FAIRBANKS — Twelve-year-old Brandon Rustad has taken a lot of hits playing hockey for the last seven years but nothing like the one he took walking to school on Friday morning.

Rustad was kicked in the leg by an ornery cow moose as he was walking down Dunbar Avenue, only about a block and a half from Nordale Elementary School in east Fairbanks.

“I heard some walking behind, and I turned around and saw the moose,” Rustad, a sixth-grader at Nordale, said. “I started walking faster and the moose started to walk faster.”

It was a little after 8 a.m. and it was still dark, but when Rustad glanced over his shoulder a few seconds later, he could see the moose in the glow of the street lights only a few feet behind him. He turned around to face the moose, walking backwards as fast as he could. The moose kept coming, so Rustad turned to run.

As he did so, the moose kicked him in his right ankle with one of its front feet, knocking Rustad into the ditch along the road.

“I was thinking, ‘Is he going to keep trampling me?’” Rustad said, re-enacting the incident later in the afternoon.

Rustad, who lives only a few blocks from school, scrambled to his feet and tried to run from the moose. He headed for a hedgerow of shrubs in a nearby yard before falling in the snow.

“I could barely walk,” he said.

Fortunately for Rustad, the moose ran off rather than continue its attack. The boy limped the rest of the way to school in a state of shock. When he arrived, he told school secretary Lori Kunz what happened.

“I said, ‘Mrs. Kunz, I just got kicked by a moose,’” Rustad said.

School officials called his mother, Sophia Stevens-Rustad, who showed up a few minutes later to find her son in the nurse’s office with an ice pack on his ankle.

“He was pretty shook up,” his mother said.

Other than a “nice bruise” on his ankle, Rustad was fine, his mother said. He stayed in school the rest of the day and wasn’t even limping by the time he got home in the afternoon.

“Thank God he’s OK,” his mother said.

Wildlife biologist Don Young said the situation could have turned out worse than it did, noting the stomping death of a 71-year-old man in Anchorage 15 years ago.

This is the time of the year in Fairbanks when urban moose can start to get a little grumpy, Young said. Their fat reserves are running low and they’ve spent the entire winter wandering around town, getting barked at by dogs and honked at by cars.

“They definitely tend to be more cantankerous toward late winter,” Young said.

Moose are common in her neighborhood, Stevens-Rustad said. A cow and calf take up residence in the area almost every winter, she said. There have been a few times when she or her husband have driven Brandon to school because of moose in their yard.

“Every time I come out of my house in the morning I look around for moose,” Stevens-Rustad said. “We always tell him to be careful.”

At the school, principal Brian Powell sent a note out to teachers telling them to remind students about the possibility of running into a moose following Rustad’s run-in.

The best thing to do if you encounter a moose is try to get as much space between the animal and yourself as possible, Young sad.

“In most of those situations, if you just retreat a moose is not likely to run you down,” he said.

If there is something nearby to hide behind, such as a tree or car, that’s probably a good idea, Young said.

It is also a good idea for parents to talk to their children about what to do in the event they encounter a moose, Young said.