The Modern Moose

Recently, some modern animals have been reconsidering their attachment to the Earth. She was a lot of fun in her honeyed youth, but she’s getting sick and seedy now, temperamental and pockmarked and tired. They find her decline kind of depressing, kind of repulsive. Before she is totally moribund they are looking around for other options, redirecting their attentions to places like the Kuiper Belt and the Large Magellanic Cloud, which contain untapped riches of rare materials and are unaffected by banana blight. In fact, such moderns have a hoof or two in heaven already: if they say yes to the Earth it’s an equivocal yes, easy to disavow as soon as they can blast off to a better where.

But as ravishing as the Cloud/Belt may be, not all modern animals seem so eager to leave the Earth. Some are still entangled with seas and trees and Russian tundra; others seem entirely indifferent to the idea of space settlement. Take the modern moose, for example. Has he sent scouts to the moon? Has he shown any interest in starships? Has he ever practiced grooming himself in an antigravity gyroscopic device? No, no, and egads, no. Nevertheless the moose is as modern as Mugellini and should be coequally respected. In his survey of everything, Modern History: Or, the Present State Of All Nations, Thomas Salmon duly notes the concerns of the modern moose: he likes to chew on young shrubs, “but mostly, and with greatest delight, on water-plants, especially a sort of wild Colts-foot and Lilly that abound in our ponds, and by the sides of the rivers, and for which the Moose will wade far and deep.”

With the magnitude of his antlers, it’s not like the moose could ever be flighty anyway. The first time bone starts coming out of his brow, the young moose might think it will turn into something moderate and flattering, something like a pillbox hat. Maybe his horns will be trinket horns, party horns, flirty horns like the giraffe’s or sleek Armani antlers like the pronghorn’s. But the bumps grow into spikes, and the spikes spread and branch and keep growing, past trinket, past flirty, past flattering, and far past moderate. (Moderate horns are for moderate species; moderate species get very excited about moderate horns.) Finally they grow past preposterous: on his head the moose carries branching antlers so absurdly heavy he mustn’t lower his head down to the ground, for fear he’ll never raise it up again.

Seventy pounds of antler seems like an affirmation somehow, an exaggerated weight implacably attaching the moose to the Earth, saying, “Yes without a question, yes with all my heart. Yes if it pitches me face-first into the mud, yes if the rest of me withers, yes if my yes gets splintered, or broken, or deformed: yes and yes and yes again.” When you have wings your hope can be elsewhere—up the hill, up the sky. But wings of solid bone scorn the idea of flight: your hope must be here.

Of course the moose did not choose his yes any more than Respighi chose his. It is his hap to be born—to come out of the mama onto the Earth—his hap to be rejected by the mama once a littler moose comes out, his hap to bear a staggering affirmation on his brow. A real yes weighs you down, like a woe, like those lunatic vows of lovers, to be kept even if one finds a better who. I, Alces alces, take you Earth to be my planet, to have and to hold, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish; from this day forward until death do us part. Yes to the pond where the water-plants thrive, yes to the pond where the water-plants fail, yes to the pock where the pond used to be. Yes to you healthy, yes to...