The Moose Failure

This story starts on Thursday October 10th when we started to scout for the moose hunt that morning we saw a cow and calf moose in my grandfather’s brother’s field. He had told us that there had been a huge bull with the cow and calf so we kept that in mind when we were scouting throughout the next couple days. We did not see any other moose that day even though we traveled about 200 miles on old logging roads in Township 10 Region 7. That Friday we decided that we would go through The North Maine Woods gate we thought that there would be less traffic because in the area that we scouted a day before the hunt. There was a lot of bird hunters so the moose were more scared to come out to the roads because they had been seeing more trucks than they are used to seeing. We ended up seeing even more hunters. On Saturday we traveled around 200 miles so and only saw one moose so we were starting to get discouraged. On Sunday we did not do much scouting but we were able to call a huge bull in from over 500 yards. That makes a total of four moose that we saw the four days we scouted for. The rest of Sunday we spent spending time with some family that I had not seen in years.

The hunt started in Garfield Maine where on October 15th I woke up the morning of our moose hunt it was a chilly fall morning it was only 25 degrees out that morning. We had been scouting for 4 days and we had only seen four moose so we were worried that it was going to be a hard hunt. We drove to a field where we had seen a giant bull the day before but when we got there a truck had already beat us there so we had to go to another spot that we had scouted that we had called in a bull on Friday in Township 10 Region 6. By the time we got there it was already 6:10 in the morning when legal shooting was at 6:20 so we did not have a lot of time to let the moose forget about the truck sound from when we drove in. We started calling at 6:15 so if there were moose in the area they could hear it and start to come in to the call. We called a medium size bull in about 27 minutes into calling but it came in behind us the one way that we did not want it to come in that way so we quickly made a game plan so I jumped out of the truck to try and load my gun and shoot. We did not see that there was a huge mud puddle next to where we parked so when I quickly jumped out I fell face first into the mud my face was covered in mud and the moose got away. I did not laugh at this moment in the moment, but my grandparents did. The day before we had agreed that no matter what we would call for an hour but after I quickly cleaned my gun we decided to head out of that spot. Farther down on the same road on are way out we saw a huge bull but By the time I got out of the car and loaded my gun it was already in the woods and we could not see it. So at this time I was down on myself because we had not seen a lot of moose and I messed up twice in the same day and thought that I would not see another moose for a while. We went to the next spot to that we were going to call at. We called there for an hour but nothing came in to the call. Then we found another spot to call at for 30 minutes and we called in a cow and calf but we only had a bull tag so we could not shoot one of them. So we went down the road and called for about five minutes and a bull came running in I got out and shot through my first clip which is four rounds loaded up and shot two more times. I ended up killing the moose in the road.

At the moment I did not think that it was funny because I thought that I blew my chances of harvesting a moose. I was even more mad at myself because we did not stick to our plan and would have probably shot a moose much earlier in the day. Now that I shot a moose I can look back on the hunt and laugh at that moment now that I have gotten my moose. If I would have laughed in the moment It might have helped me get over missing the chance on the moose and made the time leading up to me shooting the moose that I got a little more enjoyable.

Photo By Me