Uncommonly thick snow in Southcentral Alaska this year means moose are all up in everyone's business, and scarce food has given plenty of them a short fuse. Trail and road users of all kinds have been encountering them with more frequency than usual, and mushers are no exception.
On her North Wapiti Kennels blog, Karen Ramstead, a four-time Iditarod finisher and former Red Lantern winner from Alberta, Canada, writes a gripping account of a moose attack she, handler Richard Todd, and two dog teams survived Feb. 16 while on an overnight training run near Willow in preparation for Iditarod 2012.
The way she describes it, the moose seemed to be moving away from them, avoiding an encounter. But really it was lying in wait, just out of headlamp range. When the two teams got within range, the moose turned and charged everybody, setting off a special kind of chaos:
Being Canadian and British, Ramstead tells the Anchorage Daily News, their first impulse was not to reach for a firearm, but they collected themselves enough to pull out a revolver and a shotgun they carried, loaners they'd been trained to use.
The first shot, a warning shot, just made everything worse all at once.
When all was said and done, Irving, a wheel dog, was the only casualty. He tore a quadriceps muscle in the attack and is out for the season, but Ramstead expects him to make a full recovery.
Read Ramstead's compelling first-hand account, here, and read the Anchorage Daily News's follow-up, here.