This story, “I Hunted to Eat Part 3: Don’t Bet What Moose Will Do,” appeared in the July 1970 issue of Outdoor Life. Ted Updike has spent a lifetime in the bush of northern Saskatchewan or on its fringes. This wilderness trapper, who related his trapline adventures in the stories “I Was the Youngest Duck Poacher in Saskatchewan” and “I Spent 25 Years Trapping Wolves in the Canadian Wilderness,” has killed more than 50 moose and has come to know their behavior about as well as any man who has ever hunted them. Here, in the third story of his four-part series, he compares moose with other big game and tells what the moose hunter needs to do and what he can sometimes expect to happen.
IN THE FALL OF 1968 my 31-year-old son Merv and I hunted for almost two weeks in good moose country without sighting game. On the next-to-last day of the season we were driving my pickup back from our hunting cabin, 37 miles north of the northern-Saskatchewan town of Love, where we live, when we saw a fresh moose track in the dirt road.
The animal had walked the road for a way, then turned off toward a small boggy lake. There was no snow, so we couldn’t track him, but we parked the pick up and headed into the brush the way we thought he had gone.
Merv overtook him along the edge of a muskeg 200 yards from the lake. He was a good bull, mooching along only 35 yards ahead. He came to an opening in the willows, walking broadside. The shot was a push over if I ever knew of one.
Merv’s rifle was a Marlin Model 336 in .35 Remington caliber. That shell packs a wallop of close to 2,000 foot pounds when it leaves the muzzle, a good dose of moose medicine. After what happened that day, however, Merv’s wife Lynn replaced it with a Marlin .444 — as life insurance.
Merv drove his shot into the bull’s lung area. The animal staggered but did not go down. Next he spun like an overgrown angry cat — a moose can swap ends faster than a bucking horse — and came for Merv, head down, ears laid back, neck hair standing up.
I asked Merv afterward whether he thought it was a deliberate charge or whether the moose was just running hurt and blind in his direction.
“If you’d seen the way he looked, you wouldn’t ask,” was the reply. “He was mad clear to the roots of his tail, and he was coming on a dead run to get even.”
Merv didn’t have time to get the rifle to his shoulder again. He touched off his second shot from the hip. It passed under the bull’s nose and hit in the throat just back of the bell. The moose piled up as if he had run into a brick wall. Merv took exactly seven steps to where he lay.
That encounter proved something that I learned a good many years ago: moose have rules of behavior but don’t always follow them. One rule is that they are afraid of a man, but bulls are inclined to forget that if anything gets their dander up. A bull in the rutting season is as unpredictable as any animal in the woods. So is a wounded one. The hunter who thinks he knows what they are going to do is very likely to get a surprise.
Merv had another typical moose meeting in the fall of 1958. He and a hunting partner, Ralph Langford, had put up a tent as a hunting camp on the Torch River, in the country I’d trapped every winter for 25 years. It was all roadless bush when I was there, but by the time Merv and Ralph established their camp, a truck road ran in there.
They drove into the area in a pickup but got stuck crossing a muskeg. They worked until dark without getting out, finally unrolling their bags under a spruce for the night. It was raining, but they had no choice.
While jacking up the truck shortly after daylight the next morning, they heard a terrific racket a half-mile from the road. It sounded as if men were banging on trees with planks, and the hunters quickly concluded that it was two bull moose settling differences over a cow.
Merv and Ralph started for the noise through thick windfalls. Things quieted down before they got there, but they could still hear grunting and an occasional clacking of horns. Merv was up on a windfall five feet off the ground when he saw a medium-size bull 60 yards away.
His shot hit behind the shoulder too far back, and the moose rounded a big poplar and came for him without pausing, smashing through windfalls as if they weren’t there. A second shot in the neck had no apparent effect. But then Merv heard blood bubbling in the bull’s throat as he breathed, and he fell dead 35 yards away.
The two partners had just finished butchering the kill when they heard grunting and horns rattling in the thick willows of a slough 100 yards off. Next they saw a big rack of antlers above the brush, moving toward them at a fast walk.
When the moose reached the foot of a hill at the slough’s border, just 30 feet from them, the men got their first clear look at him. He was a much bigger bull than the one Merv had killed.
As the moose started up the hill, Ralph let him have it behind the shoulder. It took two shots to floor him for keeps, and by that time he was almost in their laps.
Neither man thought this bull intended to pick a fight. Every now and then he had grunted and tossed his head as he walked, and they believed he was looking to wind up his fight with the smaller bull. That was likely true. But with a bull moose under those circumstances, you can never be sure.
My admiration for moose as game animals is close to unlimited. I killed my first one in 1922, shortly after I homesteaded a quarter-section of wild land north of the Saskatchewan River, 70 miles east of Prince Albert. I killed him — and every moose I have taken since then — for food.
I have kept no tally, and I honestly don’t know how many moose I have shot. But I know the total is more than 50.
Most of the meat my family and I have eaten during the last 45 winters has been game — deer, moose, elk, or caribou — and of the lot moose has played by far the biggest role. Moose meat stuck to my ribs many a week on the trapline when without it I’d have gone hungry. And it has fed my dogs too. I figure I owe the moose tribe quite a debt of gratitude, both for feeding me and for the sport they have supplied.
In the early years I helped more than one homesteader’s family through the winter by knocking over a moose for them if the man of the house lacked the experience or ability to do it himself. Technically, killing a moose for someone else was not quite legal. But in those days in our part of Canada, the homesteader and his wife and kids ate moose meat or no meat at a:11, and it was common practice in the settlements to help the other fellow. If our game wardens knew about it, they looked the other way.
There were times when people repaid the favor and gave us moose. But if a settler
started selling game, that was another matter. The game wardens really cracked down then, and even the bush trappers would run a market hunter out of the country.
On top of the moose’s greatness as a game animal and on the table, a big bull moose is to me the most majestic thing that walks the game trails of this continent. I even think he’s graceful.
I recall a trip that my stepson Ralph Meyers made with me over part of my trapline the fall he was 14. We spent a night in one of my cabins on Falling Horse Creek. I stepped outside in the early morning, and there, sauntering regally along between the cabin and a thicket of small spruce 30 yards away, was the most handsome bull I had ever laid eyes on. And he had the biggest rack I had ever seen.
He saw me and stopped. I inched back to the cabin door and spoke quietly to Ralph: “Want to see a nice moose?”
The boy came out on tiptoes, but there was no need for caution. That bull was no more afraid of us than we were of him. He turned his head to watch, just 40 feet away, and it seemed from his behavior that he had never seen a man before.
His brownish-black coat shone like satin in the morning sun. His antlers, wide enough for a grown man to lie across, were like polished brown ivory. And behind him the green spruce thicket and the glinting ribbon of Falling Horse Creek framed him like a picture. I never saw a prettier sight.
At the end of a full minute he walked ahead 20 yards, stopped and looked back, then trotted out of sight.
Of the four game animals I have hunted over the years – deer (mostly whitetails), elk, moose, and caribou deer are the wariest and smartest. Moose rank No. 2 for brains. Compared with either of them the elk is a push over. And the caribou is so different in habits and behavior from the three others that it’s hard to make a comparison.
A moose’s hearing is as good as that of any animal in the bush, deer and bear included. One of the best moose hunting tricks I know takes advantage of that fact. I learned the trick from Cree Indians many years ago.
“If you can’t get good shot, don’t shoot,” an old Cree told me. “Carry little stick,” he added, holding up a dry twig about the length and thickness of a pencil, and went on to explain.
If yoµ see a moose within 50 yards but can’t get a clear look at it for a shot, break the stick. Be ready to shoot right away. Unless wind interferes, the moose will hear that twig crack the way you hear your alarm clock go off, and his head will come up in a hurry. Even if he can’t locate you he’ll be too suspicious to stay put for more than a second or two. But that’s your chance if you take it fast enough.
That little ruse has put moose steaks on my table several times.
However, those same sharp ears mean that if you are trying to get up close to a moose for a shot in thick cover, you have to move about as noiselessly as smoke drifting through the willows. If at 50 yards he can hear you break a twig intentionally, he can also hear one break under your feet by accident.
Smelling ability? Moose have a nose as keen as a deer’s, and they make more use of it.
If you come on a moose in a place that’s too thick for shooting, more than half the time he’ll make a circle down wind, trying to get your scent and find out what he heard or saw, before he clears out. I never knew a deer or elk to do that.
The eyesight of big game is a subject that has provoked no end of argument.
Bears, for example, are supposed to be nearsighted and pay little attention to things that don’t move, including hunters. I can’t agree.
I have always prided myself on seeing game before it saw me, but with most of the bears I have encountered, the reverse was true. I believe they spot a man first about nine times out of ten. They are as crafty at keeping out of sight as any animal I know. Part of that ability is hearing and smell, but their vision can’t be so bad as some hunters believe.
As for the four members of the deer family, deer have the best eyes of all. I rank elk next. Moose and caribou, relying on sight alone, rarely recognize a man for what he is until he moves, especially at a distance. Even at close range, caribou, if their ears or nose don’t warn them, may look straight at a man without becoming alarmed.
While walking my trapline around a lake one winter day, I came to a deep ravine with a very thick stand of young spruce in the bottom. Earlier, I had cut a trail through that spruce just wide enough for a man.
I started down into the ravine, and before my head dropped below the rim I saw six or eight caribou coming toward me along my trail a few hundred yards ahead. They were feeding and traveling in characteristic caribou fashion, and they had not noticed me.
I walked down to the bottom of the ravine and halfway through the spruce thicket. Then I stopped and waited.
After a few minutes the caribou came into sight at the top of the slope ahead. They paused and looked around. Then one came trotting down, followed by another and then a third, coming single file on my trail.
The lead animal walked to within 10 feet of me. There he found his way blocked, but he certainly didn’t recognize the motionless obstacle in front of him as a man. He and the two others behind him stopped, and all three stood there. I might have been a stump for all the concern they showed.
I stared the lead bull in the face for at least a minute without upsetting him in the least. Finally I swung an arm in sudden movement. He blasted out a loud snort, wheeled, and plunged to ward the rim of the ravine, and the whole band went tearing off in a cloud of snow.
I have read many times that animals are color-blind, but that’s a theory I never could accept.
Jack Robinson, a fur buyer from the town of Nipawin, came out to my camp on the Torch River one winter for a caribou hunt. Somebody had told him that if you see caribou at a distance and they don’t run, you can squat down and wave a red rag, and their curiosity will bring them within range. He brought along a small Canadian flag, hoping to try the trick.
He didn’t get the chance, but after he left I stuck the flag up on a short pole in the center of a big open bog. I was away for a week on my trapline, and when I got back the snow was tracked up like a barnyard for 200 yards around that flag. Moose, elk, and caribou had all visited the place, and I still believe it was the color that attracted them.
After a few minutes the caribou came into sight at the top of the slope ahead. They paused and looked around. Then one came trotting down, followed by another and then a third, coming single file on my trail.
I tested a white rag along a game trail in about the same kind of place later and left it there for a year, but no animal ever came near it.
I said a while back that caribou be have differently from deer, elk, or moose. They are forever on the move, for one thing, and that makes them hard to get the best of. They travel faster than a man does, even if they don’t know they are being followed.
I have watched caribou many times when I was not interested in killing one. The leader will stop for a bit of moss, and the others will pass him. He trots to catch up, and about then an other one stops. They keep passing each other that way, making a steady five or six miles an hour, until they take a notion to lie down, and they can be anything but easy to overtake.
If you hunt to eat, as I did during all my trapline years and many times on the homestead, you have to get good at it or go hungry. I soon learned that the secret of hunting success is to know what an animal is going to do before he does it. But first of all, of course, you must find him.
I recall a moose hunt I made for a homesteader named Johnson in the winter of 1929. He had come up with his wife, four children, and a nephew from southeastern Saskatchewan, where there was no timber and no big game, and he knew nothing about hunting. They had filed on a claim but did not have buildings on it, and for the first winter they moved into an empty place that belonged to my sister’s husband. With seven in the family, they were hard up for meat by February, so I undertook to get them a moose.
Snow was two feet deep, and I knew there wasn’t much use to look for game anywhere but in heavy timber, where there was shelter. I found the kind of place I was looking for along the border of a willow-and-alder flat. In such a place moose usually lie down in the edge of the timber when they finish feeding. But with deep snow and thick brush, there wouldn’t be much of a moose showing except the head.
I walked very slowly (if it takes an hour to move a quarter-mile at such a time, that’s all right) and kept a sharp watch ahead. Finally I saw a young bull get up from his bed. There was no wind. He had smelled me on shifting air currents but did not know where I was. I watched while he looked to both sides and put his nose into the air in one direction and then another, trying to locate what had disturbed him.
When he seemed about ready to take off I put a bullet into his heart region. He lifted out of there in a hurry, ran a short distance, and swung back, giving me a second chance. I shot, and he plowed the snow for a few feet, reared up, and fell dead.
Afterward I overheard two members of the homesteader’s family talking. They wondered how it was that they had hunted moose at every opportunity for weeks without making a kill, while I went out and got them one in half a day.
“He’s a bush man,” one of them concluded. “He knows where to look.” That sums up the first requirement for any hunter.
The best way to find game-and the easiest way to get within range-is to locate feeding areas and then look for trails leading from one to another.
If you find two lakes fairly close together, there is sure to be a game trail connecting them. There are also likely to be main trails where a long ridge or hogback ends near a stream or lake; game travels them when coming from the high land to the water to drink. And there are sure to be game crossings along creek and river banks too.
Once you have located a heavily used trail, find a place to hide downwind, make yourself comfortable, and wait. Such hunting calls for patience, but you’ll make a kill quicker and easier than if you tramp the bush.
Because I violated that rule, I failed to shoot a pair of bulls that I’ll never forget.
It happened the winter my partner Joe Johnson, his wife Vera, and I drove three dog teams in to Big Sandy Lake: We were critically short of meat at the time, for ourselves and the dogs, and I wanted a moose about as bad as I ever had in my life.
I was hunting by myself (I have never liked company when I really need to make a kill; one man makes less noise than two). I found a game trail crossing the North Mossy River, circled, and cut two fresh moose tracks going up a high ridge. From the ridgetop I could see where the tracks led into a thick stand of spindly birch. No tracks came out.
The thicket, as dense as the quills on a porcupine, covered about two acres. I’d have to get within 20 feet for a shot. The thing to do, I knew, was to sit down and wait them out. The day was bitterly cold, but I could have built a little fire and made out all right.
Instead I got impatient and went into the thicket, parting the trunks to get through. But the tops of the trees were frozen, and they rattled no matter how careful I tried to be. At the end of a half-hour I found two moose beds, still warm, but the moose themselves were gone. I hadn’t even heard them leave.
The most exciting hunt I ever had was one Merv and I made in 1961.
If I needed any evidence of the ugly disposition of bull moose in rutting time, that hunt supplied it. It was the only time in my life I’ve ever had a moose hunt me.
We drove to the end of the road on the Torch River, put a boat in, went up river a mile or so, and pitched a tent. Merv used a call for an hour after supper but got no answer, and at dark we turned in.
We had been in our bags for about 15 minutes when we heard horns rattling and brush breaking across the river. It was plain that a very annoyed moose was headed our way, and the Torch was only 100 feet wide there. It wouldn’t any more than slow him down. We shone a flashlight across, and there was a big bull, standing in plain sight at the water’s edge. Here was an animal spoiling for a fight. He started to grunt, prance back and forth, whack his horns against the brush, and pound his front feet on the ground.
Merv and I got a big fire blazing in a hurry, and we had to keep it going all night, taking turns feeding it and dozing a little. The moose never went more than a few yards from the river. He kept up his grunting and splashing, and why he didn’t cross I still don’t know.
We were sure we’d kill him at day light. But there were bad forest fires in the area, and when morning came smoke hung over the river in a cloud so dense we couldn’t see the far bank.
A little later we heard the bull bellow on our side of the river, and we went after him right after breakfast. But we could see only 50 or 60 feet be cause of the smoke. We hunted him till noon — stopping to call, sitting for a half-hour, moving on, and calling again. He didn’t answer, and we didn’t see him again. I suppose he had figured things out by then and knew it wasn’t a lady moose that was trying to lure him. That affair had an amusing sequel. When Merv and I got back to our truck we found two hunters who had just come out of the bush. One of them had a strange story to tell. He had followed a moose that whole forenoon and couldn’t understand its behavior. He’d hear it call, try to get close, and then hear it again off in an entirely different direction.
We didn’t tell him that he had been following a couple of hunters making moose talk.
In 1960 Merv and I tangled with the toughest moose I ever had anything to do with. We had separated, and I’d gone after a deer. Merv saw this bull standing in poplars 60 yards off and put his shot into its neck but missed the spine. The animal fell after running 100 yards but got back on his feet.
We followed that bull for the rest of the afternoon. He would lie down, and we’d wait and give him time to stiffen up. But each time we got close he’d jump and move out. Finally Merv got another shot as the bull lay in thick jackpines facing away. But the shot only raked him along the side of the head, and he boiled up and came at us with blood in his eye. A third shot turned him at 20 feet, and he went out of sight.
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We followed him three or four miles farther before dark, and next morning we went back and took the track again. Merv finally finished the job with a bullet through the lungs.
That bull must have been 15 years old if he was a day. It had taken four shots from Merv’s Marlin to kill him, and even the hamburger from that bull was like ground rubber.
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