Moose Mom.

Reminds me of the time I strode through a forest in New Hampshire with my daughter on my shoulders. It was late afternoon and late fall.  The leaves were thinned and mostly the matter-of-factly golden yellow and brown that ends the autumn glory for which New England is famous.

I always tried to get up to the White Mountains at least once in each season because it is just so beautiful whenever! The Kangamangus highway snakes through the mountains, and accompanies a river much of the way. At this place, the river was set back some way down a non-descript side road, but there at the end, the river meandered through a sandy, beach-like setting with a steep rising hillside of dark pines on its opposite side. It was only my second time at that place...

"Daddy, will we see any animals?" Amina asked me as we jaunted along a narrow path out into a lightly wooded area. Searching for a way to make her disappointment less painful I waxed lyrical..

"Well, Sweetpea, you know, most animals only come out at night when its quiet and there is no one around to disturb them-- I doubt if we will see any now, they hardly ever come out in the daytime."

"Oh" she replied,  clearly processing this information.

We strode on through the trees and light, stepping around fallen branches; me becoming more aware of my breath.

"Daddy." ( She still does this even now, pauses not so much for a response as for a moment of silence.) "Daddy, there's a big animal over there."

I felt a twinge of sadness that so many animals are nocturnal-- taking this to be her way of dealing with the disappointment by resorting to fiction.

"No, Sweetpea, I don't think so, they are all asleep this time of day."

We were leading the loose-knit procession of her Mom,  and a colleague from work who lagged several paces behind us enjoying the air.

"Daddy, look there is a big animal over there..."

It was so matter of factly that I hardly bothered to take my mind off negotiating a dip in the path. As we came up on the side, however, I looked up to see a fully grown mother moose with twin foals hardly ten yards in front of us!

She looked up at me and my daughter with the same calm, but compromised look on her face that I must have had. They are huge, and surprisingly elegant animals, notwithstanding the onomatopoeic implications of the name "moose". A full grown moose is the size of a compact car-- or at least it is proverbial where they live that the outcome of a collision with a moose in anything smaller than a pickup truck is almost invariably fatal to the car, and often the driver.

I looked about me but there was no simple way to turn and run with toddler on shoulders across the shallow ditch, and over the branches we had just gingerly negotiated.

We eyed each other, myself and the moose mom while our young ones delighted in the moment-- mine, eyes wide at the size of a REALLY big animal, and her's in the fresh grass or acorns they had found underneath the golden leaves of a scrubby oak tree.

It was a moment of revelation about parenthood I will never forget. We two guardians were both caught off guard and knew each knew it. I took one step back and she turned back to grazing, gently nudging the twins to make them more attentive to the situation. A few more paces backwards and somehow I got a picture -- I don't remember taking it, maybe my colleague did, but I had it for years afterwards and would show astonished New Englander friends as corroboration of my story.

"There are people who have lived in New England their whole lives and never seen a moose even once!" they would say to me. "Twins!. Now that's something special!