MOOSE, EATING GRASS
I am a moose; let me go eat some grass. Let me nibble the leaves of birch alongside a gentle creek; let me frolic among the marsh plants and horsetails and pondweed. Let me kick you in the head with my cloven hoof, a two-pointed, pear-shaped print beating in time with your heart. I am tired of walking in the deep snow, harassed by dogs and bears. Let me charge toward your belly, my horns sharpened on the blue ice and rocks beneath me. My story is the saga of the woodland. My story is the spring flowers carpeting the barren forest floor. Build your neighborhoods and ski trails and coffee shops and biodiversity projects. Write your scathingly optimistic yet acidly cautious memoirs. Sell them to all to the straightforwardly ambivalent coffee drinkers of America searching for the next authoritatively anti-establishment anarchist. I am not a heart-warming character in a fable of spiritual renewal, or a direct representation of the everlasting battle between good and evil. Mine is the charge from a forest on a gentle Sunday morning; mine is the attack of a dogsled gliding through the virgin snow. Mine is the licking of lips and the sound of the stampede, loping over and through all manner of things in my path.