Moose finally gets loose, takes a powder

Jeff Green | Feb 17, 2016

A yearling cow moose that was lingering in the vicinity of Snow Road made the mistake of trying to cross over a frozen bay to get a drink of water from the Mississippi River.

Jeff and Jenna Fenwick, who live off the bay, saw the moose on the ice on February 4th. The moose had already been in the area for a few days by that time, and a picture of it appeared in the Frontenac News that week.

However, things took a turn for the worse at the end that week, as the moose slipped on the ice.

“We saw that it was slipping on the ice on the Thursday, I believe it was, but it seemed to be able to get up and move around,” said Jeff Fenwick, when contacted this week.

Fenwick said that on Saturday morning, February 6, it was clear that the moose was stuck on the ice.

“Its back legs were splayed out and it could not move off the ice,” he said.

They went out to the ice to try and help, and eventually relatives and neighbours were called.

“We tried getting a horse harness on the moose, but it kept slipping off, and we tried to get it on a tarp to pull it off. In the end we needed four people, one on each leg, to get it off the ice,” he said.

The moose's back legs were still not working and it was a struggle to get her to some high ground on a neighbouring property.

Over the next couple of days, the moose fed on brush that was placed near it, and slowly one, then the other leg, started to hold weight and it was able to start moving around and eating more and more.

The neighbour put up some yellow tape between where the moose was feeding and the water to discourage the animal from going back to the bay and getting stuck on the ice again.

“On Monday it was doing much, much better, and on Tuesday it had just slipped away,” said Fenwick.

There have been no further reports of sightings since then. The hope is that the moose crossed the road and made its way back to the bush.