Running into a moose when driving a car or truck is bad enough, but crashing into the giant animal while riding on two wheels can be worse.

Kevin Connors barely survived such an encounter while cruising on his motorbike just after sundown on a highway in Newfoundland, a Tennessee-size island in the North Atlantic.

“I was looking ahead of me into a gradual turn to the right, and the moose came up from the left, so I didn’t really see it until it was very close,” Mr. Connors recalled. The moose stopped in its tracks, “and I hit him dead on.”

Mr. Connors doesn’t clearly remember what happened next, but a friend traveling behind him “saw me and the moose tumbling down the road like in a cartoon.”

The moose ran off. The motorbike shot off into the woods. And Mr. Connors said he was a “living bruise” for two weeks, with a broken wrists and most of the skin scraped off his back. Five years later, he is still receiving therapy for back pain.