It was wedged tight by the impact, so I twisted in my seat and kicked and kicked-I don’t remember how many times-until the door inched open. The roof was caved in so close on my right side that the rearview mirror dangled near my ankles. Only then would I realize that I’d come inches from death.īut for now I was still trapped in the car.

Hours later, after a young couple picked me up and delivered me to a bar in Delta Junction, after state troopers called a local auto wrecker who took me to an abandoned off-season apartment complex for the night, I stood before a mirror in the bathroom and studied the raw spot on my forehead, what looked like a rug burn, where the moose’s fur had scraped away the top layer of my skin. She passed so far through the glass that I actually felt her fur against my face.” As the car skidded to a stop, the roof collapsed under her weight, then the rear window shattered as she lifted herself and leaped back into the tall weeds. “I braked,” I wrote in my journal the next day, “the clump of limbs against the grill and then the hood, then a whine-almost wheeze-from the moose as she went through the windshield. Without thinking, I slammed on the horn as I pressed the brakes almost to the floor, but the car didn’t seem to slow. For a moment, she was frozen there, flat and depthless in my headlights. A full-grown cow moose vaulted from the brush on the right shoulder and into the road. Around a final bend, I eased off the gas, coasting down the slope, scanning the left side of the road for the turnoff. That was fine with me all I needed was a dry spot to pitch a tent among the birches and black spruce. During the summertime, when locals head to their fish camps and hunting lodges, it’s virtually abandoned. The town wasn’t much, just a line of roadhouses and cafés at the northern terminus of the Alcan Highway. In my battered Milepost guide, I’d found a campground at a state recreation site listed just outside the remote highway crossroads of Delta Junction. In that part of Alaska and that time of year-barely 100 miles south of the Arctic Circle, late July-it never really gets dark, so I took advantage of the dusky half-light, driving until almost two in the morning. All I wanted was to escape the constant downpour and camp someplace dry, so I pressed south from Fairbanks, shadowing the Tanana River until the clouds finally broke and the moon rose over the Hayes Range in the distance.

Eagle eye headlights