ILLUSTRATION: JOHAN HÖRBERG
THE ODDER STORY / MOOSE ATTACK
“It’s like a scene from Jaws” Ulf Jakobsson literally came face to face with 600 kilos of dark-brown rage. “IT’S AN EXTRAORDINARY story”, says rural mail carrier Ulf Jakobsson. You can hear a dash of fascination and shock in his calm dialect from Norrland, northern Sweden. He’s talking about that mysterious moose. The one that was looking for trouble. “Moose encounters along the road are common. In winter it is even more unusual not to see a moose. They usually quickly step over the edge of the plowed snow and disappear into the forest. But not this one.” IT WAS A DAY in March 2021. Ulf drove the long distance between Finnberg and Södra Mensträsk in Västerbotten. There, you pass only a few farms. Suddenly a moose was standing in the middle of the road. Which, as mentioned, is not unusual. 66
After all, there are as many moose in Sweden as there are people in the southern Swedish city of Malmö – about 350,000. “The moose turned around, looked at me a little and started walking along the road. I had no choice but to drive slowly at some distance behind it. It was a bit slippery and he walked carefully, almost slipping over at times. This went on for a kilometer. Ulf started to feel slightly stressed but tried to keep his cool. Eventually the moose stopped at the roadside and Ulf tried to sneak past. “It looked okay at first and I slowly started to overtake. Then, all of a sudden, it was as if the moose had been struck by lightening!” A MOOSE CAN run at 60 kilometers per hour. And then some
600 kilos of dark-brown rage went into attack mode! He headbutted the vehicle’s windscreen with violent force. Fortunately, bull moose lose their antlers during the winter and only small antler buds had grown back. Still, the windscreen broke. “It’s like a scene from the film Jaws. You know, when the shark pushes its head up through the boat. Its skull stopped on the windscreen for a second. I saw it staring at me, 30 centimeters away. ULF WAS GOING to deliver the mail as usual but now found himself in a Mexican standoff with the king of the forest. And it wasn’t over. The moose reared up on its hind legs and struck its front legs on the windscreen. Shards of glass flew into the vehicle.
“I started getting a bit of an adrenaline rush. But then he stopped as suddenly as he had started.” THE MOOSE BACKED away from the car slightly. Ulf was able to drive on for about 75 meters. He stopped to check whether the moose was injured, but it jumped off into the forest. The windscreen was badly damaged but still in one piece. Ulf had to drive back slowly so that it didn’t collapse into the car. “A bit later on, a colleague told me that the moose was back on the road, but then immediately jumped off it again.” “I can only speculate as to why it did what it did, but there had been a lot of snow. It was probably stressed when struggling to get over the edge of the plowed snow into the forest. ROBERT LÅNGSTRÖM PEOPLE BY POSTNORD
