HS Culture 12.3.2002 - The elk - monarch of the <I>taiga</I>, and hunted by thousands

A review by Anto Leikola

Hämäläinen, Leinonen, Mandart: Hirvi, Pohjolan kuningaseläin. WSOY, 2002. pp. 168 , EUR 42.00.

The elk, Alces alces, has its place in the history and the hearts of the Finnish people.

Kalevala, the national epic of Finland, first published in 1835, contains a vivid description of Lemminkäinen, one of the heroes of the saga, chasing after a mystical specimen of the species.

Johan Ludvig Runeberg, the national poet of Finland, gave acclaimed, realistic depictions of the Finnish landscape as well as the disposition of the Finnish people in his poem Älgskyttarne (The Elk Hunters) from 1832.

Later 19th century writers largely ignored the beast, and for a very good reason: there were precious few of them left. But despite the fact that by the mid-1800s the elk had nearly been hunted to extinction in Finland, the animal is doing fine today.

After the elk was placed under protection in 1868 the stock gradually revived, and now the Game Management Districts of Finland can safely grant permits for hunting 60,000 elk on a yearly basis.

It is rather strange

that the elk - also known as the moose in North America - has not been deemed worthy of a book until now, in the beginning of the 21st century.

Of course there have been lots of articles about the elk in numerous Finnish magazines and papers, and the animal has also featured in countless hunting stories, but the very fact that the elk has perhaps become too common in Finland may well have prevented it from attaining the same kind of mythical status that the bear or the swan have enjoyed for years.

This new book Hirvi, Pohjolan kuningaseläin (The Elk, King of the Nordic Animals) by Asko Hämäläinen, Matti Leinonen and Pamela Mandart seeks to change the way we view this majestic creature.

The name of the book is fitting. This impressive animal inhabits the taiga zone surrounding the North Pole, covering areas in Scandinavia, Northern Russia and Siberia, and the northern parts of North America.

The elk was once common

in Central Europe, too, but the last of them were seen there in the Middle Ages. These days the most westerly location in continental Europe where the animal can be found is in the forests of Eastern Poland abutting onto the Baltic States.

The Roman historians Caesar and Pliny already mentioned this odd northern creature that "ate while walking backwards to avoid having its thick upper lip getting in the way, and slept standing up leaning against a tree trunk". The Romans also “knew” that hunting the elk was made easiest when cutting down the tree it was sleeping against.

The sheer size of an elk is majestic and the broad, flattened antler crown, which by the end of the mating season can attain a spread of 1.5 m (5 ft), emphasizes its symbolic royalty in the same fashion as the lion's mane.

For anyone who has not seen one, this is a very large deer indeed - it stands about 2 metres tall at the shoulders and can weigh 500 kg and more. Little wonder, then, that triangular elk-warning signs are commonplace on Finland’s roadsides; an unscheduled encounter with one of these creatures can be fatal for the motorist as well as the animal.

The editors of the new volume

have divided their tasks according to their fields of expertise, which has certainly had a positive impact on the quality of the book.

Asko Hämäläinen, for instance, is a renowned nature photographer, who for more than a decade has concentrated on filming the elk.

His photographs of the elk are truly magnificent, to the point that after a while the dozens of great shots eventually start to wear one out.

Still, knowing how the elk primarily moves at dusk in inaccessible thickets, one can only wonder at what a varied collection of photographs Hämäläinen has managed to put together, including a shot of an elk cantering across a marsh and another one of a quick mating session, something few have managed to witness.

The naturalist and teacher Matti Leinonen was responsible for the text. Leinonen is in the absolute elite of the Finnish nature writers.

Though best known for his work as an ornithologist and ecologist, Leinonen has also done a superb job when highlighting everything essential that a nature enthusiast and - of course - an elk hunter should know about this great ruminant of the taiga.

The role of the third editor, Pamela Mandart, was a bit more obscure, but presumably she has been responsible for the overall management of the project and at least to some extent for choosing some of the photographs, in which capacity she has also done a decent job.

At most one can question the significance of just one picture, namely that of the altar fresco of the church in Hattula in Southern Finland. The fresco depicts a unicorn rather than an elk, seeking shelter from hunters in the arms of a maiden. The meaning of the picture in this context was somewhat obscure, unless the aim was merely to show what medieval Finnish hunters used to look like.

Here and there

in the book there are short abstracts of the different chapters in Swedish, German, and English. This seems to me a rather strange and pointless exercise, and unlikely to inspire foreign buyers.

A lot of the other Finnish nature books have had their own separate international editions in translation, and surely a well-written book with magnificent photographs of perhaps the most majestic animal in the whole of Europe would attract some Scandinavian, German, and Anglo-Saxon readers as well.

Perhaps the feeling that the elk is "not exotic enough anymore" spilled over into the authors, which is a shame. After all, our unique nature with spectacular sights such as the elk is still the best asset Finland has to offer to tourists from Europe and the rest of the world.

Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 09.03.2002