MOOSE ALERT! (THAT'S NO BULLWINKLE)

We thought we were prepared for any wildlife encounter. But not this one.

- BY Jim Geraghty

THERE ARE HUNDREDS of moose, grizzly bears and black bears in Alaska's Denali National Park, but given that the park covers 9,492 square miles, the likelihood of encountering a moose or bear is pretty low, according to the National Park Service. The sparse distribution isn't a result of hunting or disease; it just takes a lot of land to provide enough food and habitat for such massive mammals.

I'm with my family on a summer vacation, taking a roughly 40-mile bus tour into Denali National Park. The scenery is spectacular, and, as our guide suggests, maybe it's just as well not to get our hopes up about seeing a moose or bear, because our visit has coincided with the time of year that those animals are typically in an aggressive mood.

Apparently, the bears like to eat moose calves, and right around early June, the surviving calves become fast enough to evade the bears, leaving the bears hangry. Moose mothers, having lost a significant portion of their young, can also be bad-tempered by the time June rolls around.

Moose aren't carnivorous, but they'll charge at, kick or stomp anything they deem a threat. If you encounter a bear, you have several self-preservation options-try to make yourself as big as possible, create a lot of noise or play dead. With a threatening moose, the advice from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game is "run and get behind something solid, like a tree." Our guide says that just the week before she and her dog encountered an agitated, massive moose-they can weigh well over 1,000 pounds and eventually had to hide in a neighbor's greenhouse.