I write for my benefit only, but as I've enjoyed pieces people have posted up, thought I'd share a tale too. Call it 'giving something back'. *Extremely* long. You have been warned.

Cheers,

KG

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A few months back, a letter came in the mail from the New Hampshire Game and Fish people, marked First Class. I opened it, thinking it was a survey or some other administrative mass mailing I get from them from time to time. I opened the envelope, unfolded the letter and began reading as I stepped into the elevator. It read something like, “Congratulations! You have been selected to participate in the 2006 NH moose hunt: prepare yourself for an adventure of a lifetime“. My mouth dropped open. I’d all but forgotten about the application I had sent in. I’d been applying for New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont for a moose permit for only the past three years, but figured it’d be maybe ten before I hit one of them. The odds of a non-resident winning a moose tag last year in NH were 54 to 1; longer odds than picking the ace of spades out of a deck of cards on the first try. I ran down the hall bellowing, and burst through the front door to wake my wife and tell her the news. She was thrilled about my good fortune, but soon after went back to sleep. It would be hours before sleep came for me that night. My wife the next morning told me that I had awakened her throughout the night. Apparently, I had spent much of it giggling in my sleep.

In the months prior to the hunt, I read as much as I could on moose hunting, and secured a guide on a ‘semi-guided’ arrangement, for no reason other than to assist in getting the beast out of the woods, should I get one. I’d read and heard too many horror stories of impossibly difficult extractions from icy waters and jungle-like hellholes miles from camp to not want to cover that base. The ‘guide’ made a few suggestions as to areas that we might try, and sent a few maps, but unfortunately, soon after I learned that he was essentially a useless scammer. Shortly before the hunt I called to ask of him how I should get in touch if and when I had a moose down. He made it clear to me that if I could get a hold of him, he might be able to provide some assistance, but that he’d probably be busy with his fully-guided clients, and we’d have to make do on our own. I decided then that if I had a moose down and needed help, tried to get a hold of him but didn’t get any assistance as promised and paid for, he’d have a problem on his hands larger than a moose. But for now that’s neither here nor there.

Prior to the hunt I made four scouting trips to the WMU that I had drawn. I’d have made more, but the 300 mile round trip was difficult to work into my work schedule. Vito, my sub-permittee, joined me on one of the trips, and together we looked back into some very promising areas I’d looked at with my wife on previous scouting trips. One area in particular contained copious sign, much of it very fresh. There were rutting pits, hookings and feeding areas aplenty, and in that area we found one set of tracks whose owner was a truly large specimen. In bird-dogging some thick areas we found a couple of beds within a quarter mile from where we designated our kill zone. Surely this spot was a good one. The area was about a mile and a half from a locked logging gate road, but with the assurance from the ‘guide’ that the gate would remained locked, thereby preventing road hunters access to the area, we decided that it would be the place we’d spend opening day. Our hopes were high, and the night before the opener in a rented ski cottage we kicked back and readied gear. Vito put together a spicy alligator and antelope sausage stew using meat I’d brought back from a couple recent hunts. We dug in and toasted to the hunt with some cold ale. In the morning we’d be off to see about a moose.



To our surprise and dismay, upon arriving at our hunt area, found the chain blocking vehicle access to the area gone, and that already, at 4:30am, there were tire tracks in the thin covering of snow along the road leading in. While hardly unheard of in the North Country in October, we hadn’t counted on snow. No matter; it’d make for good tracking. What really was the letdown was that apparently someone had managed to get the key to the lock (alternately the lock may have been cut off). I liked this area in large part exactly because there was a gate keeping traffic out. Following a quick discussion, we decided to go ahead with our plan, and drove in. It was a little late to be changing plans. Maybe it wouldn’t be a big deal, we thought. We thought wrong.

After parking and making the short hike into our area, we got settled on the small ridge overlooking an old clear cut and boggy area, one that we had coined Vista 1. Into the area led several overgrown old tote roads. On one of those roads was where we saw the tracks from the monster when scouting. We set up slightly apart and facing away from each other, so as to have a vantage of the various slopes of the ridge. The plan we had agreed on was that we would stay in close communication via hand signals, and that we would if at all possible, both fire on the moose. I did insist, however, that I be the one to shoot first.

The snow picked up, pushed by a stiff wind, blowing quartering in from our right. Visibility was pretty poor at around a half hour before shooting light, with flakes coming down at a pretty good clip amidst heavily overcast skies. I called a bit, alternating between blowing on my store-bought cow call along with a few mouth grunts. About ten minutes into legal, with every sense straining to pick up any signs of life, I caught movement at my two o’clock right at 35 yards. I struggled to make out the shape in the low light and falling snow, just behind some light brush. The shape quickly morphed into what looked like two shapes. As the shadowy blobs passed beyond a stand of small pine dead in front of me, I was able to make out two whitetails, with a big, heavy-racked buck in the lead, with a mature doe in tow. I motioned silently to Vito and pointed. His eyes opened wide and looked back at me, and we quietly chuckled at the irony; there we were with a moose tag, and two deer, one a great buck, waltz by us broadside at rock-throwing distance. We smiled and watched them sneak away, ever watchful of their surroundings, but altogether unalarmed. This bode well for us I thought, if a wily old whitetail and his lady friend passed that close without making us.

Perhaps 20 minutes later, the big show started. Unfortunately, the show wasn’t in our theater. Shots broke the silence from what was maybe a quarter mile away, with two rounds fired in quick succession. Half an hour later, from off to our right, two more quick shots rang out. Fifteen minutes later, from our left came another series, this one with two shots followed by a pause of sixty seconds or so, with a third shot forthcoming. I imagined the scene; two shots into the animal from a distance, and then a finisher when the hunter walked up to find the downed moose not quite dead. Vito and I decided to maintain hunkered down, and to stay vigilant. Obviously, there were moose about, and some hunters were dropping theirs nearby.

When some 15 minutes later yet two more shots rang out just behind us, this time sounding like they were fired in our direction, too close for comfort at what we figured was less than 300 yards, we decided to pack up and see about finding another spot; enough was enough. We decided that before abandoning the area altogether, we’d take a look around the several miles of logging roads to see what numbers, if any, of other hunters were still around, and maybe start pushing into the bush from a likely area using the roads purely as access. We were in for a rude awakening once back on the road. There were at least a dozen other vehicles in less than five miles of dead-ending logging roads in that one area. With only 30 permits in that WMU, which encompasses a couple hundred square miles, it seemed close to half of all permittees for our WMU were in that one area.

We remained optimistic, and thought to ourselves that these roads merely provide access to large tracts of land. We would try using them simply as a jump-off point to get off into the bush areas surrounding the logging roads. Being that it was such a fine area for moose, with much fresh sign and prime habitat, we were a bit loathe to leave it altogether, especially since much of the pre-season scouting I’d done was in that area. I made a mental note for future hunts to have plans B, C and maybe D in place. But all was not lost: it was only the first day of a nine day hunt, after all. We hoped that off the beaten path we’d not have to deal with the orange army maneuvers we were witnessing thus far.

We climbed back into the truck to poke about to look for a likely place to work, and just around the next bend we came across a party of eight triumphantly gathered around a small bull. The rack was nothing to speak of, but it was a handsome and healthy enough looking young beast. We congratulated the shooter, a young guy in his teens (the one we heard teeing off from close behind us, it turns out), and continued on to the end of the road, where we found yet more people ‘hunting’ from parked vehicles or cruising about slowly, looking for their chance at an easy road kill. That wasn’t hardly what we wanted, to simply drive up to a moose, climb out and shoot it, but clearly that was a common tactic. It’s also perfectly legal, and if what some of the locals said is to be believed, is the way many, if not most local permittees get their moose. ‘Why kill yourself humping through rough country if you can drive right up and do one in, then load him directly into the bed of the truck?’ was the common sentiment. I understand the logic, and I guess it only would take one nightmare moose retrieval to sour the mind of a hunter forever on the idea of shooting one too far off the road. I’m fine with whatever way the others chose to fill their tags, but I was personally disinterested in that kind of experience. I wanted to get out there and hunt moose, not slide up to one in a vehicle and punch its ticket as if stopping to pay my buck and a half at a turnpike toll booth. But then maybe I was romanticizing the hunt; maybe we ought to fall in with the others in the flock? I thought about it for a moment, and considered how it’d feel looking back on this time, and how I‘d feel about shooting one from the road. Would I feel good about it, feel like we’d really been on a hunt? The answer was pretty obvious. We’d hunt off the roads, on foot.

Over the years I’ve been in the company of maybe a couple hundred moose, the vast majority up in the north woods, alone and standing nonchalantly at the road’s edge, looking like unconcerned Holsteins chewing their cud. One year while hiking I played an impromptu game of extreme ring-around-the-rosy (or dodge-the-swamp-donkey, if you prefer) with a most impolite cow with attendant calf who I walked in on unawares, and I’ve seen bulls in rut looking like they wanted trouble, but by in large the ones I’ve come across have been unconcerned about my presence, and simply feeding or watering themselves at the roadside. The two that almost killed themselves (along with my car and maybe me) at highway speed at night in near collisions years ago I don’t really count, but as a quick aside, I suggest drivers pay heed to warning signs in moose country, especially while driving at night. A moose is a big animal, and is almost sure to ruin your whole day trying to stop your vehicle with its body.



If push came to shove and after having no luck in the bush for a solid week, I thought I might later consider a roadside execution if one fell into our lap, particularly if a giant stepped forward with suicide on his mind, but I was really after a moose hunt, not a shoot. I recalled words a friend related to me, words spoken to him by his guide after they got my buddy’s bull in Maine on the 5th day of a hunt: “We worked for that bull, and eventually got him the old fashioned way; by hunting him. The others in camp plain got cheated.†It turns out that the other gents in that moose camp had been successful, and all had killed theirs the first day or two after pulling up to them in trucks. For the rest of the week, they had little in the way of fond memories of their hunt to revel in and bring home to be cherished. Call me a masochist, but I truly liked the idea of working for my moose and seeing how it would all play out in the bush. We discussed it, and Vito was with me.

We found in our ever-growing circle of area still more road hunters, and guys set up over clear cuts adjacent to the logging roads less than a hundred yards from their trucks. We also stopped and spoke to a pair of guys who had just knocked down a cow. Their moose had run out of the brush with another cow just after the hunters closed the doors on their vehicle to sit. We pulled away from the area and stopped to study maps and discuss plan B for the area. Whatever the plan was, it was not to include running amongst the madding crowd. We selected an area to start working through, got the truck parked, and set off down through into some thick growth, heading for an old clear cut that began off a small tote road a mile off. There we found some peace, and better yet, moose sign, and lots of it. We sat down in some likely areas to glass and call, to no avail. Sign was present, but none very fresh. During our travels we put up several partridge and woodcock, and saw lots of interesting animal sign, but no moose.

The snow stopped by around 11:00, and we took a break to decide our plan of action for the afternoon and following days. We considered that the area we were in was a pretty good one, but again, the sign we were seeing wasn’t super fresh. Also to consider was the fact that the moose in the area were now certainly aware that something was amiss in their backyard, what with all the shooting and trucks about, I figured they’d likely not be lollygagging around their usual haunts, but would likely push back into thicker wood. We planned to use the rest of the day to stomp, glass and call, and mark any promising locations for another look.

We trod quietly, slinking about, over the course of perhaps half a dozen miles. We were thankful to get away from the road crews, but ended up without a live moose sighting for the day. So far, things were not going exactly as planned, but then most times they don’t, do they? We were enjoying the time out and the hunt just the same. We stomped along some more, checking maps and marking locations on the GPS, trying to figure out what areas would be likely to hold moose, and areas that moose may have fled to in order to get away from the racket of the moose hunters now in attendance. As the grey of the day started turning a darker shade, we started back to the truck in a roundabout hook.

We retired back to the truck without any sightings, then made our way back to home base. Over beers, Vito mentioned sort of matter-of-factly that he wished we’d run into a friend that he’d shared a deer camp with for a few seasons in Maine, a guy by the name of Hugo. Apparently Hugo lived somewhere up that way when not in and around Boston, and was a man of many talents. Also, he was an avid and accomplished hunter, with roots in the old country (Italy). Another talent Hugo possessed was that he knew people, and lots of them, and was a man who could get things done. I wasn’t at all sure how that fit into our moose situation, but Vito insisted that if we could find Hugo we’d not have a thing to worry about. I admit being a bit skeptical of the mysterious Hugo and his supposed powers to apparently make moose appear out of thin air, and sort of forgot about it, as we had other fish to fry. Over dinner we discussed our options, and decided that we’d go back to the same area we’d been to for the opener, but push far back into the bush, and see what happened.

Before dawn the next morning after a quick breakfast we headed out into a light but steady rain. We wanted to get back to the large overgrown clear cut and beyond, hoping we’d catch one in the open and at the same time hoping that traffic had stopped or at least slowed on the logging roads. We’d heard that six animals were taken out of the area on the first morning, and so hoped that the initial rush would be over. Had the area not been so large, we’d have bagged it altogether to look for another spot, but optimistically we hoped that we’d find ourselves pretty much alone. The gate was still down when we got to the logging road entrance, and it wasn’t long before we saw lights moving in the distance. Fair enough; we’d not be hunting the road and would be leaving the road hunters to their game anyway. We left the trusty 4 Runner and hit the trail. The dark of morning was spent covering ground, and marking more areas busy with sign, and eliminating those with little to none. None of the sign we were seeing looked fresher than a couple days old, and we were starting to have reservations about our choice. Still we opted to stay the course, and picked our way through some pretty thick terrain in search of our bull. Other than a pair of shots heard in the distance, the first day’s ‘wild, wild west’ reenactment didn’t replay itself. Maybe a bit more peace would have the moose back at their routine, which at the tail end of the rut for the bulls is still largely about chasing females, from what I’d read. With any luck we’d catch a bull feeding or on the prowl for love.

I took a few shots of the area as we traipsed about from spot to spot. Again we had no joy with the calling. Sometime around noon, we decided to head back to the car and change it up a bit, maybe move on to a different town and go from there. Vito and I debated our options and the merits of each, and really wanted to put miles between ourselves and the others out there, but what nagged at us was the fact that our original supposition was correct. This was a good place for moose, evidenced by six of them taken in one day. But was this area now to be written off, or were we better off being staying the course and hanging in an area where the moose clearly liked? The questions we had far outnumbered answers. I’m not exactly known as a patient man, but I wanted to try to be smart about this. The thousand dollar question was pretty simple: do we stay, or do we go? We decided to leave answering that question for later, and humped the couple miles back to the truck. On the way, I stopped to take a few pictures.



Arriving back at the truck, we found that the unexpected crowd we had seen in the general vicinity the first day was still about; they’d just had a long lie in bed before firing up their trucks. We decided to head out to have a closer look at another area some miles away I’d casually scouted, when a woman came running out of a muddy tote road entrance, waving her arms frantically. She was yelling something I couldn’t make out. Thinking maybe she needed emergency help, I stopped the truck and put down the window. “I need muscle!†I thought I heard her yell. “Muscle, did she just say?†I asked Vito. “Yeah, I think so†he responded. For what, I wondered. And then, beyond her by some fifty yards another hunter and a dark brown form could just be seen. Oh, brother. I was inclined to politely decline and drive away, as our hunt was just starting and I wasn’t there to be an impromptu beast of burden for a complete stranger. Vito, however, being a bit more of a compassionate sort than I, got out of the truck and walked over to the woman. I started to protest, but figured if he was going to help, it’d go quicker with both of us. As an afterthought, I considered that maybe we’d earn some points from the hunting Gods; talk about rationalization. I dismounted and walked over. I’d let Vito do any heavy and dirty work if there was any, being that he was the one so quick to offer up our hunting time to help.

Turns out the woman, who I think was in her 50s, was the daughter of the shooter, who himself was a fellah born sometime around the civil war, I‘d wager. In all seriousness, the man looked ninety if he was a day. I greeted him, and he responded by showing me a blindingly white, if crooked, set of dentures. He pushed his coke-bottle bottom thick, horn-rimmed glasses back up onto his nose and surveyed the scene with his hands jammed in his pockets, his rifle shouldered. I quickly got the feeling that he had absolutely no intention of getting those boots wet. The moose, another yearling bull with only small stubs growing from his head, had two freshly made holes in his chest, compliments of mister bright smiles. He could see well enough out of those goggles to shoot, I noted. Cheeky sod! The moose had chosen to give the old guy and his daughter the finger as a parting shot. His short run through wood and cut ended right smack in the middle of the only sloppy, knee-deep puddle there was as far as the eye could see. I groaned internally. â€All I need is to get him out of that water, and then we’ll be fineâ€, the woman said with a smile. I felt like responding with, “all I need is a million dollars and a bull twice his size, and I’ll be fine tooâ€, but kept my mouth shut. I was a bit incredulous as I then watched Vito nobly step over, grab hold of one the bull’s ankles and start tugging—alone-- but there he was. I stifled a giggle.

The way the bull had died left his head and torso cocked down into the watery muck, with his back legs pretty much on dry ground above him. The daughter and father stood by watching intently, but failed to offer up any help whatsoever, which then got me a bit heated. My mother sometimes uses an expression that I thought summed up the situation pretty well: ‘why have a dog and bark yourself, eh?’ Vito tried again, but I don’t think the young bull budged much more than an inch, if that. Actually, if anything I think he was merely stretching out the bugger’s legs. When it was clear that Vito wasn’t going to be able to move the beast on his own, and I saw that at the rate things were going we’d be there for longer than I liked, with valuable hunting time a-wasting, I broke down and waded in. A bit annoyed at getting sucked into doing this when we should have been looking for our own moose, I grabbed a fistful of the bull’s rack in each hand (that’s about all there was for antlers), and yanked. The head and neck came up, but the body I think was stuck in the suction of water and mud. I let the head down for a second so as to get better footing and grip; I had no interest in getting water into my still-dry knee boots, so was trying to stay mostly out of the water. Then I slipped. In order to stop my torso from going in, I put my arms out to stop my momentum. Stop the momentum they did, right about at the armpits. Besides getting wet, I wound up with about ten pounds of heavy, black, malodorous sludge stuck to my arms. Internally, I flew into a mini-rage. Another damned fine mess you’ve gotten us into, Ollie!

I stormed out of the muck and gave the woman a bit of the hairy eyeball, thinking to myself, ‘were you just planning on asking the first passers-by that happened along for help, or did you actually formulate a plan for extraction before you set off to shoot the damned thing?’ I shook as much muck as possible from my arms and took my coat off, then went after the bull again. Now pretty thoroughly pissed off, I grabbed hold of his rack again, bent my legs at the knees, and with a roar-grunt for effect, ripped him loose from the mud and water. I put my legs and back into it, and managed to twist and pull his head and his top half out of the muck and onto dry land. “Keep pulling!†I shouted to Vito. As I turned to look over my shoulder I saw Vito standing there with a hoof in his hands, mouth agape; I’d been pulling alone. He told me later that he’d chosen to stay out of my way altogether, saying something like, ‘dude, when you get that look in your eye, I take a step back’, which I thought was pretty funny. The grip of mud now broken, Vito and I together then hauled him another foot onto dry land, where a knife could get in to do its work. Anyway, the task taken care of, we chatted for a few minutes with the woman, then left. She thanked us for our help, and we got back under way shortly after, not much worse for the wear. The old man had not said a single word the entire time, although I thought for a second I caught a look he shot at his daughter, with eyes twinkling in a devious way. I suspect he was sharper than he let on. Hell, he got his moose out of the muck and neither he nor his daughter had even had to lift a finger…

We traveled further down the access road, hoping to find another clear cut, one that wasn’t mobbed with other moose hunters (or those done moose hunting but were on the lookout for help moving heavy hairy objects, for that matter). On the map the road petered out from a solid line to a dotted one, and we hoped that we could head into an attractive-looking, different area we’d looked at from the back side. At first the going was easy, and the 4Runner made short work of the muddy, rough terrain, but it soon became apparent that the trail was getting exponentially worse the farther we got in. Eventually, we got to what was normally a streamlet, but thanks to the snow and almost continuous rain, was now a mud-filled creek a couple feet deep in places along with large, door-crunching boulders scattered about. On the other side of the creek were downed logs that would take time to move. End of the line. We exited the rig and got to a semi-dry spot and climbed and walked a ways just to have a look about, but other than flushing a meatball grouse, we didn’t see anything we really liked; it was just too thick to look like good habitat to hunt in. With no sign to speak of, we bagged it and headed back the way we came. As light of day was soon to become a thing of the past, we called it a day.

After getting cleaned up and changed back at the shack, we decided to blow off some steam and relax at a bar rather than cook. We found a place a half hour drive away in a neighboring town, and got cranking on a few 16 oz curls. At some point, we got talking to the guy sitting next to us. I noticed right off that the guy sported a thick accent, probably out of Providence or thereabouts but possibly Boston. We soon learned his name was Mario, and that Mario liked to talk. He was quite a character, it turns out. We learned that he was born and raised in East Providence, and as a kid growing up in the city enjoyed passing time smoking hashish with the police chief’s son, and more notably had been coming to the mountains to hunt and fish for many years. Used to, that is. At some point he’d decided that hunting was cruel, and now enjoyed feeding apples to the animals that came to his back porch. When I mentioned that I was just back from an alligator hunt, maybe just fishing for a response from him, he said, “Allah-gaytuhz? Like the liz-id, y’mean?†I nodded as I took a long pull on my beer, trying hard not to make bubbles. “Oh, that’s fine, cuz’ ya releases ‘em alive, right? I got a buddy down Florida way who catches ‘em too. Cuts the friggin’ tail right offavum and turns ‘em loose again. Them tails grows right back afta’ ya cuts ‘em off, y’know.†Vito and I were pretty much speechless. ‘Oh dear’, I thought, ‘we’ve managed to befriend the local anti-hunting maniac’. Mario went on to say that if he was to ever hunt again, it wouldn’t be animals, but humans he’d hunt, damn it. Vito and I shared a look, and began to return to our drinks, when Mario mentioned the name Hugo. Vito and I perked back up. Hugo was indeed somewhere in these parts, and from what Mario said, hunted the area a great deal. Mario mentioned that he thought Hugo resided a few towns north, but had nothing to offer as far as a contact. Maybe this Hugo character did exist after all. I became slightly more interested in where Mario lived as he talked on and on about the moose in his backyard, including several very large bulls, that liked very much being fed apples. After a few more pops at near closing time, we set off to pick up Airi at a local gas station.

PART 2

Airi, my better three-quarters, was on her way up following a business trip in NYC that she couldn’t duck out of in time to travel north for the moose opener. She’d joined me on two moose scouting trips, and was less than pleased that she’d not be with us from the start, but we worked out a travel plan that would take her from Manhattan to Boston, and then on to a small town not too far away from where Vito and I were established. Slated to arrive Sunday night after an arduous pair of bus trips, we’d be picking her up late. I had earlier optimistically proclaimed she’d likely miss the actual hunt, arriving the evening of the second day. I’d cited the high percentage success rate in our zone in recent years, the sign we’d seen and in particular the conventional wisdom holding a New England moose hunt being pretty much a slam dunk proposition. In any event, I was dead wrong, and we both were very much excited to have her out with us to still chase moose. She doesn’t herself hunt (at least as yet), but has always been both wonderfully supportive and enthusiastic of my outdoor passions. In recent years she’s joined me on various hunting trips, and proven to be both a crack shot and hell on fish. Together we’ve boated halibut, bluefish, striped bass, trout, mullet, coho and king salmon among others. At just over five feet and tipping the scales a pound or two over a hundred pounds fully clothed and waterlogged, she’s as unimposing as she is beautiful, but tough as nails both mentally and physically. She’s trekked the Himalayas, backpacked through the Golden Triangle, skied the Japan Alps, island hopped around Indonesia and hiked around Europe among other adventures. I had no reservations about her being out there with us.

The bus was right on time, and she piled in the truck and we retired back to the camp. After a nightcap, we called it an evening. As Airi was exhausted from ten straight days at work and the 12 hours it took to get to the mountains from NYC, not to mention we’d be running on four hours sleep on the morrow, we thought it best for her to stay behind on the first morning. She protested a bit, but not wanting to fade out and become any sort of minor liability to us, but agreed that she’d probably not be at her best. As the forecast for the morning was calling for near-freezing temperatures and heavy downpours, it made more sense to her. Vito and I decided to change things up, and were heading into a boggy area in amongst some thick woods, with all the requisite watery holes, deadfalls, thorns and rocky traverses. Airi would be better off with a day’s rest before joining us on our long, wet slogs.

The next morning came too quickly, but after dragging out of bed and getting caffeinated, we got headed to an old log landing on the side of a road a half hour north. We did a quick check of gear, and disembarked into the bush in the dark. In a number of satellite photos we had, you could see a long chain of small clear cuts on the west side of the state highway just adjacent to a body of water, all connected by overgrown tote roads like links in a chain, as the image below represents nicely.



Proceeding down into the thick lowlands, we headed for a bog and the brook that both fed and drained it. Once there, we could poke about and get oriented to start looking over the cuts. There was once again an old tote road that split into several directions once away from the road. All were badly overgrown, mostly with heavy thorns and whips head high, enough so to make travel cumbersome. It was both easier and quieter to travel through the woods, not to mention saving a little blood (wading through acre after acre of heavy thorn gets tiresome and can get painful after a few hours). The woods were thick and had some fairly steep drops in places, and as it was so wet it some parts were more than a little nasty going. Under the light of our headlamps and perhaps an hour later, we arrived at the brook and bog. We immediately found moose sign, as well as a great deal of bear, deer and coyote sign. Other than a few old ribbons of plastic left by lumberman and surveyors some time ago, we saw nothing that would indicate anyone had been in there for a long time.

As the rain was coming down in absolute buckets, we decided to get settled under some pines to try to fend off a bit of the water, and spend the next few hours discovering what it felt like to live life as amphibians. Even with rain gear and proper layering, it was still an uncomfortable morning. The rain at times fell down so hard it made me feel like I was standing under a cold home shower, and one with good pressure at that. Despite that, with all the sign about, it was a spot worth a few hours, though we had serious doubts that anything would really want to move about in the pouring rain.

As we sat there, frequently having to wipe the water which ran down our foreheads and into our eyes in a constant stream, I thought back to the small bull we’d helped haul out of the water earlier, and the little detail involving getting any moose back to the road from that place. The thought wasn’t a pleasant one. First, the National Forest forbids any unauthorized motorized vehicles, so any extraction would have to be done manually. We had considered all this earlier, and had made a checklist of items to both bring and secure, and hauled them up north with us. We had pack frames, a half dozen knives (for gutting, skinning and boning), sharpening tools, a game saw, a come along, game bags, straps and parachute cord, three hundred feet of one inch rope rated for better than half a ton, a cordless Sawzall with extra blades and extra batteries, lamps, flashlights, rags, tarps and other assorted gear. I considered the logistics of undertaking such a task carefully, and contemplated hard the fact that we’d be up against the challenge with only two of us (I had zero faith in the so-called guide to follow through). The mere idea of having to hump and haul all that stuff in there before even getting started began to make my back throb. We had a borrowed 4 wheeler, but wouldn’t be able to use it in the National Forest. I think I may have in let out a little groan at the thought, as Vito asked me what was wrong. “Ah, nothingâ€, I said. “Maybe getting a little chill is allâ€. Two hours later, we exchanged looks and almost without words, slogged out. Maybe we’d come back, and maybe we wouldn’t. We’d seen no moose, and I was almost glad. If one had popped out of the brush on the other side of the bog, I’d probably have shot him. And then where would we be? Swimming, that’s where. We had a quick cup of hot, sweet tea and a snack back in the truck, then headed to yet another area at the end of yet another logging road, and set in.

We tried to remain as quiet as possible when on the move, and so moved slowly, but even then it was no easy task. Climbing over scores of downed logs and through and piles of rotting lumberman by-products, many from knee to waist high, was required to make forward progress, and even with the wet making things more quiet, we were noisy, I’m sure. Making noise was the lesser of two evils, however, as the left side of the way up was almost impenetrable with growth. The right side was a boggy mess, with waterlogged holes waist deep or better in spots (I personally explored one before getting back to scrambling along over the wood piles). We humped to the top of a low mountain, finding moose sign all along the way, with some of it we thought was much fresher than that found previously. Encouraged, we sat in a few places to call. Glassing was sparse, as it was so thick all around us. The rain let up for a bit, so that was a bit of a blessing. At the top of the rise, we set off following what were clearly moose trails. Bigger than shoulder wide and higher than shoulder high to a man, the paths were easy to follow as they wound through the bull rushes, cattails and other marshy vegetation. Eventually they led us deep into a truly nasty area that was on our right as we climbed (of course they did).

On the trails we got onto sign that was really fresh, from the morning or maybe even earlier. Amongst the many tracks we found, there was one left by a bruiser in the mix. We pushed farther in, and at one point I thought I could actually smell a slightly pungent musk, and we got excited by what we were seeing. Vito and I separated by about 100 feet, each following a heavily used trail and poking along slowly, stopping and listening every few feet. We ran about parallel to one another, and started slowly losing altitude as we sloshed slowly along, rifles unslung. We ended up having to break off from the trails as they moved from squishy ground in a few inches of water to hummocky areas with mid-calf deep water. Finally, the trails led into water knee-high and better. We both knew we’d found a very promising area with what we were after, with at least one moose in residence that was size large. With the hookings, rubs, freshly browsed brush, droppings and tracks, we’d found what we were looking for. We planned to keep slowly maneuvering about the area, creeping along the lower edge along where the trees and bog met, and did, but not before I took a false step and went into the cold soup to my neck. No worries; as a duck hunter I do that stuff all the time for fun in winter.

We kept at it until we broke through to another tote road, but didn’t see any moose. The copious sign we’d been amongst had largely petered out. As it was by then getting on in time, we decided to pull out quietly and quickly check another local area for the last light of day, but planned on the morrow to be back in that spot in the dark of pre-dawn to spend the entire day. We headed back for the other tote road, making note of the geography. We arrived back to the truck to find a pair of other hunters just turning around at the dead end where we had parked. They stopped to chat, and we learned from them that a big bull with fifty plus inch headgear had been shot at first light just that morning on the other side of the bog we’d just been through. Damn; that was probably the boy’s tracks we’d followed. Apparently, it was a bit of a nightmare to get the animal out, and related that the two hunters figured they’d either have to quarter the animal and haul it out through the bog on their backs, which would have taken all day and night and maybe then some, or to try to find someone with some heavy machinery to get in and get it for them. They opted for the latter approach, and supposedly paid five hundred dollars to a local with some sort of piece of heavy machinery hooked to 500 feet of cable to rig it up and drag it out to where it could be picked up and hauled on out. By around noon, they had the beast; just before we’d arrived and started up the back side of the same area, it turns out. No luck's better than bad luck, I suppose. As dark was upon us, we ceded defeat for the day, and after wishing the other guys good luck, retired to camp. Airi fed us pheasant stew for dinner, and after a few cold beers, tired and spirits a bit down, we called it a night.

The following morning, rejuvenated a bit after a long lie, the three of us got geared up and decided to try something different altogether. Again, we left the camp under wet skies. As I mentioned before, the WMU I had drawn was pretty big, with more than half a dozen different towns, with hundreds of miles of logging roads coursing through a couple hundred square miles in which we could hunt. We saw a few other areas in a nearby town on the map that looked promising, including some long back roads surrounded by hills and watery lowlands where we hoped to travel to find areas to hunt. Also was an eight mile long section of power line in between two small lakes with adjacent cuts and open areas that looked interesting. As the power lines were easy to find in the dark, we hit that area first. We hiked in about a mile to a rise that allowed us to look down both sides of the overgrown brush, and were encouraged to see plenty of moose sign on the hike in. Nothing super fresh, but at least we knew that the area certainly held moose. We sat and called, and spent the morning trying to be patient, hoping that at some point along the half mile or better of power line and surrounding wood we could glass from where we sat would produce a moose. It did not.

Around noon we decided to move on, and head for the back roads, looking for newer cuts (the moose we were told are often found around cuts three years old or younger, as they produce more of the newly established vegetation for them to browse upon). We ended up walking a couple miles on back tote roads, but found nothing with any fresh sign, and continued on. At some point we passed a steep dirt road that wasn’t marked or on the map. I backed up and we headed up the road. It twisted around the side of a hill, and we followed it right to the top, where we discovered what looked to be an abandoned orchard. Now this was interesting. It certainly looked a great place to put a stand for deer, but we wondered if moose would make the rounds on top. We got out and checked the place out, but other than observing a ton of deer sign and liberating some sweet apples left on the trees, did not find anything much of interest to the moose hunter. Interesting in general, however, was that a number of the apple trees had half-burned red candles fixed onto many branches of the trees. In one cluster of trees I saw five candles, one in each tree, resembling a vague star pattern, but then I may have been letting my imagination run wild a bit. In addition and a little stranger, Vito discovered what looked like a dilapidated outhouse, but when he opened the door saw a large military-looking radio and a wall of electronics that were live and online. Looking more carefully, you could see that the outhouse actually had a seventy-five foot antenna that blended in perfectly to the pines behind it. There were all kinds of meters, lights and gauges blinking on and off, and a loud hum of electricity emanated from the shack. I have no idea exactly what that thing was or who ran it. Maybe we’d discovered the lair of a satanic cult with a side interest in high-end cryptography-enabled ham radios? I guess we’ll never know. We left everything as we found it, took a few apples to go and headed out.

We decided to head back onto the original logging road system we’d worked to head into the bush for one last area we hadn’t yet been. We covered that other section for most of the rest of the day. The older clear cut spanned several miles across a valley bottom. It was dry underfoot, with low brush, and so was easier going than the thick wet stuff, and while we once again found sign, it was not fresh. We alternated between short pushes and calling, and paused to glass all along the way. We did find some interesting things, including a downed tree where a small bear had scrambled over.



I took a couple of pictures, and had a little pow-wow with the gang. We’d given that area a thorough snooping, and since we’d not yet seen any area that really stood out as smoking hot (other than the place we’d planned to hunt but learned had already given up a good bull), we decided to cross that area off our list for good. Maybe we should have bagged it earlier; we knew that seven moose had come out of the area, and possibly more. With the pounding of trucks, people and gunfire the place had gotten, if I were a moose, I’d not be showing my long, brown face for a good while. We bagged it a little early for the day in order to head further north to see what we could find. I admit being a bit dejected; we’d hunted hard now for four days and had yet to lay eyes on a moose. I’ve been going to the Great North Woods country for almost twenty years, and I couldn’t remember a trip where I hadn’t seen at least a few moose without even trying. But I guess the fact that the moose were being hunted might have had something to do with it…

As we pulled up the highway and past a NH Fish and Wildlife trout hatchery (which during season doubles as a moose check-in station), we noticed a nice bull being hoisted from the back of a plumbing truck. We thought for a quick break we’d go in and have a gander at the beast, and while there I’d speak to a F&W guy and see if I couldn’t get some advice for our next move. While parking, I noticed an 80s vintage Porsche 944 just pulling in to a parking spot. Interesting vehicle choice for these parts, I thought. We walked over to check out the bull. He weighed in at 610 pounds, and we watched as the F&G folks used a sort of moose jaw crowbar to get at a tooth to pull. They measured antler spread and took notes, and we asked of the hunters casually what time of day the animal was shot, and how. Two older guys, the ones who climbed out of the 944 to have a look, stood by and chatted to each other behind us in Italian. The two successful hunters were happy to provide details, and said that up until that morning had found almost exactly what we’d found—nothing—until setting up in a likely area and calling. Less than five minutes later a bull came crashing through the brush at them. The bull stalled some 50 yards out behind a rock outcropping, and then was quickly gone. They tried calling again immediately, and two more bulls came to the call, one of which hung before us. We thanked them for their explanation and congratulated them on their kill, and I then turned to head into the ranger station. Vito turned to see where I was going, and locked eyes with one of the gents standing behind us, and then blurted out, “HUGO!†I’ll be damned; the man did exist after all. The two pumped hands and introductions were made between us all. I excused myself for a few minutes to go see about talking to a ranger before they closed shop. I spoke to a guy who offered up a few suggestions, saying matter-of-factly that if he had a tag, he’d head to a place just a few miles up, where there was a fresh cut. He pointed it out on the map, and offered another place to try. I thanked him and marked them on my map, and after looking at a few nice racks and mounts they had inside, including a really neat one in velvet, headed back out.

I got back out to the parking lot to hear Hugo ask Vito, “so whattayou do uppa’ here inna’ mountains, eh Vito?†“We’re moose hunting, but haven’t had any luck finding them. We’ve been looking for you, actually!â€, Vito replied. “You a-been lookin’ for me forawhat?†Hugo asked, looking maybe a bit suspicious. “For help in finding a damned moose, Hugo! We need a moose!â€. “Oh, OK.†He looked around carefully and asked, “One-a youse gotta’ a moose permit?†Vito pointed at me and said that I’d won one. “OK, you needa’ help afindin’ a moose aroun’ he-ah, I helpa’ you, no problem.†“You come over tonight witha’ you friends, and eata’ a nice dinna with-a me anna’ my friends, have-a some vino and-a drink and we talk, OK? You no worry, I make-a sure you getta’ you mooseâ€. Apparently we would be eating dinner at Hugo’s house that evening. “Are you sure about this?†I asked when back in the truck. “I don’t want to be a headache for anyoneâ€. Vito grinned at me like a Cheshire cat. He’d hunted deer with Hugo in a camp out of Maine together for a couple years, so I guess knew each other. “OK by meâ€, I said. Airi said it sounded like fun. We jumped back in the truck and made for Hugo’s house.

Hugo’s house was the one with the Porsche, the stretch limousine, the SUVs, cars and pick-ups in the front and side. This was going to be interesting, I thought. We parked and walked on to the porch to find Hugo waving us in and introducing his two buddies Luigi and Ronaldo. They were old friends who grew up in the old country but had all had come to America for a better life post WWII. They’d all succeeded and had made their home here for the past fifty or more years. We were welcomed in and made to feel comfortable. Wine and beer were poured, and soon after we were all laughing and talking as we sat about the table. Airi, Vito and I relaxed while the three Italians cooked, argued, insulted each other and drank deeply. At some point, Hugo announced that he was making a phone call for us to the man who would help get us our moose. I think both Vito and I were a bit surprised, thinking that Hugo was the one that would take us out. Vito asked, and Hugo explained that yes, he knew where he’d seen plenty of moose, but the guy he was calling was the man to talk to about local hunting. The guy, named John, was his ‘ace-a inna the hole’.

Hugo got John on the horn, and said to that he had a couple friends that needed some help getting a moose. After a few moments, he hung up and said with a wide smile, “Johnny he’s a coming now for a-dinner. You getta’ you moose now for-a sureâ€, and said nothing more about it. John showed up soon after. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I don’t think it was anything like the older fellah that wound up sitting across from me, slight in build and fairly quiet. After introductions, some wonderful home made sausages steeped in olive oil with thick slices of bread were served, and soon after, an immense bowl of pasta and plates were placed about the table. Being less shy after several glasses of red, I had two large helpings, and was pretty full and greatly satisfied. One of the guys then picked up the plates and the real dinner, with great piles of meats, wild mushrooms, roasted potatoes and assorted vegetables in wonderful glazes and sauces came out of the oven, where it’d all been roasting. Stupid me: the pasta was an appetizer. What a feed we had. I got talking to John, who ate quietly and smiled. A modest man, when I asked he replied that he’d been born and raised in the area, and had been hunting locally for some sixty years. When I asked of him how the chances were of seeing moose, he said simply, “oh, we’ll see moose. Just depends on how picky you are, and how cooperative the moose are gonna’ be. The weather ain’t been helping any though, that’s for sure.†Pictured are Luigi, John and Hugo.



After dinner and a couple more drinks, John said that we’d probably want to call it a night soon, but to follow him home, so as to learn where to be in the morning. He asked if we had a 4 wheeler, and we said that we did. He said that that was good, as it would eliminate hours off of travel time getting to some of the hunting areas he had in mind. I asked about what time we ought to be there, and he said that it needn’t be too early, as he was having some issues with his 4 wheeler, and had lost his headlights, so needed at least false dawn to run up the mountain. “Sometime after 5:00 will be fineâ€, he said. “We’re heading up a mountain? Where would that be?â€, I asked. “Well, we’ll put in at my backyard and start climbing from there.†That’s convenient, I thought.

We said our thanks to Hugo for the gracious hospitality, dinner and help all around, and said goodbyes for now to him and his gang. As we got ready to leave, Hugo said to me with a wicked grin, “Johnny he a-gonna’ work you all a-tired for-a sure, until you find-a one to shoot, I promise. Better you a-bring water, a lot, and maybe some-a aspirin too!†And with that rather cryptic prediction, we headed out and followed John to his home a few miles away. It was too dark to really see, but there seemed to be a mass rising behind his home. We thanked him for his kindness, and said we’d see him in the morning. I mentioned as we headed south that I felt a bit bad that we’d be taking this fellah away from his wife and sleep. Later we would find that we needn’t have worried one whit about Ole Johnny; if anything it was us we should have been worried about.

The next morning we got up to the sound of rain yet again. I threw some caribou steaks on the stove for breakfast. After wolfing down the club steaks, some eggs and strong tea, we got in the truck and headed to meet John, with the 4 wheeler in tow. I’ve ridden motorcycles for many years, but my first experience on a 4 wheeler was only a few weeks back, where I ran up and down some Wyoming hillsides to retrieve a half dozen antelope. If it’s got a means to steer, gears and a throttle, I can drive or ride it, so wasn’t concerned about myself, but Airi being on the back concerned me, as there were warning stickers about second passengers on the machine. If it got too hairy I’d get her off and we’d walk it. I drilled into her head about leaning, ducking branches, holding on tight and very important, for her to jump clear in a direction opposite of the machine should we begin to flip or overturn. I told her I’d yell out if she needed to bail. She said she understood. Good lass. We pulled behind John’s house some time after five, and out walked John. He said we’d wait a few minutes to let it get ‘a bit more light’ (it was pitch black), and then set out. He asked us in to have some coffee while we waited.

Once inside, I noticed down the hall a couple nice racks, and asked him to show them to me. Once in the living room, I saw what looked like a hundred years’ worth of hunting hanging on the wall. He had moose with immense spreads and giant paddles. He had whitetail racks in there, dozens of them, some larger than most any I’d ever seen in New England; as well as some caribou racks from up north. He had mounts of beautiful trout of different flavors and salmon, and in the back, a case containing the largest lake trout I’ve ever seen --by far. “Jeez! I didn’t know they grew that big around hereâ€. John smiled and turned the light in the case on. “You and lots of othersâ€, he said with a grin. “That there was the state record lake trout in Vermont for 22 years running. I caught it on that there spoon, running in deep water with lead-core line.†He pointed to the silver spoon he kept above the case. "Pretty fish, ain’t it? Peeled off 180 yards of line on his first run…†I’m not sure exactly how much he said it weighed, but I’m sure it was in the mid-thirty pound range. All around the house were wonderful outdoorsy things, some very old looking, and for John I’m sure, a treasure of memories came with all of them. He said that we could come back later and we’d share a few tales, but that we had more important business at hand: we needed to go find and kill my moose.

We got the machines loaded up with gear and riders, and got them loosely pointed at what looked like a black hole in the brush. I had a look at the machine’s controls, noting the 4WD button, choke, reverse override, gears, brakes, etc. No problems with the machine as far as I could tell, and it started right up, although I had to keep it revved a bit to keep it from stalling. Vito was riding shotgun on John’s rig, and I had Airi on back of the one I was commandeering. I had just gotten the words, “so, where do we go from…†out of my mouth when John nailed the throttle on his machine. With a roar and a trail of exhaust, he and Vito disappeared into the black hole in front of us. I learned later that John’s a bit hard of hearing. Might have something to do with that ported .300 Weatherby he shoots...Anyway, keep in mind that his machine had no lights whatsoever. I looked back at Airi and bellowed over the drone of the 500cc motor, “hold tight!†She nodded and clutched me hard. I put the machine in gear and got on the hammer, and flew into the darkness of the forest after John and Vito. A few minutes later, struggling to see any trail whatsoever, I came to my senses and realized that while John didn’t have any lights, we did. I flicked them on, and was able to see John and Vito up ahead, coursing fast down a pretty well-marked, if narrow trail. It wasn’t the trail so much that we needed to worry about; it was the madman ahead I was trying to keep up with. We shot along the trail, going over odd boulders, logs, creeks with rickety bridges (think rotted pallets tossed in a pile) and mud pits. I did learn that day that an ATV is called that for good reason.

As we gained altitude up the trail John began to slow as we approached a particularly messy area. “I think we’ve reached the end of the ridingâ€, I said to Airi. Wrong. John was merely calculating, and after seeing a line, blasted up on through, with Vito looking decidedly white-knuckled in our headlight, perched in the high seat behind John. We traveled steadily higher up the mountain, and it was getting steep enough that I rode along leaning over the handlebars, concerned about going heels over head if the front end popped up on anything. We eventually stopped at what I’m sure was a couple thousand feet up. Off to the side a quarter mile or so, we had a commanding view of new clear cut of several hundred acres in area, (this despite our ‘guide’ having told me that nowhere in the region exists any cuts newer than 5 or 6 years). We waited a bit for the woods to settle down and light enough to see down into the fresh cuts. I got out the camera and took a couple of pictures. Below is a view of Airi and the first spot on the mountain that we stopped.



When it became light enough, we dismounted and hiked closer to the cut, then got settled down to glass. After some time, seeing nothing of interest, we mounted back up and headed up another few hundred feet in altitude, then stopped to glass some more. We did this three times, climbing yet higher every time, with no moose seen. We ended up several hundred feet in elevation shy from the top, and John explained that any traveling any higher with the 4 wheelers was unwise, as it got too steep, and should we get sliding or rolling, we wouldn’t stop anytime soon. We’d now be humping it; sounded good to me. It took us another forty-five minutes to get near the top of the mountain. I was surprised that moose would travel this high up, but John assured me that they do get this high up frequently, and much higher. He explained that in deep winter, the moose often actually retreat up the mountains. “Why?â€, I asked. “Because of the deep snow†he said. Turns out that moose have figured out that the snow is a good insulator, and that their thick lower leg bones can get cold exposed to the sub-zero temps in winter. When standing in the snow, however, they remain reasonably toasty, and they use it to their advantage. Amazing, I thought. He then related a story from a few years ago where a moose had used a fire escape or somesuch to climb to the roof of the weather observatory at the top of Mount Washington, the highest peak in the northeast at over 6000 feet. Apparently, the moose was frightened by occupants coming out to see what the racket on the roof was, and in a panic, leapt off the roof and to his death. His loss was the staff’s gain, however. Fresh meat for the long, cold winter had just landed in their laps.

It soon became clear to me that John was a great scholar of the woods. As we poked about, I asked him questions, and he seemed happy explaining them to me. When I pointed up at a broken mess of branches at a tree top and asked what kind of creature made a home of such shabby construction, he laughed. “That ain’t no big bird nest or home to no animal; that there’s a bear cradle in that beechnut tree. The bears have a liking for the nuts, and in summer and early fall they’ll climb those trees to get at the nuts. Once at a good spot in the tree, they’ll take swipes at surrounding branches with lots of nuts, and collapse them in on themselves. There they have a little resting spot where they can relax and fill their bellies with all the nuts.†I had never heard of such a thing, and maybe thinking I was a bit dubious, John motioned me over. Smiling, he pointed and showed me where the bear claw marks scarred the tree all the way up to the top. The cradles can be seen below in the top left.



I learned about things I’d seen before but never understood, like moose browsing on saplings. Not of just the buds, but of the bark. I’d seen the scrapings on small trees before, but thought they were rubs. Not so. The bare strips are left when moose use their lower teeth to scrape the bark from bottom up on young saplings to eat. If you look closely, you can actually see the tooth marks clearly.



We arrived at the crest of the mountain shrouded in wispy fog. We almost immediately found moose sign, but once again, none that was terribly fresh. We found a series of rubs, but John said that they were pretty old, and said that the best thing we could do is to keep moving, and keep glassing. “There are moose all around here at all times of year, but they range quite a bit, and for quite a distance. All we need to do is keep moving until we find really fresh sign, which will give away the area they’re using, or as likely, just plain run into them. And we will; it’s only a matter of time. The bastards are too damn big to hide themselves forever.†Soon after, he bent down and picked at something, then motioned me over to look at something at his feet. “See that?†“That’s moose hair from a leg, probably gouged out when two bulls were having at each other to see who was king of this mountain topâ€



He went on to relate that the fights could range from simple pushing matches to extremely violent battles, and in the past he’d come across areas in the woods that were so torn up they looked as if a professional football game had been played on it, with blood and hair everywhere. Sometimes the fights were to the death. A guy John knows actually found the decomposing bodies of two moose locked together in death, their antlers impossibly entwined. That’s rare, but not unheard of. What I’d never heard of, however, was that on one of those entwined antlers, on one of the palms, was a hole with a tine from the opponent stuck through it. The two moose had collided with so much force that one’s antler tine had actually smashed through the other’s rack.

We traveled around the top and a ways down the other side, with only hand signals and soft whispering as communication. John had said that the moose would sometimes tolerate a man’s presence, but would not be around long if he heard his voice. I don’t know if that’s a superstition or not, as I’ve talked to moose and had them not run; yelled at them, actually (as with the cow who was trying to turn me into a carpet for getting near her calf, for example). Yet more sign was found, but no moose showed themselves. John looked as if he was trying to figure something out, and said, “They’ve left this place for whatever reason. They were here, but they’re not anymore. We need to head back and check the other side, and if we don’t see anything there, push on to a different area. No use wasting time here if they’ve gone elsewhere.â€

We wandered over to the other side of the mountain, following John through woods filled with fog and patches of snow. He stopped from time to time to look around and make a quick correction in our heading, but obviously knew where he was going. At one point he bent down and stopped to fool with a tree. I walked over to him from across a small clearing, interested to see what he was doing. It turns out he was trying to get the wing nuts off of a piece of metal. As I walked closer I could see that a tree stand was bolted to the tree. “It’s been ten years since I sat in this one here; didn’t know if it’d still be around. I’ve got maybe a dozen of these on places all over these woods. About time I took a few back home I suppose, the ones I haven’t used in a while…†In ten years I’ll forget on what city block I used to find the cheapest parking garage downtown. Here’s John, taking us a half mile across a mountain top in fog, right to a stand he hasn’t seen in ten years. Needless to say, I was impressed.

When we found nothing further of interest to John as far as sign, he decided we’d pull out from this mountain and head to the next likely spot for moose on his list. We made our way back to the 4 wheelers and got them pointed downhill. Watching Vito from behind was fun, with his alternating smiles and looks of terror, depending on how steep and how fast John was pushing his machine down the mountain. Just before getting back to the house, it was clear that something was amiss with the right rear tire on John’s machine. I yelled ahead to tell them to stop. The tire quickly went flat. John swore a bit, then told Vito to jump back on, and they continued on at a slower pace. Soon enough, we were at John’s garage. In short order he had the wheel off and his patch kit ready, but looking at the tire closely, found that it was the stem that was damaged. He had a new one, but decided that we’d head off to a local garage and get it fixed up quicker, which we did.
As it was afternoon by the time the tire was back on the 4 wheeler, John said that we’d just check another local spot, as we were running out of time for the day to make it over to the place he really wanted to go. No problem; we were following his lead.

The rest of the day was spent in another area that also looked promising. We hiked a bit and rode some tote roads to get back into areas to look over, but by the end of the day we’d still seen no moose. John looked annoyed, and said that we’d be back at them first thing, at a place where he’d killed one some years before. The area was too thick for the 4 wheelers, he said, but we’d drive over and park, and head in at dawn to give it another whack; sounded good to me. We all bid him goodnight, and made for camp. I made raspberry-glazed teal breasts for dinner, and along with leftover veggies and some pasta, we had ourselves a decent feed.



After dinner we went out for a couple of drinks, and then headed back to get some rest.

PART 3

We woke up once again to rain; big surprise. It was our 6th day of the hunt, and I don’t mind saying I was getting quite nervous. To date, Vito and I had hunted hard for 55 plus hours without a live sighting. As best we could tell from what we’d seen and what John had to say, we’d been doing nothing wrong, other than maybe spending too much time in a spot that was pretty much shot out. We grabbed a quick breakfast, tossed together some drinks and snacks and headed to meet John. We pulled up, and John came out and said we’d all ride with him, as we were just going a few miles away to park and head off into the bush.

We got to the top of a low mountain, and started down a tote road until the growth became too thick to pass with the truck. John pointed to a spot and said that he’d killed a large bull there a few years back, one that now resides on a wall at his home. We all piled out and geared up. Today we’d be once again hunting strictly on foot, so I brought a couple extra bottles of water with us. The going wasn’t too bad the first mile, as we traveled along a fairly distinct game trail in single file. When the path ended however, the woods and vegetation got thick, and then thicker still. I started to become a little worried about Airi, as after the first hour the going got pretty rough, but she never once complained or showed any sign of slowing down. We were in amongst the moose; that was certain. Once off the path, we came across fresh sign almost right away. In the thick, heavy brush and trees however, unless we literally bumped into one standing before us, I thought that one could simply stand a couple of body lengths away and never be seen. And even though we were doing our best, our moving through the area wasn’t exactly always done quietly.

After a couple or three miles of a slow descent, the terrain started opening up, but getting wetter underfoot. We came to a large open tract of land, relatively speaking, with brush about shoulder high but devoid of most trees of any size. There we could survey a large area with glass, and did so while hydrating a bit. We didn’t see anything, so pushed on. At what I figure was at around the valley bottom, we discovered that beavers, one of nature’s wee engineering marvels, had taken up residence. That spelled u-g-l-y for us. Beavers like water, and lots of it. The first two beaver ponds we were able to either skirt around or carefully walk through the shallow edges, but the third was large and deep; not put together by rookie beavers, this one. The lodge at the far end must have been thirty feet in diameter and ten feet high. There was no going through this one if staying dry was an objective. Even the edges were deeper than what I’d normally wade when ducking. As no one had anything on more than knee boots anyway, we stopped to review. We were not going to have a pleasant afternoon wearing boots that had drained a gallon of beaver pond into them, so we’d have to either hike up and around it, taking us far out of our way and into hellish thick stuff, or figure out another plan.

As Vito, Airi and I were standing there having another belt of water, John walked off a ways. He came back and said, “we’ll go across the dam.†I looked at him a bit warily, not for my sake, but for Airi’s. If she went in, she’d be miserable, and so would I, as I’d have to get her back to the truck ASAP, as it was cold enough for hypothermia to be a real concern. It wasn’t super cold at perhaps 40F, but wrapped in water logged garments, I’d be very concerned for her. Not as important but worth mentioning is that we were perhaps five miles downhill from the truck. I asked John how far it was to the other side of wherever we were heading, and he said “six, maybe eight miles until we hit a tar road, I figureâ€. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Vito didn’t like the idea of crossing the dam one bit. I said to him that if it looked too dangerous or impossible, we’d back off and figure something else out. Vito looked unconvinced, but nodded. John said that he’d go first, and climbed onto the dam. It didn’t seem to move at all under his weight. He began walking across the dam, with the pond at that point probably a hundred yards across. Next, I got on the dam and tested the strength of it with my considerable mass. Some boughs and small tree trunks moved a bit, but they never shifted radically. The water of the beaver pond was five feet deep and better, and seeping through and spilling over the dam in many places, but I figured that the dam was holding back many, many tons of water weight. Surely it’d hold us. I got out some twenty yards, still testing, and stopped to turn to tell Airi that I thought it was safe, and to follow me carefully, only to find that she was already behind me, smiling. Behind her I saw Vito climbing onto the dam to make his way across as well. I paused to pull a bare, seven foot long bough from the dam, and handed it behind to Airi to use as balance and poking staff. Up ahead, John had his arms out a bit, and reminded me of an acrobat walking on a tight rope under the big top, except that instead of tights, was wearing camouflage. It was a sort-of surreal scene, with the four of us making our way on a bridge built by the paddle-tailed hairballs, and I wanted to stop and take a picture, but thought it just too risky (for the camera). Two expensive SLRs I’ve already eternally damned to camera hell while duck hunting, curing me mostly of trying to take risky water shots. Since teetering along the top of a beaver dam qualified as risky in my book, the camera stayed in the dry bag. Within another ten minutes we’d all made landfall on the far side in one piece, and pushed on. The rest of the day was spent humping and glassing, glassing and humping. A few times I tried calling, but all in all, no banana; the moose were just not cooperating.

By the end of the day, as the sun began to droop low in the horizon, frustration really began to gnaw at me. What more could we possibly have to do to find these guys? John saw my frustration, and said to me that we were doing everything right, and that we’d find them. We were in prime moose habitat, and they were here, but were remaining elusive. He repeated that it was simply a matter of time. I thanked him for the moral support and keeping us pressing on, but that was the problem: we were running out of time. “Don’t you worry, Leighton“, he said. “Usually, we’d have seen a half-dozen to choose from where I’ve taken you so far. But remember, they could be just over the next rise, or right around that set of trees: we just have to keep on until we find them. If we don’t get him today, you come back to my house again in the morning. You’re going to kill one of these sons of bitches before this hunt’s over. Trust me.†I thanked him for all he’d done, but that I wouldn’t have him miss out on his own hunting on my account, and the Maine deer opener was but a few days away. He nodded, and we continued on, rising in elevation once again. Soon after, we broke out of the bush and onto a logging road.

As it was getting on in the day, we started east, toward the tar road. I was feeling pretty wiped out; we’d done a dozen miles already, easy, in some nasty going. John said that it’d be another two to three miles from where we were, but easy going on the tote road. At some point, I found myself walking ahead of John and Vito, with Airi slightly behind me. All the water in my pack was gone. Even after working so hard for the day, yet again we were coming away empty-handed. I marched along, a bit pouty, picking at a thorn I had imbedded in my hand, when I heard something. I stopped, but it was a second, or maybe two, before I realized it was Airi behind me that had made the noise. I turned, a bit annoyed, to stop and ask her what she wanted. When I saw her I knew: it looked as if every ounce of blood had suddenly flowed south from her face. As still as a signpost she stood, her mouth open and eyes wide. “WHERE?â€, I silently mouthed to her, frantic. Her mouth moved, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying. Vito and John were behind Airi by seventy-five yards or so, making their way up to us, oblivious to what was going on ahead. I repeated my mouthed question as I slowly took my rifle off my shoulder and slowly jacked a round into the chamber, my adrenaline level beginning to skyrocket. I took a step toward her, when she raised a shaking arm to point just over my left shoulder, and said loudly, “he’s right THERE!†Instantaneously I caught movement out of my left eye, behind me, and pivoted in place to behold what we had come for.

Before me was beyond a doubt the largest, heaviest racked and blackest bull I’ve ever laid eyes on in my life. His rack was better than sixty inches, of that I am absolutely certain; a true monster in these eastern woods. When I initially saw him, he was less than fifty feet from where I stood, but had instantly swapped ends. It was his back end I now saw, thundering away at full-bore, throwing dirt clods in his wake. In a blink of an eye he’d put a thick stand of trees between himself and me. I ran four or five steps to the right to slam myself against a tree at the road’s edge for a rest, and flipped the safety off of my model 70. I found him in my scope, but running full-tilt up a small hill. Between us were trees and all manner of brush. I pleaded internally for him to stop, just for a split second, to pause and look back, as I followed him with the rifle. He hit the crest of the small hill with but all but his head and massive antlers covered by logs, trees and heavy brush. You could hear the branches splintering in his wake and the sound his hoofs made pounding into the spongy sod. At the top of the small rise he immediately hooked right and down out of sight on the far side, and all I saw before he disappeared was the back of his massive hind leg, flexing as it powered him into the bush. I then proceeded to lose my mind.

Rather than wait, or run back to ask John what to do, or to give the bull time to relax and then perhaps try to slowly track him, I tore from the road and over the low dirt berm into the woods. Hitting stride, I bolted down the other side and into the thick forest at a dead run. I remember thinking that there may be a clear cut on the other side of that hill, and that if I hurried, I just might have a chance at a shot at him from above, if I could just make it fast to the top of the hill he’d just gone over. I had almost reached the brushy area where he had just stood beyond, when I decided to cut right and make straight for the back side of the hill, just beyond a large patch of moss. I launched off of a downed log or stump, I don’t know which, with rifle in hand. Outstretched in a classic sprint stance, I hit the ground with my first step. My brain could not compute why at that moment was the ground giving way underneath me, or why I was holding my breath, or why my head was underwater. I body rolled with my rifle above my head until I hit the edge of the shallow pond that I now understood lay beneath the fern and moss. I crawled out of the muck, ripped off my pack and continued after him. As I reached the top of the hill, I saw that there was not the clear cut I had hoped for, but yet more of the thick, heavy vegetation of the woods. I looked about frantically, picked up what I thought was his track and saw some fifty yards away where I thought he probably slipped into the heavy wood.

I was crushed and enraged at once, and my mind raced wildly. I thought then of the others, and looking back, saw Airi waving her orange hat at me. When she saw that I saw her, she began frantically waving the hat from left to right. I saw it for what it was: she was telling me to head back over my left shoulder. But that was away from where I’d seen the bull go. At that moment Vito had reached the rise, and motioned me over. I had to make a split decision. I knew Airi was telling me to go back the other way, but here was Vito looking like he wanted to have a conversation. Torn, but ever trusting in my wife, I charged off the hill away from Vito and toward the direction Airi indicated I should, scanning the woods ahead with my rifle at the ready as I made my way deeper into the thick bush. After some thirty or forty minutes, exhausted and hyperventilating, I flopped onto the forest floor, devastated.

I made my way back to the road to find no one around. I set my rifle down, made sure the safety was back on; it was. I recalled flipping it back to safe before running from the road. I lit a cigarette and held my head. Soon after, I heard faint voices. I finished my butt and made my way over to where I’d shed my pack, and found it floating in the moss pond. I fished it out, strapped it back on and walked a bit up the road to unite with the gang. No one present was pleased. I learned that Airi was in fact alerting me to moose; a pair of them, actually. And it was not the monster, but two *other* bulls that I hadn’t seen standing nearby when I bolted after the big one. Idiot! Must have been quite a sight for them, what with the two-legger going for a swim, then crashing about the forest, panting and hyperventilating wildly through it all, steam rising from him in great clouds…I imagined the scene, half-delirious and dizzy, with my spirit leaking badly. Vito was upset that I’d dismissed him in the heat of the chase. Airi was annoyed because I’d given her ‘the look’. I’d given her ‘the look’ because we’d gone over the whole ‘no speaking’, and ‘no sudden movements’ lecture if an animal was seen many times. John was the only one who really didn’t look like he wanted someone dead, and sat quietly and waited until we’d all calmed down a bit and told our respective stories. Airi had seen the bull as plain as day, standing just there, quietly feeding. She froze, and the bull looked up and stared into her eyes. She and the bull had shared a moment apparently, staring into each others’ soul. I told her that had she not yelled out, and not pointed at the bull as would a hysterical crime victim to an assailant in a police line-up, she’d have had a lifetime to enjoy lengthy staring matches with the moose in the comfort of our home. Some bickering began again, but petered out soon enough. We were all just flat-out whipped at that point, physically and more.

It was long after dark when we finally made it out to the hard top. The truck was miles away, but John has lots of friends in the area, and after a 20 minute walk along the side of the road, stopped off at the house of one to bum a ride. Jim answered the door and immediately invited everyone in. He, his girlfriend and his grandson were sitting down to a venison dinner. I felt uncomfortable interrupting their meal and don’t think I was alone, but honestly I don’t think we were in much condition to walk much more than ten more feet, never mind the ten miles back to the truck. Inside, I asked for some water, and believe garnered some stares when I drank down four sixteen ounce glasses, one right after the other, before I slowed and sipped at my fifth. Jim said that he’d get us back to our truck right away, as he could see we were all beyond tired. He was referring to me, Vito and Airi only I’m pretty sure. John looked as if he’d spent the day mostly reading the paper, and was ready if needed to go do it all over again.

Jim got us back to John’s Expedition (aptly named, considering), and we all fell into our seats. Later, I found I had gotten so stiff that I had trouble getting out of John’s truck and into mine. I remember looking at the clock on the dash, and it read 9:10. We’d been at it from 6:00 a.m. to almost 8:00 p.m., hiking for perhaps thirteen hours, through some very nasty going, covering some, I don’t know, twelve miles? Fifteen? Whatever the distance was, I was all but totally wiped out, as were Airi and Vito. It had been a very, very hard day of hunting, and while I’d beheld the Lord of the Great North Woods, standing at fifty feet, I never got a shot. It was a horribly difficult pill to swallow.

As we said our goodbyes to John for the night, he came to the driver’s side and told me to be back before light, because we’d be back looking for them again tomorrow first thing. I asked him if he was sure (on a couple different levels), and he laughed. “You’re not planning on lettin’ those bastards continue to make fools of us, and have done all this work for nothin’, are ya’?†As we pulled away, I began considering that John was thirty years older than me; almost pushing the seventy year mark. I recall mumbling words like ‘unstoppable’, ‘relentless’, ‘juggernaut’ and ‘half man, half goat’ when thinking of words that might begin to do him justice. His stamina and drive to hunt was amazing, even in men half his age. I still don’t understand it, frankly. I don’t remember the ride back to camp, or even if we ate that night. The next thing I can recall is either Airi or Vito saying that it was time to wake up.

We arrived back at John’s the next morning. I was feeling a bit rested but still weary and stiff, not just from the previous day’s hell session but from the hunt as a whole. I was continuing to have an overall wonderful time, but not knowing if we’d get another chance at a moose was certainly continuing to nag at me. John came out presently, and said that he’d decided to take us into a slightly different area, as the ones we’d covered were just not producing the animals for us as they should, despite the previous day’s excitement. He said that in order to save time, we’d be back on the 4 wheelers, as the area he had in mind was miles in on the logging roads, and it’d take almost half the day or better to walk there. I heard no complaints from Vito or Airi, and I readily admit that riding in to where we’d hunt rather than walk sounded like heaven.

We got the 4 wheelers cranked up, and soon after we were off. John wanted to wait until false dawn arrived, as he said we’d be forced to traverse a tricky area before we got on the logging road proper. Tricky it was indeed; I watched in relative horror as Vito and John had the lead 4 wheeler on two wheels as they side-hilled a steep grade, very dangerously close to flipping. I stopped and told Airi to get off. No way was I having her on the back on that piece of hill. We ended up taking a different course, as that way was just too much. I wanted my moose as badly as almost anything I can think of, but not badly enough that I was willing to risk me or my wife getting badly injured, or worse. Unfortunately, once down in that area, there was no turning back for John’s wheeler, and we spent the next hour or so getting his out of the mess, with us heaving logs to make a sort-of path, which we used to traverse a creek and exit. No matter; in an hour we were underway and onto the logging road system, one inaccessible to all but all-terrain vehicles. We’d be seeing no road hunters this day.

Less than ten minutes into our ride, John stopped and pointed. Just off the road were two does, standing stock still and watching us. A nice sight, it was. We’d not seen any live behooved animals since opening day. They soon bounced off and away, flags waving. We continued on, making great time on the main logging road. On the way we passed the area where we’d had the introduction to the three bulls the day before, but John thought that due to the circumstances, those moose had likely moved on to quieter pastures. We’d check back later if we hadn’t already killed one, John said. Perhaps half an hour later, we turned off the main road and onto a smaller tote road one that cut away off onto another ridge. We followed that one, but soon the tote road gave way to brush, and became considerably thicker from there, to the point where riding became slow and laborious. Having learned what an ATV is capable of, I knew we’d be able to keep going, but it was thick enough that we were moving along not a whole lot faster than if we’d been on foot. At some point, John said that we’d have to go off-road, and cut down the side of a hill to a parallel road, as the road we were on was becoming impassable. My first thought was, “we’re on a road?â€

John got off the wheeler and began scouting for a likely path. I got off and joined him, and we debated for a few minutes before starting down. It was slow and rough going, but after several low speed collisions with multiple trees and boulders, a few backtracks, a litany of swearing a sailor would be proud of (John’s ex-Navy) and the better part of an hour, we got back onto what John called a road. This one too was thick and nasty, and at times was only barely passable, but we persevered. The walking in the area would not have been much more pleasant. The area John planned to leave the wheelers and hunt was only about a mile away. The skidder trail we were on merged with another a quarter mile down, and just beyond where the two married was where I thought for sure was the end of the line. A creek almost thigh deep and some five feet across ran at the base of a steep grade. The elevation of what was essentially a wall of loose tree trunks and large limbs, all piled onto mud and rock, was only about twenty feet from creek to the top of the rise, but it was hell for steep, and ugly. Even John looked like maybe we’d need to rethink our route, but after taking a moment and sizing up the wall, said to Vito and I, “we can build a bridge, so that the front ends of the wheelers can at least get a bite at the base of the stack. If we can’t at least get something to launch off of, we’ll have to go back. The problem is the water.†I saw what he meant. With the front end buried in the muck and creek, nose angled severely down and touching the base of the wall of wood, we’d never be able to get the machines to climb. We began ‘building’, heaving logs, thick limbs and any miscellaneous large wood pieces into the creek for perhaps twenty minutes. My respect for the beavers grew more while working that little project.

Once we had gotten the creek filled with wood to about the level of the water’s surface, John made a run at the wall. His efforts got him onto the base of the wall, and almost out of the water, but he got jammed up while trying to climb, with the tires spinning on wet wood. Vito and I stepped in, and together, we pushed up as hard as we could on the rear end, and gained some ground, but soon hung up again. After more unsuccessful attempts, we decided to strap a harness on someone (guess who), tie it to the front end, and pull up. Meanwhile, Vito would be behind pushing up. John would be on the throttle and rocking the machine, trying to get the knobby tires to bite wood. Our efforts paid off, and soon after we had one machine on top; my turn.

Having watched John, I decided that rather than creep across the bridge and then try to muscle up the wall, I’d go full bore starting from the other side, Evel Knievel style, and keep the throttle pinned, hoping my momentum would be the key to getting up in one shot. I’d make it up, or I would not; simple. I climbed on the machine, backed up about ten feet, and had at it. The resulting chaos I look back on somewhat fondly, but in hindsight it could have been a recipe for a disaster had things gone a bit differently. Doctor Danger can be a bit reckless, sometimes. I came across our makeshift bridge on my rear tires only, as I had gunned the machine into a wheelie in front of the water. I remember the jolt at the chassis and front tires making contact with the wall, still moving forward, and standing up to lean my weight far forward. I thought I had it for a moment, but my efforts weren’t enough to overcome gravity, the wet logs beneath me, or the steepness of the wall. The engine shrieked as the front wheels spun on a slick log, and in response I pushed all my weight down hard on the foot pegs, trying to get the tires to grab. A moment later, grab they did. Unfortunately for me, the sudden grab on the wood, compounded by my having the throttle buried, was enough to violently thrust the front end of the machine skyward. As is just about always the case, when something bad happens, it happens fast. I reacted in the best way I knew how, and pushed off hard with my feet as I let go of the handlebars, trying to get clear of the wheeler. The force of the machine’s up-thrust already was hurling me backward, arse over teakettle. Then, for the second time in the past 24 hours, I found myself with my face underwater. I had flown into the creek pretty much upside-down, according to accounts related soon after, looking something like a competitive diver’s attempt at a back-flip with half pike and twist gone horribly wrong. I thanked my lucky stars when I popped to the surface, finding that three hundred fifty odd pounds of metal and plastic wasn’t jammed on top of me, keeping me subsurface. The cold water actually felt good for a moment. I looked up to see three frightened faces staring down at me. I waved that I was unhurt. I made for the wheeler again, with a low-grade hate in my eyes. “I thought you had it there for a second, Leightonâ€, John said from above, looking most serious. I cocked my head and looked at up at him hard for a second, but couldn’t help but laugh. “So did I pardner, but that there buckin’ bronco done throwed me oneâ€, I quipped back. We packed more logs for traction, and I climbed back on the wheeler, and made some progress. Being a bit more conservative on the throttle helped.



With some progress made, and now in mostly the drier wood a few feet above the creek, with the help of the lads I was able to make another few feet of progress, although I was still having problems with the front end lifting up due to the steepness. Vito fixed that problem by lending his body as ballast. With him sitting on the front rack, we were better able to keep the front end of the machine on the wood, and let the tires do their job. We got jammed up once again near the top, but after we got close enough we were able to tie a strap from John’s machine to ours, and that was that
.
We gathered ourselves up and took a quick breather, then got going once again. We traveled to several areas and did some hiking, but as had been par for the course for the trip save for the day prior, saw moose sign, but no moose. A couple hours later on another tote road, we broke for a quick lunch. I had an antelope summer sausage along, some nuts and hard candies, and John had some crackers and cheese and a six pack of soda in his 4 wheeler storage bin, and we all shared a bit of downtime, deep in the woods. After we’d all gotten our fill of snacks and were finishing up our respective bathroom and smoke breaks, John walked uphill to have a little look at the ridge across from us. I slung my rifle over my shoulder and was taking a step to join him when I saw him drop instantly to a crouching position. I did the same, quickly removing my rifle from my shoulder. I whistled softly to Vito as I scrambled up to John, who had spotted a moose some three hundred yards off along the adjacent ridge, but had lost him as he signaled for us to join him. We both got our glasses focused on the ridge, and within a minute, we had the animal in sight. Some of it, anyway; as it was thick, and what I saw were only legs. “Did you see antlers, John?â€, I whispered. “No, but I’m pretty sure it’s a bull, and he was beginning to head right at us. We’ll look him over, and if he’s any good, you kill him. But look hard, I saw two of them out there, and one might be a cow.â€

Sounded good; if the big brown mass wanted to walk right in, fine by me. I wasn’t keen on the idea of trying to shoot up to three hundred yards out there, though. Even if it looked as if I had a clear shot, the chances of hitting unseen branches or brush between where the bullet left and where it was being sent were too great for me to really want to try. I didn’t want a wounded animal on my hands. I got positioned behind a boulder and had a good rest, but John had moved and was crouching ahead of the boulder, so I went to move, not wanting to deafen him should I get a shot off. John told me not to worry about his ears. â€I’m already deaf!â€, he said with a grin, the crazy bugger. I searched for moose in my scope, but as hard as I looked, couldn’t see him anymore. Moose can blend into the woods amazingly well, but they’re not magicians, and I didn’t see anything that looked like one. I turned to ask John if he still saw him, but when I saw him scanning around the hillside, knew he’d lost sight of him too. “Damnâ€, John said. “I think they’ve taken offâ€. After waiting a few minutes and glassing some more, we began slowly creeping over to where they’d last been seen. We picked up the track, which headed up and away across the ridge. There were in fact two of them, and they were walking. We made the decision to try to catch up to them, but after some time it seemed as if they got wise to us behind them, and started moving faster, never again giving us the opportunity to lay eyes on them We’d never win a walking contest against them, and called off the pursuit. We made it back to the wheelers feeling a bit energized, if again deflated. That was two days running now we’d seen moose, and two days where we’d not been able to capitalize on the opportunities.

The rest of the day’s hunt was spent bouncing from place to place, but as dark approached, we had to start making our way back out. We were several miles off anything really resembling a road, and knew that making it back up some of the ridges and thick pockets would best be done under some semblance of light. We made good time most of the way back, with only a couple areas that I asked Airi to hop off due to safety concerns. Even the dreaded ‘wooden wall of death’ was relatively easy going the opposite direction. We would see no other critters this day, except for the one seen below. I’m not sure exactly what species of salamander the little fellow is, but took a shot of him in his impressive little outfit.



Now recall that John’s machine had been periodically overheating, and had lost the ability to run in four wheel drive. On the last mountainside we needed to run up before getting back to a passable road, John’s lack of four wheel drive began to take its toll, and spun the back wheels a great deal trying to climb the last difficult section. A lot easier getting down than up, it was (imagine that). Almost dark now, John worked as best he could to get himself and Vito to the logging road that would take us out, but what with the weight of two men, the mud and nasty, steep terrain, his machine began to complain loudly, and a mere one hundred yards shy of the road or so on a slope, I turned to watch John’s radiator blow steam and hot coolant like an angry little dragon. So much for making it out of the bush before dark...

The next three hours spent were pure hell. On top of John’s serious issue with overheating and lack of four wheel drive (not to mention no lights, remember?), he found that the battery was draining as well. He had a charger on board with him as so was able to add juice to the battery, but with the engine so hot, the fan blew incessantly, draining the battery all the quicker. As all the coolant was gone from the radiator, we had to use water from puddles to fill the reservoir back up, if we had any hope of leaving that night. There was more bad news to come shortly: the machine I was on got stuck in reverse. No matter how hard we all tried to get it to shift, it would not budge. So, there we were. Both machines were mechanically walking wounded. I could drive mine, but only in reverse. John’s had no traction and was threatening to die, explode or both. Needless to say, it looked as if we were stuck between a rock, and well…I did a quick inventory of what was in my pack; if we had to spend the night, we’d manage. It wouldn’t be too comfortable, but we’d be fine. As a side note, I always carry a pack, even on short day hunts. The one time I was in the bush and really needed it (I got lost), I’d left it in my vehicle. That night was miserable to the nth degree, but it drove home a simple reality: if I don’t bring it, it can’t help me. We all began to slow down, as fatigue from yet another day’s struggle in the Great North Woods set in. The fatigue materialized in Vito at one point as he bent back and held up a 4 inch diameter birch so I could pass under. Just as I was under it, Vito lost his grip. Held under tension like a big rubber band, when Vito let go the tree released its pent energy, and smashed me square in the face. I was not a happy chappie about that at all, but excepting my pride, was unhurt. It really did look as if we’d be staying the night, and I began making a mental checklist of what kinds of things I needed to do. Firewood, get the tarp out for a shelter, get my fire starting material ready, etc. We weren’t quite finished trying, but it was looking pretty bleak indeed.

The guy who coined the expression, “if at first you don’t succeed, try and try again†would have been proud of us that day. We all rallied together, battling fatigue. We tried a great many solutions before coming up with one that finally worked. It involved straps and a whole lot of heavy lifting. We pulled and pushed our hearts out, really. Airi directed lights and checked distances, and John steered. Vito and I gave our all, pulling and pushing, lifting and straining. With a boatload of determination and maybe a bit of luck, we got out. As we were behind spinning tires a great deal, we looked something like minstrels, and each ate a few mouthfuls of mother earth for good measure. It took us almost three hours to make that last measly hundred yards, but we got back to the road. I was prepared to drive off that ridge backwards, but Vito and John together got the gears unstuck with a trusty Leatherman tool once we got onto something resembling hard, dry ground beneath us. I led the way off the mountain, as I was the one with headlights. John said to keep the machines going fast, as it would help keep the engine cooler, and it would lessen the chance of getting hung up. “I can do thatâ€, I told him. Later Vito would tell me that he had a new nickname for Airi: ‘The Cape’. Vito explained that as he looked on from behind us coming off the ridge, all he could really see was my headlight, my silhouette on the machine and a shadowy form that seemed to flow off of my shoulders, looking like a cape swirling in the wind: that was Airi. Driving back, all around us I saw a flashlight beam cutting into the woods from behind. I asked Vito about it later, and he said, “Oh, that. The light you saw was John. He had a flashlight in his mouth, and was still scanning the woods for moose.†An hour later, some time around 10:00, we got back to John’s in pretty good spirits, happy to have actually made it out, and looking forward to a hot shower.

Almost sixteen hours we’d been at it that day. As we bid John goodnight, he said to me that if need be, he’d stay with me until Saturday night, and make it up to Maine Sunday. I told him I expected him to do whatever he needed to; there were no strings attached. I was already deeply grateful for everything he’d done so far, and had no reservations about him heading out. Vito, it turns out, was planning on staying only one more day. If we didn’t get one tomorrow, Airi and I would be on our own. I didn’t have to tell her that I’d be hunting until the last second of the last minute of the last hour; she knows me. If I didn’t get my moose, by God it wouldn’t be because I didn’t give it everything I had.

Airi decided that for Vito’s last day, she’d stay at camp and get chores done. I think she felt that perhaps we’d push a little harder if we didn’t have her to worry about. I told her that if we pushed any harder, we’d all be dead. Secretly I thought a nice long lie in bed with a fire on would be nicer for her to spend her vacation time, as opposed to running around mountains with three lunatics looking to slay a moose. She said that since we were checking out of that camp that evening, she’s take care of getting us packed and get all other chores. Did I mention that I adore that wee lass of mine?

There’d be no more four wheeling into the backcountry on the rest of the trip. John’s wheeler wasn’t in any condition for it. When we arrived at his place the next morning, he said that we’d check back where we lost those two moose from the day before. He thought that they were maybe spooked, but not running, so maybe we’d be able to pick up their trail and run them down. When we’d broken off from them, they were heading for a mountain top. John knew of another way to get up near the top by road, on the back side. His plan was to make for the top on foot, then to snoop around, hoping to find one bedded down or feeding. If we didn’t find one, we’d hike down the other side and go from there. For the first time on the trip, the forecast was not calling for an entire day of rain. We left the truck and started up a logging road toward the summit of the low mountain, looking for fresh sign. We found some, but not from the day before. John was looking for sign no less than a few hours old. He was adamant that a moose can travel a long way in a short time, so at this point in the game, felt that we’d be wasting our time with anything but the freshest sign; made sense to me. We spent the better part of the morning hiking up to and around the mountain. We were rewarded not with any moose, but the views we got hiking up and from the top looking across made it worth the price of admission alone.






Note the contrast between pictures. They were taken only two hours apart. As we hiked, the clouds and cold air rolled back in. After humping up to the top and not finding anything, John said he thought we should work down through some of the thick stuff; off we went. An hour later or so, we broke into a small clearing and came across some sign; some very, very fresh sign. “Sons of bitches!â€, John hissed. “We just jumped a big one, I’m guessing no longer than five minutes ago.†He showed Vito and I where a large moose was headed straight down off the mountain. In fairly steep terrain, the moose took giant leaps and bounds, hell bent to get away from us. We judged the distance between the tracks to be between twelve and fourteen feet; the elevation difference between the tracks high and low was eight to ten feet. I wished I could have seen that moose flying off that peak. John said, “There’s no point trying to catch that boy, guys. He’s probably still running flat-out. Something scared him good; probably us.†I sighed, and looked wistfully at the deep hoof prints and unsettled dirt, but wasn’t upset. I thought instead to myself that I kind of liked hearing about that big beast jumping down off the mountain. It made me think about what I was doing up there, and how lucky I felt. I hoped that moose and all other creatures born in these woods and on these mountains will always be there, their populations plentiful and healthy, and that there will always be hunters to chase them. We broke for lunch. We all sat alongside each other on a log on the side of that ridge, quiet for a few minutes. I felt happy to be alive, and to be a hunter.



“OK, John, what’s next?†I asked, breaking the silence after a few minutes. “Well, I figure we’ve covered the top of this hill pretty damn good. I say we keep pressing on down, hopefully catch one on down lowerâ€. I caught a look from Vito, and he looked a bit distraught, probably at the prospect of having to hump back up after getting down. He told me soon after that he’d been toughing it out, and would continue, but that his knees were really bothering him. I understood. We’d really been going full-bore for the whole week, and I was feeling it a bit too, especially in the knees and wind department when climbing. Missing a lung will do that though, I suppose.

I mentioned to John that Vito was hurting a bit, and John said that was not a problem, that Vito could drive down if he wanted and meet us at the low road. That way, John and I could cover the low face, Vito could take a break and at the same time save time for John and I, as we’d not have to climb back up later to get to the truck. And so it was. On the way down, John and I came across a massive old oak that had been felled long ago and with its weight was partially sunken into the earth. Its trunk diameter was close to five feet, and reached better I think than a hundred feet into the sky before it came down. It was a hell of a piece of wood, and I stopped to admire it and run my hands along it. John walked back to where I’d paused and said, “There was a time where there were entire forests of these, and bigger, up hereâ€. I nodded my head. We both got quiet at the thought. For maybe another couple hours we hiked slowly down, and saw no other fresh sign. John showed me some edible mushrooms that we picked, and I jammed close to ten pounds of the tender, large fungi in my pack in a ziplock before moving on. We had a slight miscommunication in where to meet Vito (read as he wasn’t where he was supposed to be), but eventually got hooked back up with him. It was getting on in the day by then, and with only a few hours left before nightfall, we decided to head back to the area where we’d spent opening day, just to have a look. I was almost surprised to see the place still crawling with as yet unsuccessful moose hunters, but not quite. Apparently some of them refuse to ‘hunt’ any other way.

We stopped and talked to a few guys, and their stories were all essentially the same: “been riding all over, seen nothing. No shots yet. Weather’s been awful, only been out three or four days this week...You guys seen the weather forecast? Tomorrow’s a wash for sure. No one in their right mind will be out.†I hadn’t seen the forecast, but it didn’t really matter to me. They could have called for a hurricane; I was going to be out hunting, no matter what; there were only two days left. John turned to me later and asked if I was planning to hunt in the morning. “Unless I die in my sleep, you bet I am.†He laughed and said that he had a feeling I would be. “Be at my place, same time as usual. I’ll leave Sunday for Maine; it’ll be fine.†I nodded and smiled, and said “OK John, you got it, and thanksâ€. Vito later thanked John for everything, and we parted ways. That night Vito packed up his gear and headed south for home and family.

PART 4

Airi and I got a motel in a neighboring town and had dinner, and got an early sleep. I again had some concern about Airi and the weather; I had watched the news and learned that it was going to be a potentially dangerous howler in the morning, with gale force winds, sleet, heavy downpours and maybe snow. She said that she’d sat out too many days already, and that she was coming with me no matter what. I couldn’t argue much with that.
I awoke in the dark to a series of loud clanging noises. It turns out the weather was downright ugly, and garbage cans were being blown about the motel parking lot amidst torrential downpours. It was about time to rise, and I asked Airi once again if she thought it wouldn’t be best if she stayed. She was having none of it. We got showered and had coffee, and got in the truck and on the way to meet John. Upon our arrival, John said that he’d gotten on the phone the night before with some of his hunting buddies, and had made some inquiries as to where people were seeing moose. None reported having seen many, save one. A friend had killed a cow in a fresh clear cut-- near the area the fish and wildlife guy had mentioned to me several days back, actually-- and that while out, had seen two other moose—bulls, and good ones. One of them was a true ‘corker’, John was told. That’s where we’d start.

Due to a week’s steady rain, getting into the area was a challenge, as the ruts in the logging road to access the area were deep and filled with water, and we bottomed out several times on rocks exposed by runoff. John took it slow and got us to our jump-off spot some thirty minutes off the tar road. The area looked very promising, and the cuttings in the area were all very new; a good thing for moose (and deer), as the young growth coming up in the cut provides excellent browse for them. We got buttoned down and zipped up, and started down into the cut. Immediately we came across fresh sign; fresh as in hours old, if that. At some point, I felt something. That something I just can’t put my finger on, but it was like a feeling of knowing something was going to happen. I looked at Airi, already soaked through in the downpours, and she said something like, “I think something’s around here; it feels-- funnyâ€. I nodded in agreement. We didn’t speak a word as we moved slowly down into an area where we could scan across the cuts. Super fresh sign covered the area. As we trod further in, a pair of crows flew up from a clearing just ahead. “I suspect that’d be that cow gut pile they’re onâ€, John whispered. As so it was. I asked John if other moose would depart an area with the remnants of one of their own, and he said that he didn’t think so, and pointed to tracks all around the gut pile, some on top of the boot prints from the hunters. The weather around then became absolutely fierce, with wind howling in gusts to sixty miles per hour or better. Several times we heard loud cracking sounds, followed by more splintering sounds and loud thumps. Trees were actually been blown down in the storm around us, and the rain stung when it hit exposed skin. It was a little unnerving to think that trees weighing a couple tons were falling around us. Once again, I was proud of Airi, who didn’t let out a peep of complaint, and continued to plod along beside me and John like a woman on a mission.

We left the gut pile area to move across to check out a low lying cut adjacent to some wet bottom lands. John had a look in his eye that I hadn’t seen before; he looked more intense, in a way I can best describe as sort of wolf-like. His eyes were narrowed, and he moved about slightly hunched, with his head constantly but slowly swiveling back and forth. But perhaps it was just the rain, which was coming down in absolute torrents. Every so often he’d stop and look through his binoculars, looking for a leg, an ear or an antler. We found an area that had been used heavily to feed, and several distinct tracks littered the area. One of them was immense. “That’d be the big boy my friends saw, I’d think. They’re in here, Leighton. You know that; I see it in your eyesâ€, John said with a smile. “You see one in here you want, you put the goddamn lead to him. If you see one you don’t want, that’s fine by me, there are more than one in here, but as you’ve seen, they won’t stick around long, and tomorrow’s the last day. You start shooting, don’t you stop until he’s down. Moose ain’t all that tough to kill, but they can go a ways after being shot, and God knows they’ll make you pay for it if they can, make straight for some nasty hell hole before they die.†I nodded. I choose sometimes to travel without a round in the chamber, especially if climbing with others with me, but this time I had a cartridge in the pipe and my rifle cradled across my chest, safety on. We had reached the bottom end of the cut, and having seen nothing, turned back to head off to the right, so we could work the other edge. John was slightly ahead of me to my right, and Airi was behind and to my left. I had just put down my binoculars from a quick scan ahead when I caught movement out of the corner of my right eye.

I turned quickly to see a bull standing just outside the tree line, some hundred and sixty yards off. I’d seen him shake his head, and the lighter color of his rack against the darkness of the trees directly behind him. He was staring right at me. “Down!†I hissed. I dropped to my stomach behind a dirt mound where a stump had been uprooted, and in what felt like one motion, whipped off my pack and got my rifle steadied on it on top of the muddy mound. I looked through the scope, set on three power magnification. There he was in my sights, looking curious, but nervous. He turned to look behind quickly, as if checking to make sure he had a clear escape route, and shook his head again, looking like maybe some rain had gotten into his ears. With the solid rest I had, I knew I could thump him without problem, but he was facing us dead on, with his front end higher than his rear, as his front legs were on a small rise. All he was giving me was a straight on shot, which I didn’t like at all, but was a shot I might have to take.

Trembling, I moved the crosshairs to his head for just a split second, then thought better of it and brought the crosshairs back down to his chest. I wouldn’t risk a head shot. I felt that at any second he was going to whirl around and disappear into the bush. Waves of desperation washed over me. This was it, what I’d come here for, what I’d worked so hard for. I put the crosshair at the base of his neck, right where it meets the chest, hoping to take out the heart, and began applying pressure. The rifle jumped in my hands as the 175 grain TBBC sped downrange. My entire focus immediately was on where the next shot would be. I jacked another round in the chamber and in a moment that seemed to move in slow motion, I saw in the scope the moose swaying and staggering backward, looking to me much like a drunken dancer trying to recover from stepping on his own feet. I squeezed again just as he got his legs back and spun for the trees. I jacked another in, and when I got back on target, the bull was busting through the tree line away to our right, headed down toward the thick growth and for the boggy mess beyond. I yanked on the trigger again, sending lead at the fleeing bull through the trees. Hitting the heart or lung was my goal, but the reality was that a hitting a shot like that would be pure luck; I was trying to clip him again and drop him any way I could before he made it into those dreaded bottoms, and was shooting simply for the center of mass moving full-tilt through the trees. I turned to John, looking for a word on what to do: should we leave him, give chase, what? He blurted out, “he’s hit hard; I saw the first one take him dead center in the neck, saw hair exploding all overâ€. I looked back to see the moose slow, and then stop. He looked back at us through the thick trees, looking wobbly. I had one round left in the rifle, and John said â€slowly walk toward him. If you get a good shot, take itâ€. At that moment, with dread I realized that I may have left the rest of my ammo in the truck in another pack. I‘d brought my dry bag to try to keep things from getting waterlogged, and couldn’t remember if I’d grabbed the ammo box or not with my other things. I walked toward the tree line with John, and we got twenty yards closer; the bull continued to stare. I noticed blood running down the inside of a back leg, and I slowly walked left to get to where I could see through a small crack in the tree line. I pulled John over so I could use his shoulder as a rest. I had the bull in the sights and was just about to touch off my last round when the animal decided he was leaving that place. With his head held down at an angle, he bolted. As if on cue, the torrential rains that had bombarded us all morning seemed to double in intensity. It was like a biblical event now, with trees and branches whipping, swaying and cracking in the storm. Water ran underfoot on top of the saturated ground in rivers and streams.

I visually marked where I’d last seen the bull, and together with John and Airi, walked slowly to the spot. I got to the area first, and saw a blood trail that was much lighter than what I’d expected. I followed the blood with my eyes, and walked behind it slowly. John stopped me to say, “he’s sickâ€, and pointed to a track that was splayed and sliding away from the other prints that ran in a fairly straight line. “The longer we wait, the sicker he’s going to get, but I’m worried about the blood trail; it’s real light, though he’s bleeding bad inside I’m sure. If we wait, we may lose the blood in this rain. If we push him and he’s still got fight in him, we’re going to push him right down into that hell hole.†I looked at John and Airi, my head swimming. I walked a few feet along the blood trail, and watched in horror as a leaf with a quarter-sized drop of blood was washed away clean before my eyes. “Problem is, with so many tracks out here, if we don’t keep on him, with no blood we may lose his trail in with all the others out here.†I ripped off my pack and turned it upside down, frantically hoping that I’d been smart enough to bring more ammo. With a sigh of relief I saw I had, and reloaded. “Let’s get after him nowâ€, I said. “We’re not losing himâ€. John nodded. I let John walk ahead a bit, and watched him work that track. He moved slowly, pointing at individual prints, turning around to look back at one, then on to the next. I could almost see his mind working out where the moose had stepped. At one point I turned to follow a track, and John shook his head. “That’s not his—our boy went this wayâ€. As we got lower into the bottom, my heart really began to pump. I was hanging on every moment, scanning everywhere. John was like half African bushman half Indian scout; he never lost the trail, even after we’d run out of blood. That’s right; the blood trail had abruptly ended.

John had told Airi to take some strips of ribbon off trees to mark the trail we’d come (I’d left my trail tape in my other pack), and looking back, you could see that while the moose was moving in a general direction, he was sort of zigzagging. “He’s hurt bad, Leighton. Don’t worry; we’re not going to lose him. You just keep that seven millimeter of yours ready to whack him again if he’s still standingâ€. I nodded grimly. We’d come almost two hundred yards when John looked up from the track, suddenly knelt and put his binoculars up. “I think I see himâ€. Already, I had my rifle up and was searching up among the trees. I didn’t see anything in the stand of pine and birch up ahead, until four small birch trees began gently swaying in the opposite direction the other trees were generally moving. That was our boy. I looked hard and through the trees and brush could just make out a head, a body and legs. The bull could go no further, and had stopped and turned to face what was chasing him. His body was quartered slightly to me, at around eighty yards. I dropped to a knee, wrapped my sling around my arm for a brace, aimed at the high shoulder and cut loose. Immediately I chambered another. The moose was still standing, and showed no sign of being hit. I got on him again and just as I fired, he collapsed. “I just saw his legs fly. Leighton, your bull is down.â€

I walked up to John and bear hugged him. “John, from the bottom of my heart, thank you†I stammered. “I’ve dreamt of hunting moose since I was a kid...You have no idea…†I was having trouble putting words together. He smiled and said, “I think I do, Leighton, and I have something to say to you. I’ve been hunting these woods for a long, long time. I’ve never, and I mean never, seen anyone that worked any harder for an animal. Many would have given up after what you’ve been through, and I wouldn’t blame them. You earned that moose. EARNED IT!†John’s words moved me. I’d never hunted so hard in my life. It was a feeling that I can’t even properly describe. Think what you may, but honestly, I was pretty close to tears. Airi came up and grabbed my hand, and together the three of us walked slowly in the rain to the downed bull. Airi snapped a few shots as we approached. He’s in the center, facing away in the first shot. Just beyond is the bog.





As we walked up, the bull thrashed on the forest floor, taking me a bit by surprise. I was about to administer another bullet, but John waved me off. “He‘s all doneâ€. That was the final thrash of a magnificent animal as he left this world. I walked around to the front and touched his eye with the muzzle, and got no reaction. He was mine. I thanked the bull in my own way for giving himself up to me, and then let out a few yells of joy. Soon after, we took a few pictures. Unfortunately, due to the heavy rains most came out blurry.





The bull was hardly the largest in the woods (I saw that one, but wasn’t able to catch him if you recall), but to me he’s absolutely perfect. The hunt over, the work began. I tagged and gutted the beast. Inside there was considerable damage, though I missed the heart with my first shot. I hadn’t taken into account that his front end was a foot higher than his rear in the heat of the moment. Due to warnings about elevated cadmium levels from the NH F&G people, I decided to leave the liver, but set the heart aside, which was about the size of a pointy volley ball. I got cleaned up a bit, made sure I had everything I’d come with, and we retreated to assemble troops and get out of the weather. John said that we’d head for his place, get some hot food in us, and then he’d get on the phone and try to get some help for us to get the animal out. John’s lovely wife Louise made us some grilled cheese sandwiches and hot drinks, and we got changed into some dry things. John then got on the phone, and inside a few hours, there were five of us back on scene, ready to get wet again.

I would come to learn that people in those parts look after one another in ways that you don’t often, if ever, see back in the city. I don’t know many people I could call on a Saturday morning during an autumn nor’easter with zero notice that would even agree to leave the house, much less agree to help drag hundreds of pounds of animal out of the woods. Getting the moose out of the woods was a bit of a challenge, and there was some excitement when I flipped the 4wheeler while dragging him on a game sled, making a sandwich of me between the wheeler and moose, but other than a few hours of sweat, with all the help we had it went smoothly enough. With the help of Hugo, Leo, Bobby, and John, we eventually got the beast back to an area where we could hook it up to a trailer. The strangest thing happened with the weather when back at the trailer, though: the skies got blue and clear for about 45 minutes, and for a few minutes a wonderful and complete rainbow stretched directly over us. Airi has since dubbed the moose ‘Rainbow’. With all she suffered through with me, she can call him whatever she likes.



The next morning Airi and I hauled Rainbow to the nearest weigh station, which was an hour's ride away or so, as after the 5th day of the hunt the local weigh stations shut down, leaving only three or four open statewide. On the ride up, we saw many scenes like the one below. On top of the nearby Mt. Washington on the day I killed the bull, the weather station recorded wind gusts to 144 mph. As I said, it was wild out there.



The bull dressed out at 640 pounds, with a live weight estimate by the field biologist at around 800 lbs plus, with an age of three and a half years. The rack’s inside spread was but 36 inches, with 8 points and no paddles, but again, I honestly couldn’t be more thrilled.

The state of NH asks that all moose hunters fill out a survey card indicating how many hours were spent scouting, hunting, how many sightings were had of which sex, etc. I had all my paperwork squared away, and when I handed it over, the woman thanked me, but upon actually looking at the card, looked at me incredulously and asked, “were you really out every single day from dark to dark—in the weather we’ve been having?†“Yes, ma’amâ€, I said with a grim smile. “I shot him on the 80th hour of the hunt, though we were out there for 100 hours or more†She shook her head, smiled and said, “Congratulations; by God you worked for your moose. The kill is way down this year. The early rut was to blame in part, but more to the point I think, lots of people just couldn’t handle the weather.†I paused for a moment, then said “Well, I’m a duck hunter, ma’amâ€. Glancing up from her paperwork, she eyed me up and down, and then said, “of course you’d be, wouldn’t you?†We shared a laugh, and she handed me my paperwork. Airi and I left and got the bull off to a butcher. I took a few minutes to examine the wounds I’d dealt to the beast while helping get him off the trailer, and while I’ll never be sure, I think what happened is that the first round entered the neck above the heart and traveled the length of the moose, exiting out of a rear ham near the tail, perhaps after ricocheting off vertebrae. That first shot broke his hip after traveling through him from stem to stern, ripping tissue apart just below his spine, which explained why he was staggering so badly. One round creased his belly, I’m guessing from the shot I took when he was running through the woods. Two other rounds hit him in the chest; I’m not sure which. A total of four bullets hit their mark; three solidly. There were no recovered bullets. I wasn’t very pleased that the animal lived as long as he did after the shot, but when I decided to pull the trigger I thought my placement was good, despite a less than ideal position. It wasn’t what I wanted, and that’s my cross to bear, but I can live with it, and learn.

By far this moose hunt was the most challenging and demanding I’ve ever been on. Very frankly, at times it was nothing short of grueling. It was also by far the most rewarding hunting experience I’ve ever been lucky enough to be a part of. My spirit was really tested on this one. I’m deeply grateful to my wife, friends John (we’ve since met up and hunted deer in Maine, with me as guest in his camp) and his wife Louise, Vito, Hugo and the guys who helped drag the beast out. I left a box of steaks for the North Country crew as a small thank you gesture after picking up the meat. My only regret is that Vito left before the hunt was over; we’d been at it together for seven days, and hunted hard for 77 hours. I got the moose on the 80th hour; just three hours into the hunt without him. Alas, that’s the tale of how I got my first moose.

Man, I just can’t get enough. But I try.

END

Kamo Gari,

Congratulations......Absolutely Fantastic!!!

Regards,
Dave

Hey kamo, awesome story and great photography, I am truly envious. That landscape was aw inspiring and great bull, by the story you, truly deserved him, great job

That is really impressive country.

Thanks for sharing.

Kyler

Thanks for the kind words, fellas. I took my first big game animal only 4 years ago, so am still admittedly very green. I make *lots* of mistakes, but try to learn from them, and try to be able to still laugh at myself. It works most of the time...

Cheers,

KG

Kamo Gari, or if I may Leighton,

Thank you.

You sir have a gift for storytelling. I thoroughly enjoyed every word of it. You definitely earned that one. You are blessed with Ari. She is a beautiful partner who you should hold onto till the rest of your days. She's a keeper for sure.

nice moose Kamo, you are going to have some tasty and healthy hamburgers

quote:

Originally posted by brianbo:
Kamo Gari, or if I may Leighton,

Thank you.

You sir have a gift for storytelling. I thoroughly enjoyed every word of it. You definitely earned that one. You are blessed with Ari. She is a beautiful partner who you should hold onto till the rest of your days. She's a keeper for sure.

Brian,

First off, yes of course you may. Second, I'm humbled; thank you for your kind words of encouragement. Thirdly, I know only too well about my beloved wife. In a freak twist of fate, once upon a time she was in fact my girlfriend, and indeed, my first love. At age 13, I first fell in love with her while living in Tokyo and attending the same school, some 13K miles from where I grew up (my Old Man was a DOD contracted war machine designer). My brother and I were unceremoniously expelled from said skoole soon after, and I lost touch with her for almost 20 years. I never forgot her. Thanks to the magic of the web, I found her, and contacted her a few years back. Turns out she'd lived in NYC for some 17 years, just 200 miles south of me in Boogie Down Boston MA. We met again soon after, and three months later in a grungy, dimly lit bar in the Lower East Side, I asked her to spend her life with me. Lucky bastard that I am, she agreed. We were married on a desolate beach on Nantucket in the dead of winter 2004. But enough of that.

Anyway, your words made me smile. Thanks Brian, and best to you and yours from us in Boston, MA (goddamnit!).

L

probably one of the best stories i've read on the internet, and many books and magazines, too! wonderful, and congratulations on the bull!

Great job!!! A well earned animal and a great story. I found myself in the woods while reading it.

Kamo,

Fantastic story, fantastic hunt, great pictures... Your wife is one in a million.

You are a very fortunate man.

Congratulations!!!

$bob$

Hey Leighton - I see you have been at it again.

Damn good story indeed. Congratulations!

Those moose steaks will taste mighty fine this winter.

Brent

Wow.....and I thought I had it tough last year when I had to walk almost an ENTIRE 10 MINUTES out of camp to get my bull....!

Congratulations! An awesome and entertaining tale. Thank you for sharing it. (more, more....)

Awesome account of your once in a life time adventure. You should think about writing as a second career .

I also like the little history of how you and Ari were reunited . It sounds like you found a special mate . Hold on to her ,she sounds very special and she tolerates hunting.

nice hunt but story is a bore

new hampshire is a boreing place to hunt

Since you're on my ignore list, I have no idea what nonsense you wrote this time, but this I do know: your mother did a lousy job raising you, Shootaway.

Thanks to the other folks for the kind words.

Cheers,

KG

Great minds think alike... he's on my ignore list too. Shootaway's a mental paraplegic of the highest order.

Leighton,

Wow...another Wow! and outstanding. What agreat story and a great set of characters...thanks for giving me a nice little "retreat" to the woods on my Saturday.

A great story and makes me think of the moose I shot two years ago in VT. My girl friend at the time was the one who drew the cow moose tag!

According to VT rules only 3 people can go on the hunt - so it was the permittee (my girlfriend), the sub permitee (myself) and a friend of ours (who was the guide) who was on the hunt.

We hunted hard for a week in rain and cold, up and down hills and were tired and exhausted, and getting a bit desperate. Our friend had to return to NY so he left on the 2nd last day of the hunt. On the very last day my fiance and I walked 3 miles to a clear cut thru some rough country and I was lucky to shoot a cow, she was with 3 bulls! I then left my fiance with the moose for 3 hours while I hiked back to the car, drove to a place where I could get a phone signal and called for a local with a horse, who helped us drag the moose out.

Oh I forgot to say that I proposed to my girlfriend on the first day of the hunt and she became my fiance and is now my wife!

I remember her joking saying the next thing we would hunt together would be an elephant! We got married a year later went to Africa on our honeymoon and the first morning I shot an elephant! I guess fairy tales do happen!

The cow moose is one of my greatest trophies and also one of the hardest hunts I have ever been on. Congrats on your moose.

It took me two days to read that but man that was a good story. I cant imagine 144mph wind. Thats unreal. We had some nasty wind during our mule deer hunt in new mexico. I saw hundreds of downed trees. But i doubt if it was even half of what you had.

Good Show

Fabulous story! You really earned that moose!
Years ago I drew a tag for the White Mtn. NF above Conway. Tough sledding without a Quad., plus I hired a bum guide and ended up hunting on my own.

In contrast to your hunt, I helped a buddy with a VT Moose hunt and it was over in 2hours! One of the easiest hunts I've been on. You just never know!

Keep the stories coming!

Great story.

Spotted Salamander

Lee

quote:

Originally posted by shootaway:
new hampshire is a boreing place to hunt

You should learn to spell "boring" because that's what your posts are. What are you, 13? Do your parents know you're online?

your the one who is name calling slug,I would not like to hunt moose in NH.I wouldn't decline a hunt there if it was free.I am not 13,but i wish i was!Don't worry about my parents you can say anything you want!

Where in my post am I name calling?

I'm sure that "Shootaway" is probably experiencing a Quebec-French to English language barrier sort of thing. What he might have intended to say was something like "I'm an immature boor, IHonda's story is great, New Hampshire is a wonderful place to hunt, and a good place to drive through on my way to my favorite beach at Ogonquit, Maine.".

Jeff

Thank you Thank you Thank you. I would like to
echo the comments of others. It was one of the best
and most entertaining accounts of a hunt I have read on the internet and I have been on it since it
was started. Your pictures were wonderful and your wife is beautiful. Thanks again for sharing the hunt!

I like it; you can take the boy out of New England, but you can't take New England out of the boy! My money'd be on P-Town, though.

As they are sometimes fond of saying in Beijing, "ah, fluck him".

I glad that you got the point of my Ogonquit Beach citation!

Didn't his Momma ever teach him that if you can't say something nice, at least be creative and articulate in your slam?

Jeff

And some people think that New Hampshire is an easy place to hunt. Bah! I know exactly the conditions you are talking about. It took me about 3 hours to read that whole story, but it was definitely worth it. The pictures and writing were excellent, and you have certainly earned that bull!

It's not the Rockies or the Brooks Range, but the White Mountains are beautiful, have some great areas to hunt, and deserve respect.

Glad to see that we have some New Englanders on board, too!

KG

Why buy hunting mags when your can read a free stroy that is much better than published ones. Great hunt and story.

that's what happens when you don't ask for the price beforehand and that's what's going to happen to me!

Wow, what an amazing hunt and story. Truly a wonderful experience. Thanks for taking the time to relate it in such a realistic manner. Much better than the stuff we all read in magazines.

Good Luck with getting him to give you a fair price Leighton! Let us know how it turns out.

Leighton you ought to post a link to this on Africa Big Game Hunting. I am sure you would win the calendar!