The elephant in the room is two metres tall, has ears like a donkey and a face like a mutant sheep on acid. The humble Swedish elk. Moody, majestic, magnificent – a quintessential symbol of Swedishness. 

And yet, elk are missing from the exhaustive list of “the most Swedish things in existence” sent in to The Local this summer. Dear readers, how could you omit this loveable monster from your register of things that are truly, madly, deeply Swedish? Why was the elk overlooked in favour of such insipid objects as the wooden butter knife, Ikea blue bags and salty liquorice? 

Frankly, it pains me to even ask this question. Is it a case of what psychologists call “inattentional blindness”, when you can’t see something in front of your nose? Is the elk for non-Swedes like the gorilla that famously walked through a group of basketball players without anyone seeing it?

God, I love elk. My heart leaps every time I see one. I love their ungainliness, their knobbly knees and silent, brooding presence. Elk are the Benjamin Button of animals, born looking rather old and weary. 

When I first came here, even a short car journey would have me straining over the driver’s shoulder in the hope of a glimpse of elk-flesh. I live on the outskirts of Gothenburg, but sightings of elk are not confined to the suburbs. One November morning a few years ago I was cycling to work near the city centre when I encountered a huge bull trotting down the pavement on the opposite side of the road. For a few minutes I chased it through side streets barely two kilometres from the university – here is my shaky video of the experience.

Sweden is home to by far the largest population of elk in Europe outside Russia, around 340,000. Some 80,000 are shot every autumn by hunters – in the countryside, Swedes are as likely to have a rifle in the house as an osthyvel cheese slicer. We tend not to think of Swedes as gun-toting rednecks, but the annual elk hunt is a big moment for around one quarter of a million locals. Schools and offices close, and city people book holidays to return to their home villages and take part in the hunt.

Elk are an example of how wilderness is an integral part of the experience of living in Sweden. The country is enormous. If you swing it round on the map from its southernmost point, it reaches as far as Rome. The population outside the main cities is tiny. Nearly 70 percent of Sweden’s surface area is forest, while just 3 percent is populated.

The nation is so vast and empty that former prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, in a rather naive response to anti-immigrant sentiment, declared: “I often fly across the Swedish countryside and I would advise more people to do that. There are endless fields and forests. There is more space than you can imagine. Those who claim that the country is full, they should show us where it is full.”

Though much of the forest is managed commercially, wild animals are always close. Two years ago, a man waiting at a bus stop near Gothenburg’s eastern hospital filmed a wolf trotting along the road. The annual migration of hundreds of thousands of cranes to Hornborgasjön is a breathtaking sight. Further north, Sweden has a population of nearly 3,000 bears.

This aspect of Swedishness is captured beautifully in my favourite book about the country, Andrew Brown’s “Fishing in Utopia: Sweden and the Future that Disappeared” (2008). Brown followed his girlfriend to Sweden in the early 1970s, and his book describes a Sweden that was very different from today’s. In the mid-2000s, Brown returns to the country and travels its length, rediscovering what it was that made him fall in love with Sweden in the first place and giving us vivid snapshots of the changes that have taken place.

For Brown, fishing in the lakes was the wilderness experience that shaped his relationship with the country. Without a work permit and sharing a house with his girlfriend’s parents in a tiny village near Gothenburg, catching pike (gädda) for the table was his main contribution to the family’s economy. Sweden has a staggering 268,000 lakes. After his Swedish odyssey, including several fishing trips, Brown writes: “Only in the scruffy forest lakes of Sweden could I recapture the sense that I had stepped into a better world.”

Whether you experience it by plunging into its clear, dark waters or through the pull of a fish on your line, a Swedish lake is an experience far from the paved and ordered comfort of city life. It means mud between your toes, the thrilling shadow of granite under the surface, and the shock of water heated only by the fickle Swedish sun. 

Just 30 minutes from my front door, I can be floating on a lake immersed in total silence, like in another world. The lake regularly has breeding pairs of storlom, or black-throated loon – a rare and stunningly beautiful waterbird with a haunting, plaintive cry that echoes over the still surface of the water. The official guide to the area says the surrounding forest also has tjäder, the wood grouse or capercaillie. Sometimes I strain my ears and persuade myself that I can hear its distinctive, clicking call.

When I wonder idly if I could ever take my family back home to England, I realise that it is this wilderness experience that has me hooked. Other aspects of Swedishness are sufficiently pleasant, but deep down the elk are tugging at my heart.

David Crouch is the author of Almost Perfekt: How Sweden Works and What Can We Learn From It. He is a freelance journalist and a lecturer in journalism at Gothenburg University.