These two resident moose, a cow and her yearling female calf, have really become addicted to the snow-melt salt on our porch. Now they come back several times daily for a prolonged licking session. They just ambled past my window only four feet from where I’m seated at the computer. From where they’ve bedded in the yard they walk under  the deck next to the house to pass by my truck. I park so close to the house I don’t know how they squeeze by the hose spool.

The kids have been taking a lot of pictures, their harvest limited to captured images. My lovely bride, though, the Grim Reaper, has had enough of the infernal racket and commotion—our pack must be getting hoarse from almost constant barking—and she doesn’t see any reason why we can’t do one in for the freezer. She’s suggested several quiet ways, her creative methods tending toward the up-close-and personal. Of course, she isn’t the one she proposes wield the weapon. The dogs, too, must be slavering, thinking about a kill. As I write, the calf has left the salt lick to wander over to some inviting browse next to Fuzzner’s pen. Our trusty old guardian, who once at arm’s-length distance saved Levi from a huge on-rushing grizzly—in an episode I might sometime tell you about—doesn’t take kindly to intruders of two legs or four. She’s simply going berserk wanting a piece of what she perceives to be a threat to the family she watches over.

Yesterday the kids missed a great shot of Levi’s Spazmo stretched out toward the nearby mama, barking furiously, leaning vigorously against his chain, the tension holding his front feet high off the ground. Night before last, the calf, while feeding on the willow that grows next to the canoe in back of the house, was rubbing the wall by the bedroom window so hard that Levi awoke wondering if she might be coming right through to bed down in warmer climes next to him.

Dropping down off the deck, forking one to put on a show for the kids has crossed my mind. But then I’m not as nimble as forty years ago when back in 1969 I leaped aboard to straddle a big cow for an unusual ride. Besides, I must consider this new bionic hip I’m sporting. It hasn’t yet healed from the recent installation. And too, today I have a family that depends on having not only a live dad, but a healthy one.