So i decide, as i would near a Canada blackfly-fed trout rippled beaver swamp, to sneak up on the bellering wonder. Walking some distance to the other side of the campus, knowing full well that the last moose that trod these China lands from Russia must have been a good hundred yars ago, and that the pattern is too consistent, and its not THAT quiet here, and its not wild, the wailing gets louder and louder.
Coming finally close to the tree behind which the hollering washes out in waves, there is the moose, an old man. His hair grey, and with downward hanging wiry sprigs of beard typical of an Asian guy, like some mini bonsai type of tree vibrating down out of his chin-skin, and a kind of kung-fu stance with knees sternly bent half, with fists at chest height flowing out with each beller like a slow motion flying dragon (though Chinese dragons have no wings, its just the Hollywood ones). And i behold, feeling guilty of my unavoidable stare, in as much wonder as i would at a Canada moose. He doesn't acknowledge me, in a deep concentrative trance.
The tree trunk is steadily positioned between his shoulder blade secondary wings as he regularly performs a motion as strange as the yowl itself, at a frequency of about 3 per yowl. And, remember, these bellers override all other campus sounds, as cool students slowly begin to flow their way to classrooms, mostly in a quiet determined walk, seemingly oblivious to the man-moose. He is part of the U-bubble wilderness as he ironically stands beside a huge lotus swamp that any moose in Alaska would give its left horn to be loafing in, with lotus stems the size of fat carrots towering as long as Yao Ming's fully streached, arms up, basketball dunking body, crowned with their single top-of-the-stem halo leaf nearly double size of a flattened Chinese hat. the moose man throws his upper body backward smacking the chest area of his back into the tree in the rhythm of a 30 beats per minute heart.
One of these days, i plan to muster the courage to join and study from him; and there will be a joint Canadian Chinese moose chorus.
moose call - traditional Chinese medicine
