Monarch of the Falling Sky

“My hands started vanishing under a cover of snow, losing all feeling as I spent an hour trying to get a clear eye shot of this moose.”

Sixty centimetres of snow had buried the Icefields Parkway by the time my wife and I reached Jasper, and the highway behind us was sealed shut. There was no turning back. For 5 hours, we had driven with the storm, only forward, deeper into the white. 

All the hiking trails across the park had been swallowed whole, buried under the storm. After driving the whole day through the whiteout, we needed to feel the ground and get some fresh air so we parked by Maligne Lake and stepped out for a short walk. 

A few steps into the unclear trail lost in snow, we spotted a bull moose - massive and unhurried. A charcoal-dark towering giant against the birch and spruce backdrop, shouldering through the shrubs. I dropped to the ground with my camera while my wife pressed behind a bush and we both collapsed into stillness. He gave us a brief assessment to ensure we were no threat and then simply returned to foraging. The overnight snow would bury the last of the forage by the morning and he knew it well from experience. 

Our breath came in shallow pulls, the cold wet enough that each inhale carried the taste of ice and pine resin. The storm had compressed the forest to a frequency just below silence. The only other smell cutting through the sterile, frozen air was the pungent, musky scent of the bull’s bell, soaked in rutting urine. It came in phases and passed. 

The lodge behind us had dropped from nearly full to barely ten percent occupancy due to the storm, which meant it was just us, the moose, the forest and the storm.

My hands started vanishing under a cover of snow, losing all feeling as I spent an hour trying to get a clear shot of the moose. For an hour he grazed, acknowledging us maybe 2-3 times and I hit the camera shutter every time he looked at us. But through the 500mm lens, snowflakes fell constantly into the space between us, drifting across the focal plane, concealing his eyes the moment I thought I had captured them. I finally gave up on the eye contact shot and reached into my jacket for the 70mm lens to capture the whole scene. The forest, the snow, the scale of the world he moved through so effortlessly and of course the heavy snowfall curtaining it all. As I reached into my jacket, the zipper made a sound. Small and metallic but, in that silence, loud enough to alert the moose.

His head came up. He turned and began walking toward us through the trees, not with aggression, but with the quiet deliberateness of an animal that simply needed to know. I never got the 70mm out. I raised the 500mm lens and slowly began to rise, struggling to regain the feeling in my legs. One careful step back. Then another. Four frames fired as I started to feel my legs, with my wife ensuring we were at a safe distance which was difficult for me looking through the big lens.

He stopped. Held us in his gaze for a moment that felt much longer than it was. Then dropped his head and went back to foraging. 

When I finally pulled up the photos on my computer, I wasn't expecting much, I'd been mid-retreat, half-rising with snow webbing my lens. But there they were. His eyes, sharp and steady through the falling white, looking directly into mine. A frame made on the lens I had abandoned, in the moment I had stopped trying to frame it, and while I was walking away after spending over an hour in the cold!