Sunday evening just at last light, after having spent the weekend trying to find a moose for my 15-year-old son, his first, we loaded the boat and headed home. We had gone less than a mile from the boat launch and after seeing no moose for the entire weekend we found 7! They were all legal with his tag (a special drawing tag) and he shot a huge old cow.
In a lake…
Shooting moose in lakes is foolish…
At 4AM we finally finished getting the moose loaded and headed for home.
246 lifetimes worth of moose mane is still back there by the lake…
The moose eats good, though…
Sorry for wimping out and not recovering at least a little…
art
After having hunted so long, dragging that thing out of the water, and field dressing it… And 4 AM… I wouldve said screw it too!
Glad to hear the boy got a moose! THAT is what matters!
Just shows, Hap, that you are never too much of an old **** to learn.
I shot a deer once with my bow, back when I was in college. Broadhead had come unscrewed, and when I shot, the arrow planed, flew in a big barrel roll, and stuck the deer right in the butt. Aw crap.
Deer took off down the trail towards the truck, which was parked in a log truck turnaround. If that deer had not hit the VERY last tree along the trail, fell over and died on the spot, it would have landed in the bed of my truck on the next bounce.
Turned out the arrow had severed its femoral artery and it bled out in the fifty yards it ran.
Dennis
PS we all coulda used that moose mane, you know. Go back and get it! :rolleyes:
Moose mane is usually pretty easy to come by here. We still have a lifetime supply for us saved from a moose my wife shot. I intended to save some of Riley’s moose hide, just because…
Riley keeps walking around saying, “Iwant to go hunting… For RABBITS!”
DG
I have done stupid stuff lots of times and even been lucky a time or two… But perspective can be a tough thing to recognize. As a kid just a bit younger than Riley my father and I dealt with a moose alone that ran into a bigger lake a died.
We floated a canoe down a river and portaged across to the moose in the lake. Then we cut up the moose in the lake… Which is all the detail I ever recounted until Sunday night when I realized what my old man had been up against with just a skinny kid for help.
And then the moose recovery got difficult…
At the first portage we thought the ponderous freighter canoe would float the moose and us across the shallow pond. It did not. So we mostly dragged the canoe across pond after pond until we reached the river and stashed motor.
We put the brand new '69, 6 horse evinrude on the motor mount and dropped the gas can in the back and realized the thread of life between them was missing… The gas hose was still in the rig several miles upriver. Walking back was not an option.
So we lined the canoe up. Lining is extremely hard work. It seems easy to say the keel held at exactly the right angle to the water will cause it to run right up the river and all you have to do is keep the working the line. And taking a wrap around a convenient tree will give you most of the resistance needed.
What it doesn’t begin to tell is how hard the sweepers are to negotiate. Cutting them down with a small meat saw is easier than going around most of them.
It took three full days to get the moose and canoe back to the road.
And I sniveled about Sunday… I am appropriately shamed…
art
Hap, I’m thinking this time of the year you had plenty of daylight at 4:AM. Waterlogged Moose could be kinda hard to drag tho. Cudos to the son for his kill.
Negative on the daylight thing… New moon and coming up on the Equinox in three weeks we are down to 14 hours of daylight give or take right now. It was dark as the inside of a cow Sunday night!
It is illegal to shoot a moose in water in my home province (Newfoundland)…probably due to the animals left to rot after the hunter relised the work he/she has infront of them.
speaking of moose…I could use some lower belly hair of a calf…for my hairwings
Here’s a true story. I was with a buddy when he was bow hunting for deer. I had a flintlock rifle and was hunting squirrells. In Kentucky at that time, the bow season and early squirrel season had overlap.
About noon or so, I started walking back to the truck for lunch. I saw my buddy all hot, sweaty, jacket off, shirt unbuttoned and totally out of breath. He had just drug a deer about 300 yards up a very steep brush covered hill.
I asked him why he was dragging the deer up that hill. His asnwer was to get it to the truck.
The truck was parked at the BOTTOM of the hill he just drug the deer up. When we went to get the truck, the gut pile was about 50 yards away from the tailgate of the truck.
Needless to say, he was somewhat unhappy with his wasted effort.
