A woman in Anchorage, Alaska, is recovering from her injuries after she was kicked in the head by a moose while walking her dog last week, in a shocking moment captured on video.
Tracy Hansen and her dog, Gunner, were walking the usual route they take at least three times a day when she was suddenly knocked to the ground in the Thursday incident, she told NBC affiliate KTUU of Anchorage.
“I thought someone had not been paying attention and hit me with a bike or something,” Hansen told KTUU. “I had put my hands up to my head, and I’m like, ‘I’m bleeding.’”
It was only when she looked up that she realized she had been kicked by a large moose that she and her dog had walked past earlier.
“Knowing that the moose had been somewhere behind me and now, here this moose is in front of me, and I’m like, ‘Was that the moose?’” Hansen said.
It might have been hard to believe had another resident, Kate Timmons, not captured the moment on video.
Timmons happened to have been passing by in a car with her family when the incident unfolded. In her video, the moose can be seen loping down the sidewalk, appearing to gain speed as it advances toward Hansen walking ahead.
"Watch out! Watch out!" Timmons shouts, as the moose races toward Hansen, before slamming a hoof into her head and knocking her to the ground. The moose then slows down and continues walking down the sidewalk.
“My husband was able to help pull her over the snow bank, so we could get her in the truck with her dog and kind of get her out of the way,” Timmons told KTUU. “It definitely seemed unprovoked from our standpoint and it happened so fast it was just like, a matter of getting her out of the situation, getting her help, making sure, you know, my big thing was that she didn’t have a head trauma, that there wasn’t a bleed or something.”
Hansen said their paths had crossed at the right moment.
“Kate and I were discussing that the Lord put her in the right place, at the right time to be able to help,” Hansen said.
Hansen is still recovering from her injuries. She said she had to have staples for her head wounds and still has headaches and bruising.
Still, she said the incident hasn't put her off her daily walking route with Gunner.
“We’ll be back on our normal walks,” she said. “The moose won’t stop that.”
