Home > Hunting Adventure of the Month

Hunting Adventure of the Month

Moose in the Mountains
A hunt in the unspoiled British Columbia wilderness.
by Ron Spomer

A moose wallow will fool you, first time. It looks something like a whitetail scrape, just a muddy patch stinking of urine, sometimes with a track in it, more often smoothed by rolling shoulders. We found plenty of them in wet meadows and willow sloughs on the mountain flanks above camp. That first afternoon the British Columbia sun beamed happily, if uncharacteristically, on October woods, the willows already naked, the dwarf birches barely clinging to their last rusty leaves, the sedges yellow. It was late fall at this latitude, but the temperature suggested summer. It wouldn’t last.

“Lots of sign. Let’s try a call,” Dustin whispered. The twenty-two-year-old carried himself like a seasoned wilderness guide, but he looked like he should be dating someone’s teenage daughter.

“We’re gonna call here,” I relayed to my hunting partner, Drew, when he fetched up behind me with his guide, Kent. “Lots of sign, eh?” I indicated the tips of the willows, cropped like so many suburban hedges.

“It’s like a moose feed lot! Did you see those tracks? Hoofs like snowshoes.”

Kent led Drew slightly higher and to our right. They’d watch an avenue to the northeast. Dustin and I covered a 150-yard swath of meadow to the northwest, dense pines shadowing its edges. “They’ll be in range soon as you see them,” Dustin explained. “Give me time to size them up. They all look big when they’re this close.”

The kid clamped his hands over his nose and mouth and began moaning like a B-movie ghost with a cold.  

“Hey, I see one,” Dustin said.

“Already? Where?” I half raised my rifle, scanning the meadow edges.

“Across the valley in the burn. See that big white rock?”

The rock was two miles away, and beneath it were two sets of moose palms. Big ones, too, antlers flat and broad and long like sheets of plywood. “We can get them.”

We were making good time down the mountain, striding through a burned forest black with carbon contrasting with the yellow of wet meadow sedges, when moose interrupted. Cow, calf, small bull in velvet, bigger bull in hard antler, dead ahead. I whistled and stopped our crew. Pointed. We crouched, raised our binoculars, conferred. Too small. They moved up the mountain we’d just descended.

“We’re still good. Let’s get over there,” Dustin nodded, pointing up the far slope with his chin. It looked easy until we hit the beaver ponds, pearls on a necklace of silver stream lacing the valley floor. The ice was just thick enough to give hope, and just thin enough to give way. The sheet sagged, broke, and Dustin splashed through. We followed in turn, quickly so the water couldn’t work its way between our Gore-Tex pants and boot tops. Then it was up the dry slope, black dust erupting.

“Cow,” Kent said as we fetched up behind him like sheep. “Looking right at us.”

“Probably what those bulls were waiting for,” Drew said.

“Probably right behind her,” I added. “Get ready. They could pop out anytime. We’re gonna get us a double header, buddy!”

I like to sound confident when I am, and this time I was. How could we miss? A cow was standing where two bulls had been lying an hour earlier. The wind was in our favor, and we were deep in the wilderness where human pressure is rare if not unheard of. It was a slam dunk. So we waited. And watched. The sun slipped behind the mountain. Dusk descended. The cow moved nothing more than her head, and rarely. The only bull that showed was walking away, far to the east, topping a far ridge bristling with fire-burnt snags. Drew saw him trailing another cow. We’d been duped by a diversionary female. Near twilight she finally sauntered off the ridge and crossed below us. The second bull wasn’t with her. It was a long hike back to the tents in the dark, through soggy sloughs, stepping over fallen timber, getting jabbed by stobs.

The Magic of Moose Hunting

Moose, regardless of the subspecies, have never been Harvard material. A bit dense, perhaps, but mostly too big and isolated to feel threatened by the odd, puny human that enters their domain. Grizzlies, wolves, and cougars they know to fear, but Homo sapiens? The few times we enter their space we’re either no threat (Wow! Look at the moose! Click.) or they’re dead. (Bang.) Where’s the education in that?

And that’s part of the magic in moose hunting. Who hasn’t dreamed of discovering a wilderness the likes of which Lewis & Clark visited in 1805? Who wouldn’t want to hunt an Eden where game has been living for thousands of years largely unexploited by humans? It’s a hunter’s paradise, and northern British Columbia is the place. Classic mountain wilderness. Snow-capped peaks stacked upon snow-capped peaks, all stitched together by seams of conifer forest laced with ribbons of deciduous brush, dark rivers, babbling brooks, and lakes reflecting the Navy sky. You find your roots in places like this, epiphanies like a surprise flock of oldsquaw ducks all decked out in black-and-white formal attire, bobbing and splashing in the silver waves of a lake you could scoop in your hands and drink. You find golden grizzly hairs stuck in the sap of fir trees head high. Wolf prints in the mud. Hawk owls gliding from spruce top to spruce top. Mountain goats like patches of unmelted snow on the dirty brown of dead tundra. And air so quiet, so vast you can hear the Earth breathe.

Unless Drew falls asleep first.

“Wake up and roll over,” I said, elbowing him.

“What? Huh? Is it time to get up already?”

“No. I haven’t even gotten to sleep yet. You’re snoring too much.”

“I do that sometimes.”

“I noticed. You’d think, with all those horses, they could have provided two of these little backpack tents.”

“At least they brought one for themselves. Could you imagine sleeping in the same tent with them? I don’t think they’ve taken a bath in a week.”

“A month is more like it.”

Odoriferous or not, Dustin and Kent glassed diligently each morning while Drew and I nursed the fire and breakfasted. By the time we finished, they usually had a moose or two in sight. Always across the big valley--three to four miles of matchstick burnt timber. We saw many bulls, several good ones, but never on our side. By the time we humped across, they were usually gone.

“It went up and over the mountain while you were crossing that beaver pond,” Kent would say, having stayed behind to watch our progress. Or, “You walked right past him! Didn’t you see him? He was right there in those willows.” Trouble was, there were willows everywhere, and plenty of divots, dips, holes, and hideaways. Dustin cow-called, but the bulls would not respond so late in the season. One yearling came in, grunting happily.

One close call came during lunch. We’d crossed the valley yet again, still-hunted and cow-called and grunted, searched high and low in a pocket of spruce where Kent had seen a good bull disappear after breakfast. We found nothing. It rained and snowed, the wind bringing hints of North Pole.

“Let’s get out of this wind and make a little fire,” Dustin suggested. “He must have slipped out.” The flames were dancing happily and we were breaking dead timber when a bull, assuming we were another bull, snorted to the top of the ridge. There it stood, not 100 yards away, looking down its bulbous nose at us as we stood aiming armfuls of dead spruce branches.

The following morning we hiked uphill, back to our first-day wallows and beyond, hoping to find a bull in the upper reaches of timber, just under the alpine tundra.

“Kent is waving. He’s got something!” Drew said as we sat catching our breath. Dustin had crossed the valley to glass back to our side. Between the two of them they felt confident in finding a bull. And it appeared they had.

“Bull with a cow at the head of this drainage,” Kent said when we scampered up to him. We’d agreed that Drew would have the first shot opportunity, as this would be his first North American moose.

“Load your rifle. Get ready to shoot. He’s just over this little rise. Come on. Crawl up there.” Drew cradled his little Ruger Frontier rifle and began to crawl. Chambered in the potent, short-action .338 Federal for quick handling in heavy cover, the rifle would now have to shoot some 250 yards across an open basin. I held back, slowly standing as Drew bellied forward until I saw the moose in the short alpine firs. Kent raised his binocular to call the shot. Drew leveled the little rifle and fired, then fired again. The whump of impact bounced back. The bull trotted downhill and toppled. A cow and calf ran off.

We’d finished taking pictures and were contemplating a tough butchering assignment when Dustin came striding up. “I spotted him just before you guys crawled up and shot,” he said.

“Where were you?” I asked.

“Other side.”

“And you made it back here already!” The kid was tough. So we let him do most of the butchering and moving of quarters. They were huge, heavy quarters that would make delectable winter meat for at least two families. The tenderloins fed us for two nights.

“Now we get yours, buddy,” Drew said.

Chasing King Bull

An hour later we saw him. “There he is,” Dustin said. “Far side. The highest meadow.” There, perhaps four miles away, stood the moose of mooses, King Bull, master of the universe. Even at that distance its palms were obvious to the naked eye. In the spotting scope it looked as if it had run its head through a billboard, each antler seemingly as tall as the bull itself.

“How can he hold those up?” Drew asked.

We started in the dark next morning and were well up the far side by first light. A good bull jumped in the willows and trotted off. Then it looked back. “Take him,” Dustin urged.

“Is it the one?”

“No. But it’s big. Big enough.”

Not for me. I’d seen the best. We kept climbing, sweating in the damp morning air, breaking out on top before the sun. Strips of wet meadow alternated with dark timber. Droppings littered tufts of grass. Isolated willows were nipped short, their twigs blunt, some nearly as thick as a pencil. We worked our way down a grassy avenue, hugging treeline, hoping to see the moose first, but ready for a running shot if we didn’t. A lake emerged under a roll of ground ahead. A big, dark deer ran from the lakeshore toward the forest—a cow.

“Be ready. There’s gonna be a bull behind her,” Drew whispered. There wasn’t. We eased around the lake, through a band of conifers and into another meadow. “This is where he was. Last night. Standing right here. There’s where I shot my moose.” Drew pointed across the vast valley to a high tundra basin where we could almost hear ravens croaking happily. Then he pointed to big tracks in the grass, a faint path through the sedges before us. “He walked right across there.”

“The time/space continuum: Right space, wrong time.”

We hugged the meadow edge and still-hunted, grunted, cow-called. We worked back around the lake, following moose trails up a bordering ridge where the view alone was worth our long hike.

“This is the place,” Dustin said. “We can see off both sides.” He sat and uncorked his tripod. Drew cleared a perch overlooking the north side. I trimmed a branch blocking my view to the east meadows. We were set.

The moose weren’t.

“We’ll have to leave soon or it’ll be dark,” our guide suggested after sunset. Of course. Right at the magic moment when the wood pixies came out and the bulls with them. But we faced nearly two hours of hiking to reach camp. It took nearly three as we tripped over unseen roots, fell into camouflaged holes, and got slapped by willow whips. A golden flicker of firelight guided us like the Star of Bethlehem until we dropped under an intervening ridge. Then all was black under cloudy skies, the willows unending, the bogs half frozen, ice breaking one step, holding the next until we were walking like zombies, hungry, nearing exhaustion.

And then we smelled wood smoke--glorious, warm, welcoming wood smoke. We dumped our packs beside the cheery fire, half stripped to dry our sweat-damped clothing, wolfed half-broiled chunks of tenderloin and gulped cup after cup of Gatorade. Drew was too tired to snore that night, or I was too tired to hear him.

On our sixth day we went back over the mountain. The big burn had beaten us. A wrangler from base camp on the lake had brought horses around to pick up Drew’s moose.

“We can hunt goats on our way over the top,” Dustin said. “There are some good moose meadows below the lake, too.” The hike up and over was stiff, the wind cold, but Drew fairly skipped along, picking up caribou sheds one after another, casting off the smaller for the bigger until he was laboring under an armload of ancient bones.

“You can’t get all those home,” I laughed.

“I know. But I’d like to! Look at some of these.” They were fine antlers, heavy, long, wide, and many-tined. Drew sawed off a palmated bez for a  souvenir, abandoning the rest to the ground squirrels.

We found no mountain goats, but Kent spotted another huge moose just below base camp. We couldn’t have hit him with a shoulder-fired missile. I was all for charging off the mountain and at least trying to intercept him, but while we plunged, the moose sauntered and was soon out of sight, far down the valley. It was another hour before we reached the lake.

It started raining, continued all next day, then turned to snow with temperatures in the teens. The bulls would move and stand out like lumps of coal. We hiked far downstream, checking willow meadows and lovely beaver ponds rimmed with sedges. It was Christmas card scenery, and perfect moose habitat. Someone should have told the moose.

And that’s how it ended: with a whimper instead of a bang. With one bull instead of two. “It wasn’t supposed to go like this,” Drew said as we huddled round the fire that last night. “We were both supposed to get moose.”

“Guess they didn’t read the script.” But they had. The moose knew their part and had played it perfectly, denizens of the wilderness wandering freely, exciting us with their potential, humbling us with their elusive nonchalance as, without really trying, they avoided our best attempts to capture them. We’d had our chances, played the game by our rules and theirs in the most beautiful arena in the world--the untrammeled mountain wilderness. Already it calls me back.

For more information about this hunt, contact Canadian Mountain Outfitters.

More hunting adventure stories