In preparation for my trip to Alaska I reread Seth Kantner’s novel Ordinary Wolves. It’s about a boy named Cutuk growing up in the Alaskan wilderness. This time around I especially enjoyed his vivid writing about wildlife. Wolves, of course, but also his description of the life of a bull moose, who had spent the winter hanging around his igloo “for company in the lonely winter, the way moose often did.”

And now it’s autumn and the big moose has been killed for its enormous rack, little more than a trophy, and Cutuk wishes the hunter,

” . . .could feel the other 364 days a year the moose had fought to live. How it felt to survive birth in the willows while brown bears waited; winter stands beside his mother against the wolves; survive years alone in wading deep snows, the willows buried, the tundra howling wind; survive the spring crust that dropped moose to their ribs while it supported big hungry bears; and the summer insanity of mosquitoes driving him to his eyeballs into water. All for the cool sweet fall and the chance of mating.”

On my last trip to Alaska in the summer of 2000 the only wildlife I saw was the above pictured moose. She was grazing next to the road, just being a moose. It was thrilling and was the highlight of an all too short trip.