THE GREAT
MOOSE MIGRATION

Few animals are more Swedish than the moose. We grow up with their antlers poking down into our cradles, passing unbothered in the background of a back-seat car window, and then gone. But here’s something I find confusing: an elk and a moose are both different and the same, depending on where in the English-speaking universe you find yourself when you see one. What British people call an elk is an American moose, the one with the droopy nose and smooth, plump antlers (as if they’ve been inflated from the cranium, straight into a souvenir shop). But there’s also an American elk: a stag but with more muscle, pointier head, and antlers. The American elk, from what I gather, is closer to a Swedish hjort. The Swedish älg, what my mother called un alce, is therefore both a moose and an elk. It’s such a mythical creature, not as in imagined, but as in shedding myths as it goes, with every passing season.

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For present purposes, I will stick to ‘moose’. There’s no point in pretending that most Swedish people don’t get the bulk of their English, its rhyme and its reason, from American TV shows, even if I’ve spent years trying to lose the unwarranted accent.

Slow TV Day 6: As of yet, no moose are there to be seen. For the first ten days of broadcasting, the reindeer are the undisputed stars of Den stora älgvandringen, The Great Moose Migration, on Swedish web-TV. At half ten in the morning, eight reindeer are resting in the snow between water and wood. Seven of them lie in a half-moon, with their white behinds to the camera, whilst an eighth is holding court in front of the group. Sometimes, there’s a shiver, as if they were one body, given a little electric shock. Someone told me, when we moved to Bath, that Nicholas Cage owned a house somewhere in the area. There was a rumour that he showed up in a pub on New Year’s Eve and bought everyone a round. At this early stage, the reindeer are the Nicholas Cages of The Great Moose Migration: the kind of celebrity you might, realistically, one day see.

My dad mentions the show a few times before I decide to tune in. By then, the network is almost a week into the live streaming, we are two weeks into the first UK lockdown, and it’s been three weeks since my dad last touched another person. At this point, this feels like a long time. My sister is doing his shopping, which he’s not happy with, as she replaces regular crisps with vegetable ones. Really, he wants to write the list, pick up the things, bring them home, and thereby plan his week. He’s staying indoors in the south of Stockholm, and Adam and I — on furlough from our retail jobs — are staying indoors in Bath, but in the cities themselves conditions are different. The Swedish response to the pandemic is markedly less robust, compared to the rest of Europe. ‘People in Sweden have a high level of trust in government agencies,’ the Swedish prime minister says in an announcement, reminding us of who we are. I’m not sure I count, having left Sweden almost a decade ago, having always been something else too. I feel like he’s speaking to certain trace substances. As a result, he adds, ‘people in Sweden are on the whole acting responsibly.’ Under these circumstances, my dad, having compromised lungs, is staying inside. Being retired allows him to do this.

For thousands of years, parts of the Swedish moose population have travelled the same route between their winter homes and their summer pastures on higher ground. The internal map is not a genetic heirloom; instead, the calves learn about the most efficient paths from their elders, then they remember them from spring to spring. On the show, the experts compare the thoroughfare to a bus route — it gets busier the further down the line you go. For the second year in a row, SVT, Swedish Television, have installed twenty-four-hour cameras around an area where the moose have to cross Ångermannaälven, a river in northern Sweden. In order to keep people entertained at home, when those who are able to begin to stay at home, the network has kicked off the broadcast a week ahead of schedule. We are expected to be bored and in need of moose. The small profile of a moose head against a white square at the bottom-left corner of the screen tells you how many have crossed the river so far, as the streaming progresses, as the days go by and the ice melts, as we listen to Boris Johnson’s voice hammer down harder in press conferences and quickly pulverise outside of that screen.

On the first day, the moose-counter says 000, which suggests they must be expecting hundreds. What a cheap way to get people hooked, I think, and bookmark the page.

Slow TV Day 7: There’s a recording from last year when one of the reindeers ‘photobombed’ the Moose Migration. It jumped up and down in front of a camera installed on a tree, its head bobbing in and out of the frame as if on a trampoline. ‘Just look at the eyes,’ I say to Adam. I’m getting addicted to them, glistening conkers on each side of its head. A few years ago, a sound recording of a beluga whale, supposedly imitating a human, fulfilled the same purpose. It sounded drunk and overjoyed, and Adam quickly caught on to how useful it was if I was feeling the opposite, overly sober and under the surface. I reach for this clip with the same abandon, but it’s not cheering up that I need this time. I don’t want to be entertained.

Quite a few of the reindeer have only one antler. Bizarre, my dad says. I look it up and find that this is perfectly normal. Reindeer are the only deer species where both male and female have antlers, but they don’t drop them at the same time of the year; neither do they lose both antlers at once. Here’s what John Berger wrote about zoos, photographs, and nature documentaries, the vehicles we use to survey non-human beasts: ‘In the accompanying ideology, animals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance.’ We love it when a reindeer ‘photobombs’ a moose, because that is what we would do, given the opportunity. We drag the baggage of humour with us into the image, among many other things.

The WhatsApp group I use to communicate with my dad and sister has become peppered with wild-life alerts. When one of us spots a movement among the trees, the rest of us are immediately informed: ‘A reindeer bum!’ ‘Otter!’ ‘So many reindeer!’ my sister writes. She should really be watching a lecture as part of her physiotherapy degree, most of which has moved online. Occasionally, she needs to go into the hospital to practise on real muscles and joints. Whenever she wears a face mask on the Stockholm tube, everyone around her takes a step away. Because masks aren’t widely used, her fellow passengers think she’s sick. Oddly, this seems to make the mask twice as effective: protecting the one who wears it, as well as others. As we’ll find in a few months, when we return to work in the UK, this isn’t the case when masks become the norm. Many will then, unwittingly, regard them as an excuse to relax social distancing. Everyone’s individual response is ignited by that of others; we are, and are made of, a chain of reactions.

‘Händer det något?’ I ask my dad on the phone. ‘There were some lovely reindeer earlier,’ he says. ‘They were all running very fast.’ If all you are met with, when opening the screen, is the river’s iron skin, or a branch losing snow drip by drip, you can choose to go through the time-stamped highlights underneath the video. Each link tells you about the event in question: ‘The reindeer are resting.’ ‘Otter on block of ice.’ Some descriptions are more elaborate: ‘Curious reindeer smells the microphone at 11.23.’ I’d love to know whose job that is, what kind of tiny power they have, the ones who choose the words to describe what is happening.

Slow TV Day 9: ‘Jag har sett järven!’ my dad writes. I love it when animals are referred to as the bear or the wolverine in Swedish, as if all bears were one bear, all wolverines one wolverine, out there and everywhere. I video call my dad and follow his directions on the timeline. There’s a rocky slope, blotted unevenly by the sun through a canopy of pines. There are dark crevices, armpits of unknown depth in the cliffside, and a lot of moss. We hold out for the wolverine’s arrival. I watch my dad watching the moss, and try to assess his okay-ness on this particular day, how keenly he’s feeling his isolation, or if something has managed to sneak in via a door handle (he does take out the rubbish) and into his lungs. A snout becomes visible between two rocks and our eyes widen when a treacle-coloured half-bear, half-badger with a feather-duster for a tail emerges and runs past the camera, licking the ground with its belly, then out of view.

‘He’s off!’ says Adam, who’s been watching all of it, and us, from the bedroom door. What do we make of this? It’s an English-language phrase I’ve always liked. As in: what does this become in our hands?

The first time I begin a day by opening the moose-tab on my browser, it already feels like a habit. I head for the livestream first, the ‘real time’: a time that is real because it is shared by all of us, anyone who’s sleeping, eating, struggling to breathe, or having sex right now. The river, my at-risk dad, the nurses, the sick in London hospitals, and the sick in Guayaquil, Ecuador (where I lived aged one to five), where people are currently burying their dead in public parks because there is no room in morgues nor in cemeteries; my family in Colombia under strict quarantine. Then, I scan through the highlights I missed whilst sleeping. This is how, from now on, I clock in these days: first the moose-count, and not till then the death-count.

Slow TV Day 11: The moose finally arrive. It happens on exactly the same day as last year, in spite of the pandemic. The first couple of moose appear on the far side of rows and rows of pines, trudging steadily through wet, borderland snow. There’s still snow up north these days, although not much. I can’t hear the sound it makes under their hooves, but the look of the snow tells me it’s thin and dissolving. We have caught them live. Although no one has caught anything with their hands, the way you catch a fish in a stream or Adam catches moths in our bedroom, the word makes it sound like this is the result of our own efforts, as if there were no TV producers deciding which camera to broadcast from, which view to feed us and when we’re allowed to see it.

It’s also my birthday. I get a little drunk on whisky, dancing incoherently in our lounge, with Adam playing Rage Against the Machine songs on the electronic drum kit. Following jagged, tipsy lines, I cut myself out from my mid-thirties and paste myself into a much earlier age. Last year, on this night, we were trying to get some sleep on an occupied bridge during a climate protest in London. I remember my legs and dripping nose being a lot closer to the legs and noses of strangers than I would usually have found acceptable, closer than would have been necessary, under normal circumstances, or legal under current ones.

If you’re keen to learn more about the moose, there is a recording of last year’s ‘moose studio’ available to watch on the STV website. It was a cosy set-up, with fur-wrapped benches around a fire in a forest clearing, right by the side of Ångermannaälven. Experts were invited to discuss the moose as prehistory, the moose on the eighteenth-century bourgeois dinner table (lung-mash, liver, bone marrow — they prepared some earlier and spend some airtime having small bites), as deadly traffic accident, as suburban neighbour, and in widely shared home videos from someone’s backyard. One of the guests is an archaeologist who admits to being called ‘the moose woman’ by her peers: she explains what the moose meant for the local population during the stone age. ‘A moose,’ she says with wavy hand gestures which then turn into little power grabs, ‘well it’s a moose!’ It’s as if she were talking about parenthood or fire. ‘It’s a natural force one simply has to relate to,’ she says, and I wonder what it’s like to share an office with her.

There was a period about four thousand years ago, when the moose almost disappeared from this part of the world, possibly because of a warmer climate. The word ‘sagolik’, fairytale-like, comes up a lot among the moose panellists. One of the guests is a woman who took to watching a nature documentary about a white moose called Ferdinand during the late stages of her pregnancy. She’s a psychologist researching the effects of nature connections on mental health. When she was no longer able to get outside as much as she wanted to, the documentary allowed her to ‘flee into that world, and bring that strength’ with her.

When this all started, a few elements felt strangely familiar. This is a turn of phrase I’ve always liked because it should be a contradiction in terms. Most familiar things are also always strange. ‘Have you noticed?’ Adam said one day. ‘We’re the party poopers again.’ This was mid-March and we’d just cancelled a meet-up with friends at a pub. We said it might not be a good idea because of Covid, and the response was that we could all bring hand sanitiser. ‘We’re young,’ someone else said. ‘Even if we get it, we’ll probably be fine.’ For a while now, we’ve been the people who bring down the mood at a table, our trying to do something coming down as a scoop of unwanted terror straight into people’s pints. Adam never brings it up, but when we’re asked what we’re up to these days, what am I supposed to answer? The bit I find the hardest to explain is that it’s not ultimately about me getting sick, just like it’s not about me, personally, dying in a flood or fire next year, or in five. The best explanation I have for why I started wearing a face mask before it was mandatory lies in something my dad said to me when I told him I’d been furloughed. ‘I feel really guilty,’ I said. ‘I’m getting paid for not working.’ ‘Why?’ he said. ‘It’s just like being signed off sick.’ ‘But I’m not sick!’ I said. ‘The world is,’ he said, with uncharacteristic lyricism. I was grateful to him for saying that. It made me remember the points of contact, where we become other, where I become a system.

So, I do find it confusing that the figures in Sweden, a country where civic duty and societal responsibility are supposed to be rooted in our culture, keep rising.

Slow TV Day 12: That woman in the studio loved her white moose, Ferdinand, so much that she ended up naming her daughter after a character in a moose-related fairy tale: Sagan om älgtjuren Skutt och lilla prinsessan Tuvstarr, The Tale of Leap the Elk and Little Princess Cottongrass. Not long ago, a collection of Swedish fairy tales was sent to the bookshop where I work. I took it home because I recognised John Bauer’s illustrations on the cover. All I know about John Bauer is that he drowned with his family on their way to a new home in Stockholm in 1918. The reason they chose to go by boat and not by train was that there had been a railway accident recently along that route. As a child, I found his images eerie, all the trolls, the tomtar, the golden-haired children, some of them naked and some of them covered from top to toe by their golden hair (I dreamed of being covered top to toe in my hair, which could never be golden — I could never be part of those fairy tales), masses of hair covering the bodies of the trolls too. All these creatures seemed to emerge from a less safe place, just past the sofa or an arm’s length from my grandparents’ window. The moment the burgeoning nose of a troll began to make the night feel dark, I could shut the book and run downstairs.

Looking through those images now, they are a relief. In John Bauer’s work, the wood is safe and intact, as impenetrable as ever. It has stayed the same in spite of everything — in spite of me. Regardless of what I do, how careful I am or how little I’m able to change the situation, this wood is still there.

Slow TV Day 19: Now, we’re watching out for the swimmers. The moose-counter in the corner — the one that keeps track of how many have crossed the river — remains on 000. At about half past nine in the evening, three moose wander down a steep slope at Södra Udden, and one of them takes the lead all the way to the water’s edge. The night is bright in the way only nights up north are lit — un-dark — with the sun sifted out but leaving light’s basic elements. All three moose, two of them possibly calves, are now up to their haunches in the water. They stay there, taking sideways steps and little shimmies, sipping from the lake. After a short while, the bigger one turns back toward the shore and starts walking up the slope again, with the other two quickly in tow. The counter doesn’t change from 000. ‘Fegisar,’ my dad says. Little cowards.

What do nature documentaries really document? The work of David Attenborough, whose renown also reached someone who grew up in Sweden and Colombia, has faced criticism over the years, on the grounds of including ‘staged scenes’ (a polar bear giving birth in a zoo as part of Planet Earth) as well as portraying a false image of wilderness as untouched, guiding the viewer’s gaze away from annihilation caused by human activity (Dynasties). What would an entirely authentic nature documentary look like? Essayist Amber A’Lee Frost wonders if it would be ‘ethical (or even possible)’ to install cameras in a polar bear’s wild den: ‘Is a polar bear giving birth somehow less “wild” in a zoo?’ What kind of authenticity are we after when looking at non-human animals? How could we possibly extract ourselves from the viewing that happens through our eyes?

Relying solely on a series of cameras installed in trees and in the moss, The Great Moose Migration seems to avoid the most obvious pitfalls — it doesn’t give the moose human voices; it refrains from adding dramatic music, or staging battles between moose (although these happen — they get nervous when too close to each other). Does this mean that, as humans, we aren’t there? The migrating moose, like Bauer’s images of children and trolls, calm me, cradle me in my seat. There’s so much we don’t know about this virus. Watching the moose, these days go by almost quietly, as if they didn’t have such insidious corrosion rushing through their veins. ‘Diseases have always come out of the woods and wildlife and found their way into human populations,’ a New York Times article tells me. ‘And with modern air travel and a robust market in wildlife trafficking, the potential for a serious outbreak in large population centers is enormous.’ That was 2012. But these are moose, not pangolins or bats. Is that why I’m comforted? Is this wild life safe, just like we are supposedly safe from the worst of climate breakdown, for now, in this section of this hemisphere? Does this mean that we mistook the forest for the fairy tale? Or that we’re looking for something which is no longer there? Although presenting itself as objective observation, not storytelling, the very premise of the show relies on a narrative of humans peeking into a peaceful, timeless space in which we aren’t implicated. If we are not a part of that story, that system of interlinked reactions, we don’t need to take responsibility for what happens inside it.

I understand why someone would watch a white moose when trying to calm their uterus, which is about to expulse a new human. Bauer didn’t use much colour in his work. According to the book’s introduction, he felt that subdued greens and browns better suited the woods of southern Sweden, which was where his art came from, and where it will always live. It could be that simple, that a part of me is homesick. I don’t think it is that simple, or that homesickness ever is.

Slow TV Day 25: By now, six moose have crossed the river. I missed the first few, as it happened during the night, and I’m not yet hooked enough to keep watching past midnight. I can’t say if this is a sign of sanity or shows a lack of commitment.

With regards to moose-viewers elsewhere, it takes a while to trace the watch-party. The hashtag comes in so many variations; it too migrates: #denstoraalgvandringen (for those without Swedish vowels on their keyboards), #denstoraälgvandringen, #moosemigration, or simply #moosewalk, which sounds like it was born in the eighties. Someone called Papa Emeritus tweets a screenshot of the river along with the hashtag #skattepengar and #slöseri, #taxmoney and #waste, but mostly there is gratitude. ‘Patience is rewarded,’ someone called Elisabet writes. ‘#SlowTV is great #EntertainmentAtHome while battling Covid-19 #SVT’. A viewer in Brazil shares that sentiment, saying on the last day of the broadcast (according to Google Translate) that from now on ‘quarantine will be sad’. The programme also seems to attract viewers from opposing sides of the political spectrum. Göran Bengtsson thinks the Moose Migration is the only watchable programme on SVT nowadays, amidst all the ‘leftist propaganda’, whilst Non ServiⒶm ANTIFA, an account full of anti-Trump tweets, writes: ‘10 points to #SVT!’ They’re both, apparently, finding something to love.

Slow TV Day 26: Moose are great swimmers and they’re usually fine walking on ice, but the in-between stage, ice which is about to melt, is a problem for their skinny legs and sharp hooves. At 11.08, a small group of moose begin to cross the river, which is still frozen at the edges. Three of them are evenly distanced in a row, with a pair holding the rear. As the first two step onto the opposite shore, number four makes an unexpected, sharp turn, and continues to swim along the beach without getting any closer to it. When it finally decides to head for land, it has reached an area with a broad streak of ice lining the beach. It begins to swim straight into that ice sheet, hoisting itself up on its front legs only to pierce the frozen layers and crash through them each time. It tries, again, to get up on the ice and collapses, heaving, then falling. It finally stops and just lies there, half-in and half-out of the water, panting.

What do I see? That it looks like serious pain, the kind you cannot distract yourself from. What do I want to be told? That this would have happened regardless — that because I am here and the moose is there, that because it’s a moose, what I do has no bearing on what happens next.

Göran Ericsson is Professor in Wild Life Ecology at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. He was a regular participant in the moose studio in 2019, and has since set up an online question-box about moose on the university website: ‘What are the causes of the reduced weight of calves since 1985?’ someone has asked. ‘My daughter wonders if the moose have cold feet.’ ‘Can moose get corona?’ I find it welcoming, that someone who incidentally watches moose with their breakfast gets to ask their question alongside those who are well-versed in breeding patterns. In an email to Göran Ericsson, I ask if he’s noticed a difference in the kinds of questions people submit this year. He tells me that, this time, the questions are more fundamentally about wild animals, more generally about nature. He’s seen a definite rise in interest, he says. His gut feeling is that the programme is providing an entrance to ‘something calm, comforting and perhaps, lagom boring’.

Oh, that word. Lagom. It’s one I’ve been thinking about too, during these weeks of moose watching, news watching, watching oneself and others from afar. The word lagom has a reputation as being non-translatable. It means not too little and not too much: a lagom portion of meatballs, being lagom warm. Just right. Swedes sometimes refer to our own country as the lagom country: supposedly, we don’t like extremes. During both world wars, Sweden remained officially neutral. Closing primary schools, the state epidemiologist says during a talk show, will likely lead to worse peaks when they open again. So, you wait and you don’t close the schools. You follow common sense and you don’t make sharp turns. Lagom is being not hungry but not too full either; it’s the greyish green and uncertain brown of John Bauer’s woodland images. That neutrality, though, is only one narrative among many, and however much of a lone ranger it likes to think it is, it is wired into all these other stories. German transports of war materiel and soldiers to occupied Norway were allowed through the country during WWII. In the seventeenth century, Sweden was a European superpower, waging bloody wars of expansion. The north of Sweden, the setting for our moose show, is the stage of historical state oppression of the Sami people. Sweden was also the first country in the world to establish a National Institute for Race Biology in 1922. These are colonised lands, rarely regarded as such, and there’s nothing lagom about any of it.

As for the moose, they’re built for cold. At higher temperatures, their energy is rerouted to regulating body heat, and the food itself becomes less nourishing. There’s been a reduction of 20–25 per cent in moose reproduction in Sweden over the last twenty years. They’re also more susceptible to certain diseases. In 2016, it was confirmed that so-called ‘brain worm’, a parasite which also infects reindeer, was spread throughout the country, and is likely to become more common with rising temperatures. It attacks the moose’s central nervous system, causing them to become disoriented, wobbly, lost, and confused.

Slow TV Day 26, a bit later: The moose makes it safely onto land. It finally reaches thick-enough ice to hold its weight and lugs itself up on its folded front legs, then the rest follows. There’s an inaudible sigh of relief on Twitter.

In 2018, Attenborough said that his documentary Dynasties would be ‘a great relief from the political landscape which otherwise dominates our thoughts’. Den stora älgvandringen’s relationship with its viewers, however, suggests that rather than a relief from politics, a balm to the frazzled, it offers a continuation to our preferred narratives, and politics. In the UK, a ‘community spirit’, a ‘pulling together’ (our WhatsApp group full of neighbours we’ve never spoken to, clapping for the NHS, the comparison to a ‘Blitz Spirit’), will all become stories told about this crisis. They in turn exist within a wider narrative, in which it’s easier to clap for the NHS than to fund it. It’s a story which anyone existing within late capitalism inhabits, including (and this bears repeating) Swedes: a story in which individual freedoms reign supreme, and individual responsibility is defined and curtailed by these. In spite of all the talk of trust in authority, of Sweden having access to this unique cultural common sense, that too is only one of several stories determining our response, how we react when frightened, and the shapes power takes. Which of all Sweden’s narratives explains why the country has one of the highest per capita fatalities in Europe by the end of the spring? It sounds obvious, but Swedes act selfishly too, in an individualist system. It’s only when it doesn’t fit into the narrative we expect, and desire, that we call it a human, instead of a Swedish, thing.

How natural it is, to carry it all in with us: the anxiety, the fairy tales, the need for reassurance. Be it because I am, at least in part, Swedish, or because I’m a person in real time, right now, I desperately want a normality which shelters me, and the people I love, from the extremes I know are there. I want trolls in my woods but no starvation and no racism. I know this is what I’m looking for, and I know it doesn’t stop there.

‘The image of a wild animal becomes the starting point of a daydream,’ John Berger wrote, ‘a point from which the day-dreamer departs with his back turned.’

Slow TV Day 30: Someone has described today’s highlight thus: ‘Moose hides behind a tree, 13.13.’ My dad thinks the moose looks absurd, the way it stands so still behind the trunk of a tree whilst facing the camera, or the direction where we know the camera is placed. All we see of the moose is its belly puffing out on one side of the trunk and an ear on the other. If it is indeed hiding, it’s doing a poor job. Adam comes up behind me and begins to narrate the thoughts of the moose in the voice of a confused person who, I imagine, wears a top hat but no pants. ‘You can’t see me,’ our cartoon moose says. ‘I’m invisible!’

Turning our backs on the daydream, where do the day-dreamers go?