Literally, locking horns is a rare occurrence in the moose population, but it does happen.

There are the two moose on top of the Second Avenue Folk Knit business. While the carcasses are molded casts, the antlers locked together are real, and were recovered from a small lake south of Whitehorse.

There is also set of antlers locked together in the Riverview Hotel.

And there are two dead moose laying in a slew some 40 or 50 kilometres north of Aishihik Lake, locked together.

Greg Guttman, of Listers Motor Sports in Whitehorse, and three companions were out bison-hunting Dec. 1 when they caught something out of sync with the wintery landscape.

They'd already been that way once, and hadn't noticed anything out of the ordinary.

But on the return, they picked out what looked to be like antlers.

There in the slew, two large bulls lie locked together in death, both their heads submerged under water to just above their eyes, their bodies untouched by predators or even scavengers.

The animals were well hidden by snow, but for the antlers that belied their location.

It's likely the dance of death occurred sometime last October when the moose where in rut and still defending their territory and harem of cows, Guttman said in an interview Thursday.

'Typically, one would have exhausted first and fallen down, and the one still standing would have held the other's head up, and then it would have fallen down.'

An experienced hunter, Guttman said this is the first set of antlers locked together he has seen the wild.

He said he understands that it's generally moose of the same size that become locked together, simply because smaller moose don't normally challenge larger moose.

In this case, one rack measured 61 and five-eighths inches while the other measured 61 and three-eighths.

Guttman, Mario Poulin and Duane and Jay Parent left the rare find in the field, not knowing if they would be breaking any wildlife regulations by removing the antlers.

Moose biologist Rick Ward of the Department of the Environment said this morning it's a rare occurrence for moose to become locked together in battle.

First of all have, they have an antler configuration that would enable the two set of horns to get locked, and then they'd have to meet each other, he said.

Take 10 moose standing in the field, and odds are, it's not likely any two of them would have the necessary configuration to get locked together, he acknowledged.