Swing of fate leaves lucky moose alive and well

You spend a couple weeks trooping to the Kenai Peninsula to try to fill the moose-hunting tag of a lifetime. The weather pounds you. Your moose calling brings in more bears, including some frighteningly big grizzlies, than it does moose. None of the moose that show themselves are legally big enough to shoot.

Then, in the last hours of the last day of the hunt, the big boy finally shows up. Only it's hard to tell in the fading light whether his wide antlers meet the legal limit of 50 inches. It appears they could be 52, but then again they might be 48.

So just to make sure, you stare at the brow tines of the antlers, hoping to count three, because three makes the moose legal. And it looks like there are three, but in the bad light it could be you're looking at two points and some sort of stub of a bump that could be a point but might not be.

You want badly to shoot a moose, but you don't want to shoot an illegal moose. You cuss yourself for leaving the binoculars below when you climbed 16 feet into a tree so a bear wouldn't get you when you were calling moose. You can't tell now. You stare at it and stare at it and stare at it, and then dusk goes to dark and the season is over.

You motor back across Skilak Lake. You make a long, late-night drive home to Anchorage and go to bed.

Then you wake the next morning and go outside to find a yearling moose -- a moose that would be legal to shoot in most of Alaska -- tied down in your yard.

A fork-horn bull of a perfectly tender and tasty size has wrapped its anglers in the chain of the swing on your child's outdoor gym and can't get loose, though it is doing a nice job of demolishing the gym.

Right about there, I might have decided to get the gun and shoot that moose in defense of life and property just to balance out the yin and the yang.

Neighbor Bob Besch didn't even think about it.

"I couldn't have eaten that little guy,'' he said. "I couldn't have eaten him in good conscience."

Never mind that Besch, who grew up on the Kenai and now teaches at Hanshew Middle School, could appreciate more than most the winter supply of tasty steaks, burger and sausage into which that moose could be converted if the cold, hard rules of Nature were followed:

The strong and the smart survive; the weak and the foolish die.

Had the wild hunters -- a bear, a pack of wolves -- found a moose in a predicament like this, they would have eaten it alive.

Humans though, are a different kind of predator. Humans, or at least most of us, are slaves to compassion in various forms.

Besch felt sorry for this poor, love-sick, fall moose far from being big enough to find a mate, yet long ago driven away from the companionship of his mother.

So Besch called the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Pretty soon area wildlife biologist Rick Sinnott, another hunter with something of a spot for wild animals, showed up on a pretty September Sunday morning when he could have been off enjoying himself.

He shot the moose with a tranquilizer dart. The dart hit bone and failed to fully tranquilize the moose.

Sinnott could have shot it again, but not knowing for sure how much tranquilizer got into the animal's system in the first place, it would be easy to overdose the animal and kill it.

So Besch, Sinnott and another volunteer decided they would -- in Besch's words -- "cowboy up" and wrestle the moose to the ground.

"It was a little dangerous," he admitted, which might be something of an understatement.

Two people have been stomped to death by moose in Anchorage in the past 15 years, and a lot of others have been seriously injured, including one of Besch's neighbors.

She ran into the woods in pursuit of a loose dog not far from Besch's house and stumbled on a moose that reacted by kicking the living snot out of her. It took her months to recover.

Besch knew this. He knew how good moose taste. And he knew how plentiful the animals were in his neighborhood up above Potter Creek.

"I can go out on my deck and call and have four or five bulls in my yard," he said.

Often they are big bulls -- big, big bulls; the kind of bulls a hunter can only hope to stumble upon in an area open to hunting.

Besch admitted he wouldn't complain if the city and the state would allow a few to be shot.

But just not that one in the swing.

This was a poor, young, foolish victim of man's -- or should we say, child's -- toys. Besch thought it deserved another chance.

So the men wrestled it to the ground, cut it free from the swing set, and then fled. All got away safely.

The moose bounced up, shook itself off, took a pee and wandered off into the nearby alders and tall grass.

By now, the animal has probably forgotten most of what happened. Moose are like that.

Still, it will likely remember that swings are a bad thing. And that is a good thing.

Because swings are for children, not moose.

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Outdoors editor Craig Medred is an opinion columnist. Find him online at adn.com/contact/cmedred or call 257-4588.