Foster: Skirmish with moody elk spawns game of one-upmanship

I used to be the only person I knew who could boast at dinner parties about nearly dying at the hooves of an angry elk.

Then I recently met a Canadian man named Iain at a Chattanooga microbrewery. Iain (pronounced Ian) is a native of Newfoundland. He is a friend of a friend and happened to mention one of his favorite spots - Jasper National Park, in the Canadian province of Alberta. It's in a town of 4,000 residents and many more elk. It's also about 2,500 driving miles from Chattanooga and 2,500 air miles from Newfoundland.

And yet, two men in 2010 could commiserate over a beer in Chattanooga about killer elk from the early 1990s in the same Rocky Mountain outpost.

Iain had mentioned that Jasper is one of his favorite places.

"I've been to Jasper," I said. "Nearly got killed by an elk."

I didn't expect Iain's response: "Really? Me, too!"

The next few minutes were a test in one-upmanship.

My run from the killer elk lasted only a split second or two. It was May 1994 and I was camping in Jasper National Park and spied a large female elk grazing near my tent. I retrieved my 35 mm camera from my Jeep and inched closer for a shot. She turned on me and sent me scrambling for the Jeep, which luckily had an open driver's-side door. I dived in, slammed the door and watched, heart racing, as the elk stopped inches from my window and fogged up the glass with what I must assume was stinky elk breath.

At first blush, Iain's story was better. He had to run for 20 minutes through the woods, hurdling downed trees and bouncing off standing ones until finally reaching civilization.

I regained the storytelling momentum, however, when I related how my four-step jaunt and dive occurred with an already-torn groin muscle, the product of a season-opening softball game the week before. Spokane, Wash., can be downright cold in late April and early May. If you don't stretch properly, you can injure yourself.

Groin muscles are adductors - fan-like muscles in the upper thigh. They stabilize the hip joint and attach from the pelvis to the thigh bone. When torn or strained or pulled, they trigger great pain. Even men who don't have torn groin muscles will wince at the phrase "torn groin muscles."

Iain winced. Then I told him the story got worse. I was icing my groin in front of the TV during a Sunday afternoon golf tournament and fell asleep. A couple of hours went by. Let's just say there's a valid reason why ice packs are supposed to be limited to about 20-minute intervals. If they aren't, you must make a trip to the urgent-care center to see a baby-faced doctor and then be diagnosed with frostbite of

the groin. The doctor was extremely amused.

"You win," Iain said.

Was there ever a doubt?

One other lesson I learned from that experience was, don't tell your softball coach about killer elk and frostbitten groins when the coach also is your newspaper's humor columnist. Not only will he embellish the story by using "moose in Banff," but the column he writes might end up in a hardback book of his all-time best columns.

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As a result of last week's column, 35 of the 38 readers who responded said they preferred one edition of the newspaper, with the same front page distributed regionwide, but with plenty of North Georgia articles inside. In exchange, we will put on A1 any North Georgia article that warrants it. One reader added at the end of her e-mail a request with which I cannot in good conscience comply, however: "[P]lease shave off your rednecky looking facial hair."

I've had either a beard or a goatee since the Reagan administration. Goatees remain in vogue even for non-rednecks. And my mom likes it.

J. Todd Foster is executive editor of the Chattanooga Times Free Press and can be reached at jtfoster@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6472.

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