Last hunt of the year and my third hunt following a successful muskox and caribou hunt this summer. My first moose.
I shot the moose on shore near sunset when the and it went into the bush. We waited an hour and then went after it. It was thick as hell in there and completely dark out. At first, we couldn’t find blood - so I thought I made a bad shot, we finally found some good blood and my buddy was blood trailing while I was scanning for the moose with the shotgun ready incase it charged. We found it against a creek lying down not too far from where we shot, it’s wasn’t moving we start talking / celebrating and it just gets up, thinking it’s either going to run or charge us I hit it with two slugs right behind the shoulder and it drops.
So we’re cleaning the moose, in the dark, in an area that had bear shit everywhere, in a river that’s knee high with freezing water while it’s 1 degree out. We got out a nice big fire just on shore for light/ to deter a bear hopefully and got to work.
Once we are at about 3 hours in and our feet are just so wet and numb, we hear like this whooshing sound two times. We both look at eachother like “did you hear that?” Thinking a grizzly had bluff charged us we run into the river and start yelling and splashing water. We grab the gun and shoot a round off. Now we’re knee deep in the river looking at the shore and all you can see is the fire illuminating the thick shoreline/marsh, and I’m just waiting for a giant grizzly to come running out/accepting my death. At this point we have one slug so we’re talking about just walking down river and abandoning the kill till morning where we can view it from afar when we hear the whooshing sound again. At this point realize it was the fire lighting up the dry needles / sticks we fed it with
(it was 2am at this point okay?).
We finish a hour later and then haul everything out to the shore. We had bone in quarters and just wanted to get out of there asap so we hauled out the 4 quarters about 200m till we reached the shore of the shallow lake. It took both of us to carry one quarter. Once we got it to shore it was a 500m walk thru the grassy shoreline and we felt a bit better cause we were out in the open now so we tied ropes to the quarters and just both dragged one quarter across the grass to the truck at a time. We finished at 5am and all in it took us about 8 hours. I still don’t understand how that whole ordeal was 8 hours, from start to finish it felt like it was tops 2 hours. It was like we time warped
Side note I was pretty impressed with the slugs I used on the moose. I used the challenger brand slugs you can buy up here in Canada and I think they used a hardened lead? One of the slugs punched through the first shoulder and shattered the second shoulder and was resting on the far hide with minimal deformation. Definitely would bee a good bear defence round
I shot the moose on shore near sunset when the and it went into the bush. We waited an hour and then went after it. It was thick as hell in there and completely dark out. At first, we couldn’t find blood - so I thought I made a bad shot, we finally found some good blood and my buddy was blood trailing while I was scanning for the moose with the shotgun ready incase it charged. We found it against a creek lying down not too far from where we shot, it’s wasn’t moving we start talking / celebrating and it just gets up, thinking it’s either going to run or charge us I hit it with two slugs right behind the shoulder and it drops.
So we’re cleaning the moose, in the dark, in an area that had bear shit everywhere, in a river that’s knee high with freezing water while it’s 1 degree out. We got out a nice big fire just on shore for light/ to deter a bear hopefully and got to work.
Once we are at about 3 hours in and our feet are just so wet and numb, we hear like this whooshing sound two times. We both look at eachother like “did you hear that?” Thinking a grizzly had bluff charged us we run into the river and start yelling and splashing water. We grab the gun and shoot a round off. Now we’re knee deep in the river looking at the shore and all you can see is the fire illuminating the thick shoreline/marsh, and I’m just waiting for a giant grizzly to come running out/accepting my death. At this point we have one slug so we’re talking about just walking down river and abandoning the kill till morning where we can view it from afar when we hear the whooshing sound again. At this point realize it was the fire lighting up the dry needles / sticks we fed it with
(it was 2am at this point okay?). We finish a hour later and then haul everything out to the shore. We had bone in quarters and just wanted to get out of there asap so we hauled out the 4 quarters about 200m till we reached the shore of the shallow lake. It took both of us to carry one quarter. Once we got it to shore it was a 500m walk thru the grassy shoreline and we felt a bit better cause we were out in the open now so we tied ropes to the quarters and just both dragged one quarter across the grass to the truck at a time. We finished at 5am and all in it took us about 8 hours. I still don’t understand how that whole ordeal was 8 hours, from start to finish it felt like it was tops 2 hours. It was like we time warped
Side note I was pretty impressed with the slugs I used on the moose. I used the challenger brand slugs you can buy up here in Canada and I think they used a hardened lead? One of the slugs punched through the first shoulder and shattered the second shoulder and was resting on the far hide with minimal deformation. Definitely would bee a good bear defence round
