A gray October morning, third day out without seeing anybody, and I was trying to make up time because of my staying put in the tent the prior day because of a pouring rain. I needed to make decent miles before the early sunset and hoped the weather would hold, although cloudy skies showed little promise. I had paddled perhaps five of the eighteen miles I needed to go and was moving up Spoon Creek, when I suddenly sensed something ahead.
Right around the corner were a moose and calf. Right there. Fortunately, unlike four months earlier, when I passed a moose and newborn calf on a lake, needing to out paddle a swimming angry cow, this calf was larger and the cow just stared at me. I had my paddle in the water, using it to brake, but I couldn’t back up or move to the side if she charged me. She didn’t, and the two quietly left. I was on schedule later that afternoon. That night, geese awoke me as they flew south towards a Hunter’s Moon. The following day, I paddled in dense fog, the day after in a blizzard, and before I finished would see three more moose and no people.
On the canoe trips my wife and I took, we had a joke that I was ”expected” to find a moose, and nature often delivered. Still, I never go into the wild expecting to see something. I try to put myself in the right place and hope I will get lucky. I certainly have been. Showing up in the wilderness and showing up in life are important parts of success.
On one trip, our moose sighting was a bull seen on a back road on our way to the jumping off point to Lac La Croix in the western Quetico. We encountered one on a portage coming into Basswood Lake, where I kept the canoe on my head a lot longer than planned so my wife could join me and see it 10 yards away. There was the last day out on a trip, previously moose-less, when I went down to the lake to get water, looked down the shore, and saw a cow standing in the lake 50 yards away. I got my wife’s attention and motioned her to come down. The country had delivered its annual moose sighting.
We saw our ’96 moose at the end of the first of what would be 15 portages on a day we took the Frost River to Cherokee Lake. Eight years later, we saw one swimming across a lake towards us, initially impossible to identify because there were so many branches stuck in his antlers that he looked like a motorized floating tree.
In 2010, we were at our favorite campsite on Lake Insula, what would be our last time there, a year before the Pagami Creek fire. The site was at the head of a quiet bay, and few ever left the main travel channel through the lake to go there. It was serene, views in all directions, lovely ledge rock of Canadian Shield. After dinner, I walked over to look out on the bay and the sunset. I always carry binoculars just in case I see something; If I stayed past dark, I could check out the Double Cluster in Perseus or Andromeda Galaxy.
It was calm and well into nautical twilight, where the light is too dim to read by, and the first stars are visible, when I heard a distant, odd sound with two components. I looked with my binoculars then quickly ran to get my wife. There was a bull moose on the far shore, walking right at the water’s edge, clopety, splash, clopety, splash. Water carries sound well. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the noise was in phase with the sight from our viewpoint, because the moose was walking at precisely the speed so that we heard the prior splash when he was making the next step into water.
We listened to the distant clop, splash for two minutes in deepening darkness until he turned into the woods and both he and the sound disappeared.
See you on the trail. Any wildlife sighting is a gift.
Boreal B[l]og 
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