In my piece about great bars that are near light rail stations ("You Can't Drink On Light Rail, but Here's Where You Can Drink Near Light Rail"), I recommended Oliver's Lounge for downtown's Westlake Station. The bar's huge windows are what make it special. I also love the flying chandelier and the sensual fall of the great curtains. Another great thing about Oliver's: it never gets busy until around 4 p.m., and so it is ideal for afternoon drinking and writing. The other day while doing exactly that at around 3 p.m., the phone of the woman sitting next to me beeped and vibrated. She picked it up, read something on the screen, and yelped. Her husband, who was sitting next her, and who, like his wife, was drinking a bright-orange cocktail in a tall glass, wondered what was wrong, and she told him: Hook the moose was killed by a car. The husband also yelped. The two were having drinks before packing their things and flying back home—Anchorage, Alaska—shortly after dusk. The dead animal is very well known in that wintery and wildish city.

"He has this huge rack," the husband said to me.

"I'm not kidding you.... It's an amazing rack on that animal... You would not believe the rack... The size of it.... The rack... It's just huge... Like that... Big, big rack..." I noticed that the Alaskan wife did not call Hook's famous antlers a rack. But she didn't contradict her husband. Those things were, as he said, really something else. "Looked like a castle on his head." Because a computer was right in front of me, I googled Hook the Moose and found this video...

Indeed, that moose had quite a rack. But all is not lost. Don Dyer, the executive director of the Alaska Moose Federation, wants a taxidermist to preserve "the unique bull in death" for "future generations."

Because 90 percent of the moose's meat was salvageable, it was sent to a Wasilla family with four children. As Dyer wrote, Hook will "be a source of high quality protein for this nice family for many months."