The Long Trip
by Spartan2
Layover day
We were awake at 6:30, but slow to rise. Everything was damp and muddy after the storms in the night. Cooked breakfast on the stove. From the tracks, the small moose was on our shore by the "washing rock" this morning, but we didn't see or hear her.
We packed up to go on a day trip to the Vern River. This didn't amount to much. We paddled and struggled through dense vegetation and got to a small rapids with no visible portage.
On a nice day it might have invited a carry-over, but with the dark sky and rain threatening, we decided against making it an "adventure". So we paddled Weird Lake back to the campsite. En route, we saw a different moose, a large cow.
We explored the end of the lake across from our camp, and I snapped a shot of the campsite from afar.
Neil mentioned that he hadn't seen much of the rapids at the portage, so we turned down that way. In the little stream by the portage stood a large cow moose with two calves on shore. She fed for a short time and then headed for shore, and of course the calves followed her out of our sight. As they left, they turned and looked back at us with great curiosity. Beautiful big ears and brown eyes in horse-like faces. Stunning little animals.
[A note here about the photography. We didn't realize it at the time, but our old Yashica Electro-35 camera that Neil had brought back from Viet Nam was developing a serious light leak. I have tried to tweak the photos to minimize the light stripe, but unfortunately this sequence of moose and calves was not of good quality. I still include them, because they chronicle the story, and they represent such a lovely memory for me.]
The weather was cool and breezy. It kept looking like it would clear, but really didn't. After we got back I went out in the woods to a further place and I saw the cow from the morning [at least I thought so] out feeding across the lake. This time she had a calf with her. I sat on the rock and watched for 3/4 hour or so; she knew I was there but kept feeding, always keeping one eye on me. They were there after we finished our supper, too, and I gave in and took a photo even though it was much too far away.
These two days have been fantastic for a person who enjoys observing wildlife in a natural environment. The moose appear quite unthreatened by the presence of people, and it is interesting to see them at close range. They are much more horse-like than I had thought. (I had always considered them more as bovine.) They move with a lovely grace and seem perfectly adapted to feeding in the water.
Weird Lake certainly doesn't seem weird to me!