Come Along the Moose Path.

To those who don’t live in the boreal forest of the high North, it can seem like a scary place, full of dense bushes and pitfalls of devil’s club. It is not what people expect to see because they have been mislead by period movies and high fantasy shows made in Hollywood, where forests are neat and tidy places in which you can run your horse at a gallop with ease. We Taiga dwellers always roll our eyes at that. In real life, there is underbrush, living curtains of old man’s beard, soft patches of rotten ground and moss in which a horse could easily break a leg, and devil’s club…so much devil’s club! But we also know that there are many paths through the forest if you know where to look. These paths were not made by people. In fact, if you try to clear a trail yourself (or any patch of forest for that matter), you will face a constant backlash of the forest trying to replant itself there. You will need to do constant maintenance. The natural paths of which I speak don’t have that problem. Year after year, they remain, with no sapling or bush attempting to take root. It is as if there is some unspoken law of the woods to keep these paths clear. They almost seem illuminated as even the canopy above agrees not to obscure the path. One such path starts behind our house and leads all the way to the swamp at the very back end of our property. Can you see it?

We call our path “The Moose Path” because it is used by our ungulate neighbors in winter to come down to our grounds and eat our berry bushes.

The paths are windy, never straight, almost like the way a creek would flow. For some reason, not everyone is able to clearly see the path, even though it looks like a shining neon road to us. I’ve had friends come over who just don’t seem to be able to see the Moose Path. They are on it one minute, and then completely miss its curvature and traipse blindly through the berry bushes. If you are one of those people, and you don’t want to get lost in the forest, bring a dog or a kid; they never have trouble seeing the path.

The Moose Path is like a supermarket full of tasty treats. Cranberries, blueberries, cloudberries, rosehips, puffballs and more.

While the existence of the Moose Path and others like it might be completely logical, not magical (such as outlined in The Hidden Life of Trees), they do have a certain fairytale quality to them.

We love our moose path, not only for the berries, shrooms, and a way to get to the back end of the property easily, but also for it’s secret escape path value. Catch me if you can, baddies! Don’t get lost in the forest.