The ghostly spectre on the left in these photos is me, sitting on my behemoth of a moose! (Don't worry, more pics later in the post to document the event, it's just that we didn't recover him until right at dark. I know, these are terrible, but they are all I have of my first moose while he was still in one piece)
After finally thinking that we were never going to connect with a moose this year, the season was extended until the end of February, and on Monday I went out with Abe, Robert, and Matt. The journey was about 80 miles roundtrip, but just before dark, the first moose we had seen all day appeared. He was taking refuge in a willow thicket which borders a river on two sides. After 'flushing' him out, I found myself barreling down the river standing up with the seat squeezed between my knees, pulling the rifle off my shoulder, pulling the clip out of my pocket and locking it in the gun, racking the bolt to get a shell in the chamber, trying to not hit any bumps, and trying to get to a location where I would have a shot. It was a hairy couple seconds there - not sure how fast I was going, but let's just say that the bull's speed was dictating that more than my own discretion...
At any rate, I chose a good angle, because I finally got a glimpse of him striding off through the spruce and willows at an amazing rate of speed. Very strange how a moose runs - the legs appear to be the only thing moving - the body and head just kind of float along on a level plane. Looks goofy, but they are covering some GROUND, let me tell you, and they do it with what looks like no effort at all. A negative aspect of this however, for the moose, is that your target areas basically do not move up and down at all, unlike, say, a deer. So when you put the gun up, you do not have to compensate for any movement other than the horizontal. MUCH nicer than when a whitetail is streaking across a field at 30 mph and you don't know if he's going to leap up in the air on THIS jump or the NEXT one...
In this case, the bull was about 300 yds away ('measured' afterward - not just a guess) and moving straight away - directly toward a stand of spruce which takes up about 5 square miles. In other words, it was shoot now or forget it. So I held for the spot where I presumed my bullet would strike the back of his neck, and squeezed. He immediately looked like someone who is running downhill and their legs cannot catch up to their body - his head went down and forward and his legs seemed to start flailing and windmilling - but the big sucker didn't go down. Oh, no. I hadn't hit the spine - instead the bullet went just left of center and hit just meat and blood vessels. Because the spine was not hit, all the .300 WSM did was change his mind on where he wanted to go. He must have decided that he wanted to cross the slough, instead of paralleling it anymore, after that little 'bee sting', and so he turned to the right and began to cross the slough. I chambered the second shell and, with the crosshairs on his front shoulder, swung the rifle with him to get his 'speed'. Once I got a feel for how far to lead him, I put the crosshairs out in front and waited for him to come in. When the beard came into line with the crosshairs, I squeezed again, planning to place the bullet in his lungs. You could hear the bullet strike him as the blast seemed to have a double echo. Not like a long, slow, echo off the nearby hills that you usually hear on a miss - this was a KA-WHAM! He stumbled for a surprisingly short moment, and then, to my shock, continued on as though nothing had happened. Just up the slope of the draw he paused and looked right at me...at which moment I proceeded to promptly place the crosshairs once again on his lungs and squeeze. All I heard was a deafening CLICK!......
It was at this moment that I realized that in the frenzied chase a few moments before, I lost one of the shells in the clip of the gun. It was loaded with three when I left the house, but when the bull stopped briefly and looked at me following the second shot - all I got was a dry fire. The third shell must have fallen out while I was racing down the slough with my eyes on the bull instead of the clip. Any-who, the bull proceeded to run into an astonishingly thick stand of mutant willow trees, that nothing could seemingly push through. But he could. And he did...
Robert and Matt went around to the top of the thicket to wait and watch, as there was nothing but open tundra for miles if the bull left the willows. Abe and I went in the brush on foot, trying to either flush him out again into the other guys or put the finisher in him ourselves. It didn't take long to see where the bull had been standing and coughing out blood. Now I've seen my share of blood trails - even trails in the snow, which of course are magnified, but this was a serious blood trail. I could have laid down in it and not reached both sides of the swath. It was amazing that the animal was still running - at least to me it was. Abe knew better from his extensive moose experience, of course. He said I he was just glad I hit him good and "slowed him down"! Hah! One in the neck and one in the boiler room with a .300, and he used the term 'slowed him down'. Now that's funny. Suddenly, Abe points to a spruce about 50 yds off in the thicket in front of us, which happens to be violently shaking. He says, and I quote, "Hey look, it's getting windy over there!"...Unable to keep from laughing, I realize that the bull is likely stumbling and running into the trees in his current state. We push on...in a short while I hear a heavy rustling, shooshing, noise in the brush immediately in front of us - it is the moose - but is he going away, or is he coming AT us? (which wounded moose are prone to do when given the chance - moose kill far more people than bears do) Robert lets us know the answer.... WHAM! His .30-.30 barks out in front of us about 100 yds. Then again, WHAM! Suddenly, an eerie yell erupts from the tundra out ahead: "AAIIEEEEEEYYEEEE!!!" And then, WHAM! another shot. What on earth is going on up there? Abe and I retreat to our snowmachines and bowl over brush on our way to the scene of the shots. And finally at long last, I behold my bull moose, there on the ground, looking like he is the size of a motor home. Here's a video taken just moments after I leaped on top of the beast and gave him a bear hug and a few swats, among a chorus of yells from our group. Yessssss!!!!!!!!
We were butchering from 7:30pm until 10 oclock (as the video mentions, I think) and every one of us was also nearly out of gasoline after our full day of riding, all while nearly 30 miles+(depending on when you looked at the GPS) from home. The decision was made to leave the cut-up bull in the snow overnight and go back on Tuesday to get the meat. Here are some pics from the next day:
Some of the terrain out there:
A closer look of the same shot. That's Abe looking back at me, wondering why I have stopped. :)
The area is a lot of open tundra (and frozen-over lakes and ponds), which is dotted with ribbons of brushy (VERY brushy) lowlands which border sloughs or rivers. This next two shots show the brushy thicket the bull went into,and a glimpse of the open tundra beyond - there is a hidden river down in that bottom, which is the one I roared down, originally, trying to head him off.
My snowmachine and the area once again:
Here is the hide and head - note the bloody pedicels where the horns had recently fallen off. It was a meat hunt anyway, but I never thought my first bull would be bald as a bean...
A pile of snow-covered meat, about 300-400 lbs worth without the bones, maybe more! - which regulation dictates you must leave attached until you bring it out of the field.
This is a pic of our sleds, loaded up and ready to go. All that you see there on the ground here is the meat pile, minus the bones and hide of course. Some of it is partially covered in snow. Man, what a great location for some wolf traps!
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