MISQUAH — A young bull moose — an animal rare enough this far south to qualify, in local terms, as a genuine event — spent two days this past week on and around Little Pelican, drawing quiet crowds to the shoreline, halting traffic on the County 6 bridge, and resolving, in passing, a long-standing point of local pride.

Moose are northern animals, and a moose on the Chain is uncommon enough that the date of the last confirmed sighting is a matter of dispute and at least one tall tale. This one, estimated by onlookers at a year or two old and by the area wildlife officer at “big enough to leave well alone,” appeared Tuesday on the Little Pelican shore, browsing the willows with the unbothered air of a creature that has never heard of any of us.

The Department of Natural Resources urged residents to keep their distance, not to feed it, and above all not to “help” it back north, a moose being, in the officer’s words, “fully capable of deciding for itself where a moose ought to be.” The animal obliged this advice by ignoring everyone entirely, and departed Thursday as quietly as it had come, presumably toward cooler and more familiar country.

The sighting did not go unremarked by the Mud Lake faction, who observed with deep satisfaction that the moose, given the entire seven-lake Chain to choose from, had bypassed deep, fashionable, expensive Big Pelican altogether in favor of one of its humbler neighbors. “Even the moose knows,” said Dorothy Knutson, president of the Mud Lake Association, who conceded that Little Pelican is not technically Mud Lake but represented, in her view, “the correct instinct.”

The visit also revived, at the library, a four-year-old loose end. Children’s librarian Ruth Aune — currently recovering at Abbott Northwestern (see News) — once mused, when her summer-reading tiers were exhausted by an unusually determined reader, that she might add a “moose” level, “if I could only decide what a moose would read.” The question now falls to her substitute, Megan Tollefson, who, informed of both the moose and the precedent, said she would “take it under advisement, along with absolutely everything else this week.”