Wyoming people are used to seeing wildlife, sometimes even town, but nobody at a youth soccer game in Jackson was expecting an up-close encounter Saturday morning.
“You just don’t expect a bull moose to run through a kids’ soccer game,” Barbara Allen, a real estate agent and former Teton County commissioner, told Cowboy State Daily on Tuesday.
Even so, Allen kept enough of her wits to make two short videos of the huge beast lumbering onto the field from across the street. It then proceeded to trot around, even as some of the children screamed and a small dog started barking at it.
“I think the poor moose was just confused and didn’t know what he was doing,” Allen said of the incident, which started at 11:25 a.m. and lasted about 2 minutes.
Memorable Season Finale
It was the season’s last day of games for 6- and 7-year-olds, Allen said. Her son was playing a game on an adjacent field, but her young daughter was right next to her as she took the videos.
“My daughter loves to look at animals. She was more on the ‘awe and wonder’ side of things when the moose came through,” Allen said. “He was beautiful. He had a shiny coat and great paddle antlers.”
She said the unexpected ungulate seemed as confused as the humans.
“I don’t think he knew what to do once he got on to the field and there were all these screaming kids and parents trying to herd them out of the way,” she said.
Toward the end of the second video, a man on an e-bike can be seen coming up behind the moose and herding it away from the crowd.
“Nobody knows who the ‘e-bike guy’ was yet,” Allen said. “I don’t know if I would want to get behind a bull moose on an e-bike, but I give him a lot of credit for what he did helping to get the moose away from the children.”
Nobody was hurt and the moose eventually found its way off the field, Allen said.
“He turned down the road toward the Flat Creek Corridor, and that’s the last I saw of him,” she said.
