worry about than bears. It's fall, when moose (plural: meese?) are looking for love. Wooking fo nub, as Eddie Murphy used to say. That female moose you've been ignoring every morning as she wanders around the meadow all summer? Hubba hubba, buddy.
So, the moose (mooses?) are getting randy, and for humans, that means watch your butt. You remember the teenage tantrums you used to throw when love wasn't going right? Did you have several pounds of hardened rack on your head?
So, the Idaho Mountain Express is warning residents, primarily the dog-walkers and the fitness nuts, to be aware and look out for moody moose (moosen?) as they stomp the neighborhood.
I remember one fall while I was living up there, hearing about a moose who went on a rampage in Downtown Ketchum, and began ramming parked cars with his antlers. Justice! We cried as he hoisted our flagons of beer at Grumpy's. (Hey, whose car was that anyhow? Not mine, right?)
In that same year, a lovelorn moose got all bent out of shape and almost took it out on a lady walking her adorable little punt-dog. Both the dog and the lady got out O.K., I recall, but once again, Justice! cried the barely-sober jury from their barstools. This, the beer-fueled pundits declared, is species justice, where the number of annoying weird dogs gets docked by the number of pissed-off megafauna. (Everyone's OK, right?)
Round here, we got no moose. Darn it. We got no bears. Yet. What we do got are squirrels, squirrelling away nuts for winter. And they're driving my dog bananas. But I say to the squirrels: watch your butts. He's getting faster.
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