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The moose watched the man with the axe walk by through the mist and thought it a good sign that he did not stop and stare or try to approach him. So long as the man did not come near the moose, the moose had no plans to come near the man. Having avoided yet another encounter, he turned and headed towards the large hill where it amused him to stand and watch the leaves sway in the breeze. Stopping for one last munch of a new maple growth, the maple having far too many growths for the moose’s aesthetic sensibilities, the moose wandered back onto his path. He had made his path some years back when some man had ordered some stones on his trail. Not that the moose minded the ordering of stones, per se, but he did feel that it would not serve his image well to wander hither and yon upon well placed rocks when he could meander quite freely on dirt and foliage. Much of the foliage that grew in the moose’s way needed a good trampling every now and again lest it get out of hand and disturb the general aesthetic of the forest. Some animals had no concern for how things looked. But not this moose. He had a good eye for detail and would not stand idly by when he could do his own small part to make the forest more livable for all.
One of the things the moose really couldn’t stand, however, were the large beasts that often ate men and at other times spit them out. From the moose’s perspective, if you were going to eat a man, which seemed an unsavory undertaking, you should have the good sense to kill him first and then keep him down. He had seen other meat eaters kill and eat their food and their food never came back out alive. He didn’t understand the smoky beasts, however. They mostly traveled on the grey hard rock the men had crossed all his paths with and they moved too fast, quite often running into other animals. His cousin had been hit by one during a winter storm when most of them had the good sense not to be out on the grey rock. His cousin had never been the same since and often confided to the moose that he would rather have not been hit by the smoky beast. It seemed a good notion.
So what he found when approaching the grey rock, as he was right now, was that it was best to just walk right across it and not pause to reflect on the yellow lines and spots that made the grey rock such an appealing sight. They were so very uniform and seemed to serve no purpose other than decoration. The moose often wondered where the men had found such a wondrous grey rock with yellow striping. But he never wondered too long and had made it a point, if he were going to wonder about it, to do so from his high hill spot rather than from atop the yellow stripe in the middle of the grey rock.
So the moose wandered across the grey rock, pausing just briefly to reflect on the marvelous yellow line before moving back to his path. Just as he stepped onto a small shrub next to the rock that had attempted to encroach upon his well-maintained trail, one of the great smoky beasts let out its great roar as it rambled by. If there were any of the smoky beasts he could not abide, it was the very large ones. The moose would even go so far as to hate them.
Lakebridge: Spring (Supernatural Horror Literary Fiction) Page 2
