If you're a moose, don't call 911

In case you missed the details, a couple of Ohioans hiking to the U.S. Forest Service camp at Crescent Lake, where they planned to stay and do some snowboarding, encountered a moose under attack by wolves. This sort of thing happens in the wilds of Alaska. Unlike the socially caring, friendly, familial wolves known to urban Americans, Alaska has wolves that grab other animals with their teeth and try to rip out chunks of flesh until the animals die. Anyway, the Ohioans ran into this process in action. Their story, if it is to be believed, is that they encountered a moose charging down the trail in their direction with a wolf clinging to it, fangs embedded the moose's neck. The wolf, they say, saw them, let go of the moose and fled, which makes them a whole lot luckier than the Western Alaska teacher recently killed by wolves. Yes, I know, wolves don't kill people, people kill, yadda, yadda, yadda. Or it at least there are no "recorded" instances of wolves killing people, which might have something to do with the holes in the record-keeping for the period before humans all but exterminated wolves in most of North America. Suffice to say, there isn't an American Indian tribe out there lacking oral histories of wolves laying waste to people, and there is no reason to doubt those stories. So the Ohioans were probably lucky the wolf, in their version of events, let go the moose and fled. The moose, however, was still there, and it was agitated. You would be, too. And when a moose is agitated, it does one of two things...more