Pecked to death by ducks by Tim Cahill

occasionally said, "Humph." The larger of the two might have weighed fifteen hundred pounds, the smaller perhaps two hundred pounds less. They were standing belly-deep in a marshy pool at the edge of Yellowstone Lake, in the far southeastern quadrant of Yellowstone Park, and they were feeding on aquatic plants. I was standing stock-still in a grove of trees—spruce and lodgepole pines— surreptitiously watching the big fellows dine and edging closer for a better view. The larger bull stared at me for a time, then plunged his head into the pond so that only the top half of his antlers was visible. The other was feeding as well, and while the two were blindly intent on their underwater meal, I moved to another tree five feet closer to the pond.

    PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS a 8o
    It was just twilight, the end of a long summer day, and the pond was a shimmering luminescence, a mirror to the fading pastels of the sky. The smaller of the two bulls raised his great, goofy head, and there was the sound of falling water. Streams of it, pinkish silver in the dying light, fell from the animal's immense, palmate antlers.
    There was a great inhalation of air: "humph." Then the larger bull came up for air, and the sound was like that of a marlin breaking water in a calm sea. "Humph," the animal said. A fleshy dewlap, the bell, hung from his neck. A string of mossy-green subaquatic foliage dangled limply from his mouth. Color bled across the sky in long, fingerlike streaks, and there was a momentary quickening of the light on the surface of the pond.
    The moose stared directly at me, without a great deal of interest. I stood in the shadows, still as death, attempting to look like a stubby lodgepole pine. This was dull entertainment for the feeding moose: I felt like the outdoor equivalent of some inane dinner-hour television offering. The thought festered in my mind for a bit, and I didn't know why. Suddenly, unbidden, I heard in my mind's ear the voice of Lome Greene narrating a nature documentary I had recently seen on cable TV, the kind of thing you watch while munching on a bad burrito. The show was a fine one, all about bears scooping salmon out of various streams. Mr. Greene, by way of capping things off, said—I swear it—"People don't give bears enough credit for fishing." He sounded peeved about this.
    That sentence brightened my life, and for a week I bored nearly everyone I met with my effusive accolades for the fishing ability of bears. "They catch more fish than anybody, and don't you forget it," I'd tell puzzled people over a beer at the Owl Casino and Lounge. "Bears are damned fine fishermen, and people just don't give them enough credit for it."
    I wondered what Lome Greene might have to say about the feeding bulls before me. No doubt the sight would make him indignant. "Moose can eat tons of food with their heads totally under water, and not one person in ten thousand gives a rat's ass."

    There was a slight crackling of branches behind me and to the right. Both bulls turned to the sound. Long ears stood erect on their skulls and swiveled toward this new entertainment. My camping partners, Tom Murphy, a professional photographer, and Lee Hutt, a talented amateur one, were moving down a sloping trail two hundred yards away. They had set up their cameras high above, on a fragrant, sage-covered hillside overlooking the glittering marsh, anticipating that the full moon would rise over the distant mountains of the Two Ocean Plateau, where the imaginary line of the Continental Divide meanders through the high country before snaking down into Wyoming's Teton National Forest. My companions hoped the moon would rise with the colors of the setting sun still on the marsh.
    I had dithered around with Tom and Lee for a bit, decided that the hillside shot was beyond my technical capacity, and had gone off with my friend Karen Laramore to fill the water jug at a spring on the edge of the marsh. The path took us past the pond where the