There’s a Moose on the Loose in Minnesota

Late last month, Bernie Stang, who lives in Central Minnesota, hustled her daughter and a friend into her car and set off in search of a wayward moose named Rutt.

After five hours, they found him trotting around a harvested cornfield near Grove City, Minn., about 20 miles away.

Then Ms. Stang did what many Minnesotans have been doing lately. She uploaded the images to a Facebook page devoted to tracking Rutt’s every move.

The page, called Rutt-The Central MN Moose on the Loose, has more than 38,000 followers, many of whom, like Ms. Stang, think nothing of dropping everything and jumping in their cars, hoping for a glimpse of Minnesota’s most famous moose.

“It’s all gone crazy in Minnesota, and all for one moose,” she said on Wednesday. “He’s just brought a lot of joy and happiness to so many people.”

A map on the Facebook page that tracks Rutt’s path indicates that he has roamed about 280 miles since Sept. 23, from Alton, Iowa, to Sebeka, in central Minnesota, where he was spotted on Saturday.

Many have speculated that he is trying to find other moose in the thickly forested far northeastern corner of the state, where most of the estimated 3,700 moose in Minnesota live.

Tiffany Wolf, a wildlife epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota who studies moose, said it was not clear why Rutt had traveled through the southern and central parts of the state, “quite far outside of the area where we would expect to find moose in Minnesota.”

But she said that Rutt — whose fans named him after a moose voiced by Rick Moranis in the 2003 animated Disney movie “Brother Bear” — appeared to be healthy and about 12 to 18 months old.

Marysa Anderson of Cosmos, Minn., went looking for Rutt late last month and found him on a dirt road near a combine harvesting corn outside Atwater, Minn., about 20 miles away. He gazed directly at her as she took his photo.

“It was just an unforgettable experience,” she said.

Rutt has appeared in footage from trail cameras as a shadowy apparition moving at night, and in videos and photos that have captured him grazing on prairie grass, loping across fields or cutting a solitary figure on a country road.

Fans have painted him against a backdrop of billowing white clouds and have rendered his likeness in wood. Sherry Hancock of Cokato, Minn., wrote a poem about Rutt heading north to his home.

“He’s kind of inspirational in the fact that he seems to have a goal in mind — he seems to know where he’s going, and he’s making his way there,” she said. “It’s almost as if he has enjoyed the trail himself.”

After Rutt passed through Staples, Minn., on the day before Thanksgiving, drawing a crowd, he made the front page of the local newspaper, Staples World, under the headline “Famous Moose Spends Day in Staples Area.”

John Brichacek said he had been inspired to create a cocktail for his bar, the 2 Tall Tavern in Cushing, Minn., after neighbors spotted Rutt on his family’s property in Browerville, Minn.

“We were watching the moose do moose things and thought, ‘We’ve got to do a moose drink,’” he said. “‘We’ve got to do something for Rutt.’”

The drink he created — equal parts vodka, Kahlua and Baileys Irish Cream — is garnished with two miniature pretzels hanging off the edge of a glass, like antlers.

“People were loving it,” Mr. Brichacek said. “We just keep joking and talking about Rutt.”

Brenda Johnson of Dassel, Minn., said she had created the “Moose on the Loose” Facebook page in 2018, to track another moose that was later struck and killed by a driver.

The page had about 1,000 followers and was mostly dormant until people started posting on it when Rutt was spotted in Iowa in late September.

The page then “blew up” as Rutt roamed into Minnesota, and it has been “growing and growing” ever since, Ms. Johnson said.

She said she worried about Rutt now that he was drawing a crowd every time his latest location was posted on the page.

“Our No. 1 concern is his safety,” Ms. Johnson said.

Dr. Wolf, of the University of Minnesota, said she was interested to see how far people would be able to track Rutt as he heads into northern Minnesota.

“I think once he hits that forest, though, he’s going to escape off the radar for sure, and I think that will probably be a good thing,” she said. “A successful journey.”