Mountains of the Heart by Scott Weidensaul

Author:Scott Weidensaul
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fulcrum Publishing
Published: 2016-04-26T06:00:00+00:00

If the nineteenth century was the bleakest time for the Appalachians’ large mammals, the twentieth was somewhat kinder, thanks to more enlightened game management and maturation of the forests. Like the black bears in the northern ranges, other animals previously restricted to wilderness have made the most of the improving situation.

In New England, moose are a common sight again—not just in Maine, but in Vermont and New Hampshire, where they were completely extirpated. Moose have reestablished themselves in smaller numbers in the Adirondacks, and a few have wandered across New York (one to within a few miles of Pennsylvania), others into the Berkshires, Connecticut, Rhode Island and even coastal Massachusetts.

Much as bears, these are monstrously big creatures that can, like will-o’-the-wisps, live near humans without ever being seen. A good friend of mine in western Vermont finds their softball-sized tracks each winter in the snow around his lakeshore home but has yet to see the moose themselves. It frustrates him to think that a thousand-pound mammal can blend so completely into the woodwork.

Even though moose are doing so well in Vermont that the state instituted its first moose hunting season in a century in 1993, the Green Mountains, with their sugar maple stands, are really better suited to deer. Moose don’t come into their own until you move north, especially to central Maine. Here, Mount Katahdin lords over the lesser peaks of the Longfellow Mountains like a bunched muscle, rearing up from the flattish coastal plain of spruce and birch that stretches two hundred miles to the sea. This is a boreal jungle of regrown clear-cuts, thick spruce blowdowns, open heaths and impenetrable bogs, a semi-wilderness seamed with anonymous dirt logging roads in which it is possible to become quickly and seriously lost.

Smack in the middle of Maine’s North Woods is Baxter State Park, more than three hundred square miles of forest with the gray bulk of Katahdin at its core, donated to the state in the 1930s by former Governor Percival Baxter, with the provision that the park remain forever wild. There is no hunting allowed, and the moose herd has done well over the years—probably a little too well, since there are no wolves to keep them in line. It is almost impossible to spend much time in Baxter without seeing at least a few of the great beasts.

Sandy Stream Pond, a jewel of a lake set under the walls of South Turner Mountain, is especially popular with moose, since its muddy bottom supports a lush growth of aquatic plants that supply the moose with sodium, a mineral lacking in their normal diet of twigs and woody browse. I had walked the easy trail back to the lake and was sitting on the shore, hunched over my tripod, watching through the camera viewfinder as two bulls and a cow methodically sucked down water lilies a hundred yards away.

One male, the largest, would submerge almost completely, with just the peak of its hump breaking through the choppy waves; one could easily believe it was just a dark rock.

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