The elk seemed to know, Mike Miller said.

Moments before a light earthquake struck beneath western Prince William Sound on Thursday morning, Miller's small band of elk at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center near Portage gathered in a group and began running -- to no place in particular, he said.

"These guys were just trotting along like they were migrating," said Miller, the center's director. "They knew they should be scared and stressed."

He initially thought a wolf or other predator was in the area. But as Miller watched the suddenly restless animals from his window, he said, the quake struck with a jolt.

He looked over at the black bears' den, and the two 3-year-olds scampered out and climbed a cottonwood tree, according to Miller.

Scientists gave the 8:36 a.m. quake a preliminary magnitude of 4.7. It occurred a few miles beneath the surface in the vicinity of the north end of Knight Island, said Bill Knight, a scientist with the West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center in Palmer.

The epicenter was 63 miles west of Cordova, 45 miles east-southeast of Whittier and 65 miles east-southeast of Girdwood, the Alaska Earthquake Information Center in Fairbanks said.

People from Palmer to Cordova felt the slight temblor. There were no reports of damage.

"Not enough energy was released to produce a tsunami, but we did get a number of felt reports from Cordova, Chugiak, Palmer and Lazy Mountain," Knight said. The person in Cordova reported the quake as a "sharp jolt," he added.

Scientists have long speculated about the apparent uncanny ability of some animals to sense an imminent quake. A few scientists have theorized that certain animals with highly attuned sense organs can pick up micro changes and tiny trembles in the earth's crust that precede a major release.

There have been reports, for example, of elephants, flamingos and dogs fleeing the coast in some Indian Ocean countries in the hours and minutes before the Dec. 26 tsunami struck.

At the Alaska Zoo on Thursday morning, however, nothing appeared unusual and nothing, in fact, was even felt at the time of the quake, a zoo official said. The zoo, in Anchorage, is about 90 miles from Thursday's quake epicenter.

Miller's Wildlife Conservation Center, at Mile 79 of the Seward Highway, is roughly 60 miles from the epicenter. A 140-acre park formerly known as Big Game Alaska, it is home to dozens of various animals. The quake clearly rattled some of them and "shook all of the bears out of their dens," Millers said.

"The black bears shot out and went up to the top of the closest tall cottonwood tree," he wrote in a morning e-mail message. "They are still up there. The three brown bears shot out of their dens and ran into the brush."

But other animals at the center seemed to become spooked before the quake hit, Miller said.

"All the other animals -- elk, bison, deer, moose and caribou -- jumped up and started moving around before the earthquake as if they knew it was coming," he wrote.

In a telephone interview later, Miller said he was from California where he had felt "a lot of quakes."

"This one was like a gun going off, like a whip-snap," he said. "It hit the whole building,"

Before it struck, however, he was looking out the window. It was light enough outside to see movement and details, he said.

"As soon as I saw (the elk) moving, I thought, 'Something's got 'em going,' " Miller said.

At that time of the morning, the caribou, moose and other animals would normally still be bedded down, waiting for the early sunlight.

"But this morning (before the temblor), they were all up and moving as if it was 10 a.m.," he said. "Those elk were all shoulder to shoulder, at full attention but (looking) in different directions. They knew something was coming but didn't know what."

Daily News reporter Peter Porco can be reached at pporco@adn.com or 257-4582