Moose on the Loose

Our hunters and guides had eaten and ridden off in the inky black for the morning's hunt. After doing her morning's work, my wife decided to saddle up a horse and go and see if she could find a little meat bull for the freezer. Not 20 minutes from camp, she spotted a cow and a yearling bull. One shot from her .338 Win. Mag. and the bull dropped. She field-dressed the bull and returned to camp to wait for some assistance in packing.

My hunter and I returned to camp early, and upon hearing Wendy's story, we all went to get the bull. The moose had fallen near a few blowdowns, so I fired up the chain saw to clear them away. While I was cutting, I felt Wendy tap me on the shoulder. I looked up to discover that, while I was sawing, a big bull moose had walked out of the timber about 100 yards away and was swinging his head slowly from side to side.

My hunter nonchalantly asked if it would be okay to shoot that moose. Moments later, his rifle spoke, and we had two bulls to pack back to camp. Sometimes it can be just that easy.

Moose have always held a fascination for me. As a boy growing up in British Columbia, I longed for the day when I could go with my dad on the annual fall moose hunt. Deer hunting in Canada is sort of looked at as "fun hunting." Moose hunting, on the other hand, is serious business.

Moose are hunted in three main types of terrain. Much of the hunting in the western U.S., Alaska, British Columbia and parts of Alberta, the Yukon and the Northwest Territories is carried out in the mountains. In the rest of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, southern Quebec--and the northcentral and eastern U.S.--hunting occurs in dense forests.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, moose are also hunted in high rolling tundra, where trees are few and far between. You'll find this moose country in the northern parts of Alaska, the Yukon, Northwest Territories, Nunavut, northern Manitoba and Quebec, Labrador, and parts of Newfoundland.

In more accessible areas, 4x4 pickups are commonly used to drive old logging and mineral exploration roads. Hunters glass logging blocks, meadows and swamps. ATVs are often used as a backup to transport hunters and retrieve game.

Boats and canoes figure prominently as transportation until freeze-up. Jet boats are used to run up rivers in mountainous areas, canoes and boats are used to float slower rivers and streams, and boats are used to hunt the many thousands of lakes that are found in several areas of the north.