Of Moose and Music

When my kids were in middle school, they each took up the tuba in the band. They continued to play the tuba through high school and, in the case of my daughter, college. They spent one summer in the early 1990’s practicing their tuba playing on the deck of our cabin in the southwest Adirondack Park in upstate New York. It wasn’t long after that that I heard of a radio collared moose wandering the woods on the state land behind our place. While I’ve never seen the moose, I have seen her (since it was tagged its sex was known) tracks in the mud at some of the vlys (marshes). I always thought that the kids playing their tuba scales that summer may have been the reason this moose had wandered down from the larger concentration that was flourishing further north between Blue Mountain Lake, Indian Lake and Long Lake.

Now comes a report of a moose near Sioux Falls, South Dakota who may have been attracted to the sounds of a baritone sax. Music calms the savage beast, I guess.