Moose at the Mt. Engadine Wallow

CURWOOD: Head fifty miles west from Calgary in Alberta, and you'll reach the edge of the Canadian Rockies with its jagged snow-capped peaks. Writer Mark Seth Lender visited Mount Engadine Lodge there. But it wasn't the spectacular mountains that riveted his gaze at sunrise; instead, he was captivated by the mud wallow just below the lodge. Moose at the Mt. Engadine Wallow 2014 Mark Seth Lender All Rights Reserved LENDER: The land lies between two rows of mountains, white-capped like a sea of stone. Down in the trough between them water flows, not an ocean, but only the trickle of a stream: small reminder of the torrent that once flowed in a distant timea time of ice. In the foothills of the Canadian Rockies, a moose and her calf search for dietary salts, sodium and magnesium, necessary for life. (Photo: Mark Seth Lender) The glaciers grinding advance. All that rock and dustthe fines and filings of the landmade this soft silt ground, and the water that remains combines to make a mire, this La Brea made of mud where moose come to wallow in the dark and tar-like stuff. They are mothers and daughters and mothers and sons. They sink, up to their bellies and their hips, into the sucking bog, fossils in the making. Instead, their long legs pull free. They turn. They bow their heads to drink. A moose and her calf drink salty water that fills their footprints. (Photo: Mark Seth Lender) Each hoof prints a cup that fills with water, and in that water are valuable things more pressing than thirst. Their quest is not for wet, but salt, the salt of the earth that once was mountains: calcium, magnesium in oxides and carbonates, sodium and chloride. Without these buffering salts they will starve though their bellies bulge with the sweetest grass on earth. Without salt, the ferment of digestion stops. And the moose knows this and shows the way to her calf-of-the-year. And the calf, new in this world, watches and stands as close as she canmoving side to side; standing flank to flank; head to head; back to back. A calf mirrors her mother, learning that they cannot survive on grasses alone. (Photo: Mark Seth Lender) The calf and her mother, like atoms bound in a carbon ring, each mirroring the other. By salt they grow, healthy and fat. The wide stiff brush of hair that runs along the calfs young spine is a throwback to Lascaux and Chauvet where our ancestors drew hers in ochre and umber, and charcoal mixed with fat in those intimate torch-lit spaces in the ground. Portraying with the first paint in human hands what life was for all of us, on the edge of a vast and frozen placeits trepidation, borne like the whims of season without complaint, its hope, like sun entering the dark mouth of the cave; its agonies, at the end of the game. Thirty thousand years ago that was. Is there much difference, now? CURWOOD: To see what Mark Seth Lender saw, slog on over to LOE.org.

CURWOOD: Head fifty miles west from Calgary in Alberta, and you'll reach the edge of the Canadian Rockies with its jagged snow-capped peaks. Writer Mark Seth Lender visited Mount Engadine Lodge there. But it wasn't the spectacular mountains that riveted his gaze at sunrise; instead, he was captivated by the mud wallow just below the lodge. Moose at the Mt. Engadine Wallow 2014 Mark Seth Lender All Rights Reserved LENDER: The land lies between two rows of mountains, white-capped like a sea of stone. Down in the trough between them water flows, not an ocean, but only the trickle of a stream: small reminder of the torrent that once flowed in a distant timea time of ice. In the foothills of the Canadian Rockies, a moose and her calf search for dietary salts, sodium and magnesium, necessary for life. (Photo: Mark Seth Lender) The glaciers grinding advance. All that rock and dustthe fines and filings of the landmade this soft silt ground, and the water that remains combines to make a mire, this La Brea made of mud where moose come to wallow in the dark and tar-like stuff. They are mothers and daughters and mothers and sons. They sink, up to their bellies and their hips, into the sucking bog, fossils in the making. Instead, their long legs pull free. They turn. They bow their heads to drink. A moose and her calf drink salty water that fills their footprints. (Photo: Mark Seth Lender) Each hoof prints a cup that fills with water, and in that water are valuable things more pressing than thirst. Their quest is not for wet, but salt, the salt of the earth that once was mountains: calcium, magnesium in oxides and carbonates, sodium and chloride. Without these buffering salts they will starve though their bellies bulge with the sweetest grass on earth. Without salt, the ferment of digestion stops. And the moose knows this and shows the way to her calf-of-the-year. And the calf, new in this world, watches and stands as close as she canmoving side to side; standing flank to flank; head to head; back to back. A calf mirrors her mother, learning that they cannot survive on grasses alone. (Photo: Mark Seth Lender) The calf and her mother, like atoms bound in a carbon ring, each mirroring the other. By salt they grow, healthy and fat. The wide stiff brush of hair that runs along the calfs young spine is a throwback to Lascaux and Chauvet where our ancestors drew hers in ochre and umber, and charcoal mixed with fat in those intimate torch-lit spaces in the ground. Portraying with the first paint in human hands what life was for all of us, on the edge of a vast and frozen placeits trepidation, borne like the whims of season without complaint, its hope, like sun entering the dark mouth of the cave; its agonies, at the end of the game. Thirty thousand years ago that was. Is there much difference, now? CURWOOD: To see what Mark Seth Lender saw, slog on over to LOE.org.