Shaggy Moose Story
Like most of you, I’m back from the holidays now, except that for me it’s time to curl up, tuck my hooves under, and slow down for a little nap. Finally. It was hard work this year, but so worth it.
Before I settle in for some much-deserved browsing and a nap in my favorite little stretch of woods, though, I thought I’d come back here for a bit. I really do owe it to you to finish my tale. It’s been a bit of a shaggy moose story, I know, but I’m getting to the meat of it finally and I think you’ll appreciate knowing where all this rambling ends up. I might just point out while I’m at it that rambling is what moose do. You ought to try it sometime – it’s good for the soul and helps your digestion too. Trust me, I know. Birch bark is not easy on the belly, so I’m something of an expert on this.
One more quick diversion before I finish telling you about Porcupine and Purple. It’s really more of a final plea for help and one I hope you’ll take seriously. As you all get back to work and driving the kids to school and picking up groceries, please don’t forget Christmas. We work hard to make it something that will last through the winter and if you hold little bits of it in your heart, you’ll see the magic and the wonder continue to play out to get you through the rest of the cold and dark until the willow buds pop out in a few months. I probably should have asked this at the start, but do you believe in Santa Claus? If you don’t, you should. It matters. Besides, if it’s a little crazy and a little childish, what’s the harm? I could also point out that you are reading a blog written by a moose. Belief in a portly old gentleman in a red velvet suit hardly seems a stretch in comparison.
So here’s what happened with our friend Porcupine – and he is a friend now. That’s what usually happens when we investigate someone who has been disturbing the order of winter cheer. It’s kind of like the FBI recruiting hackers to investigate cyber-crime. Who better to understand how things can go wrong with Yule order than someone who has felt the need to disrupt things himself? It’s also really common once the warmth and light and joy start flying around to feel a little overwhelmed and want to share. You’ll see in a bit, but Porcupine is like that – he has good reason to want to share his light now and he’s currently in YRRT training to be assigned to a team soon. Our big challenge in finding him an assignment, quite frankly, is that he just doesn’t move very fast. We can’t very well put him on a team of raven and moose and caribou, can we? Wolves move fast, even by my standards, and squirrels, foxes and hares may be small, but they can definitely get the move on. Porcupine? Well, we’re working on it.
Our story really starts back in September, at the fall equinox. September isn’t a terrible time to be a porcupine. There’s still plenty of food, lots of places to shuffle through the woods, good ground cover to pad the feet. And people aren’t out every darned moment of the day with their pesky canines. Kids are back in school and quiet has started to settle in the woods. It’s a pretty good time of year. On the night of the Equinox, though, something happened to one particular porcupine in a patch of woods just outside of Fairbanks. He looked up from his shuffling into the night sky and what he saw wasn’t the green of the aurora or the bright white blinking of stars. What he saw was purple, the kind of purple that can only mean piles and piles of snow. The Equinox, you see, is the night that everything changes. Mostly, we don’t see it – it’s a little like squinting at one of those paintings with hidden images. You have to be looking at it just right to see it, but if you do, suddenly the sky is filled with a perfect image of what’s to come. Porcupine looked up at just the right time (or just the wrong time if you take it from his perspective) and he saw the cold and the dark, felt the frozen and burning pads on the bottoms of his feet. He saw his blanket of leaves blow away, felt the frost on his snout grubbing for food. But more than anything else, he saw snow. Piles of snow, drifts of it several times deeper than the height of an average porcupine. He looked at the sky and he looked at his little stubby legs and he was very, very unhappy.
That’s how it always starts, with just a little unhappiness when there’s no good company to dispell it. One little grumpy moment festers and becomes a plot.
So our grumpy friend with the stubby legs stewed a bit, got grumpier still, and started plotting. He climbed into the hollowed out log he had selected for a den, and couldn’t shake the image of his perfect den drifted full of snow. He chomped on some slightly wilted skunk cabbage and imagined the taste of bitter winter bark on his tongue instead. He thought of a late January case of indigestion and started to become very grumpy indeed, feeling his quills quiver in anticipation of a full-on mad. And mad he got! Just about the time his quills refused to lay flat any longer and leapt to their full spiky glory, the perfect plan leapt into his mind. He would just steal all that purple right out of the sky. Who would notice a porcupine, least cuddly of all the rodents, snuffling around in the middle of the night collecting purple? Most people didn’t notice him when he was five feet off the trail from them – why would they start noticing him now? And so the plan was hatched – Porcupine would have to act quickly before all the purple moved across the sky and started making winter happen, but if he managed to secret some away, maybe he could hold off the snow just long enough to show them all.
If you’ve ever been in the woods at night, you may have an idea of how many hiding places there actually are. Think of every hollow between the gnarled roots of trees, imagine all the misty, boggy thick spots. In fact, just put yourself into a wooded scene from a bad horror film and you have the idea. There were plenty of places for Porcupine to hide purple, places where no one with a sense of self preservation would think to look. The trees didn’t mind. In their flow of time, a single winter is but the blink of an eye. The hollows and shadowing places didn’t mind – why would they? Other animals in the woods were so busy preparing for winter themselves that they hardly noticed and those bunnies and fox with the changing coats, well, let’s just say they’re a little embarrased when they’re half and half and looking like a nightmare of a bad hair day. They were so self-absorbed just then that they didn’t pay it any mind. The only ones who noticed were the owls and it was to the owls we went for help.
Life is movement and so is light. We think it’s the colors that fascinate, but it’s really the sparkling, the sudden bursts and jolts, the streams and shimmers. When purple starts to spread through the sky to draw in old man winter, you can watch it travel. It’s like looking at a starry sky, though. If you live in a city or just don’t think to look up, days and days could go by with no stars in the sky and you wouldn’t even notice. The movement of changing light across the night sky is a little more subtle and even those of us who understand the way of seeing required to watch it can get disctracted, forget to look up. By the time anyone realized that purple was noticeably absent, we were well into October with not so much as a flake of snow.
Purple may have been noticeably absent, but Porcupine was noticeably less grouchy. Our problem, at this point, wasn’t so much that it took a long time for anyone to take notice. Our problem was the credibility of the first witnesses. Have you ever met a Boreal Owl?
The thing about owls in general is that they can be a little, well “professorial” would be a nice way to put it. They don’t mean any harm – they just get a lot of their own company and can be a little stuffy and pedantic in mixed company – mixed species company, that is. They’re also a little hard to follow because their heads do that weird thing and the eyes are kind of blinky and then you’ve got the arched brows, horns and beaks. Owls are just a little intimidating and difficult to follow. Boreal owls are a special case because they’re also small and fluffy and flighty. Imagine crossing a history professor with a gerbil – like that. Making any kind of sense out of what they were trying to tell us was like getting a straight story out of the chess and glee clubs combined. It was a mess. The thing of it was, though, that the owls had it just right. They saw what they saw which was strands and streams and burst of purple being sucked out of the night sky into hollow logs, burrows and under tussocks. I still feel a little guilty for failing to grasp what they were trying to tell us right away, but just go have a conversation with a cute tribble-like fluffy owl and see if you come out with your antlers on straight.
I think you may begin to see how things started to slip out of our grasp. By late October, we had purple pooled all over the place, owls in disarray, bears starting to wonder whether it was getting close to bedtime, storm clouds drifting through, not getting a toehold and then drifting right on. The ravens were no help at all – they just thought it was good fun and entertained themselves diving into the pools of light and coming up with a purple glow to their wingtips and tailfeathers. As more of the change into winter was pulled straight out of the night sky, everyone got more and more confused and agitated. It was bad enough in the forest, but when the winds started to get confused, well that’s when things started to get really bad.
Old Man Chinook is nobody’s fool. He’s been doing what he does for a really, really, really long time. But Porcupine’s stunt really threw him for a loop. Let’s go back to our discussion about light for a moment and about purple pulling green. If we’ve got a bunch of purple pooling and streaming around at ground level and starting to accumulate in underground hideaways, what happens when green follows? Warm winds, thaws, a remembered scent of new buds on trees. That’s like home cooking in the kitchen to Chinook and no sooner did he get a whiff of all that green than he started blowing…and blowing and blowing. He blew down trees and took the roofs right off of houses. He took what little snow had managed to fall and scrubbed it right off the forest floor. In his laughing and huffing and puffing, he brought beach blanket weather right up to the Far North. And that’s when the humans started to get really confused. Anyone who has been up here through breakup knows the feel of Chinook’s breath against bare hands and cheeks. Some of the older ones just shook their heads and muttered about Chinook causing trouble blowing through town on the wrong side of Christmas while others could do no more than just look up into the trees as if they might catch a glimpse of Chinook there and ask him what the heck he was thinking. Some just celebrated one more day of t-shirt weather and didn’t think too much about it. Between the slightly nervous energy of those who knew something was afoot and the slightly manic energy of the ones celebrating a few more precious days before pulling out the puffy coat, things were definitely and decidedly out of balance. And Thanksgiving was starting to approach – without some signs of winter by Thanksgiving, cranberries don’t taste right and that’s the beginning of a very serious downhill slide into a less than stellar Yule experience. We had a very serious problem on our hands.
More on Friday night…
