Moose hunting in remote places
By Jim Shockey
Experimental hunts have always drawn me like a moth to a burning bright light bulb. I’m not sure why, especially since most of the experimental hunts I’ve been on have resulted in about the same amount of satisfaction as the moth gets from the bulb; circle and circle and circle until you are totally exhausted and then call it quits.
Last fall I decided to try just such an “experimental” hunt in a new part of my Yukon Rogue River Outfitting area. The problem was, I needed the right hunters, hunters with some amount of “explorer” blood coursing through their veins, hunters who would understand that if the hunt, for whatever reason, turned out to be a bust, it was the price they would pay for playing the game.
We ended up with a group of seven, including my nearly 80-year old father, Hal, joining us as the official camp kindling maker and water boiler.
Flying in to the main camp, we found it in disarray, unused in years and nearly destroyed by a grizzly. The only thing the grizzly didn’t bite, claw or break, was the eight wheel drive Argo Avenger that we’d flown in at great expense the year before, a forethought, dropped there just in case we ever planned to hunt that area. This mean machine would be our workhorse, there to bring any moose back to the main camp so that the meat and antlers could be flown out on the floatplane.
On the first day of the Rue brother’s hunt, Rod was the chosen shooter and honestly, I do not think we walked more than 20 minutes from camp before we spotted a big bull. Rod touched the trigger and the first bull moose of our experimental hunt was on the ground before noon on the first day.
We walked back to camp, fired up the Argo, and had the bull back to the floatplane dock by midafternoon and winging it back to civilization by that evening! Over barbequed tenderloins that night, we couldn’t help but wonder if we were just “one time lucky”, or if we were on a roll.
With Bart, we pushed the envelope, pushed back the unknown, and when we crawled over the last ridge and first set eyes on the valley that we planned to hunt, I was awe. I did not take a picture of that place; no photo could ever do justice to the magnificence before us and somehow it just didn’t seem right to even try to capture such a sight and copy it on a 4x6 print. No, it seemed to me that it was a place that should never be photographed, it was sacrosanct, a spiritual place, and a place of worship. As if in confirmation, three caribou bulls suddenly appeared above us. Where had they been? And just as suddenly, there were two cow moose standing directly below. None of us spoke, none of us dared to. We knew it was a gift from the One for whom words were not necessary to express our appreciation.
We pushed on that afternoon, further into that magic place. Late in the afternoon we saw the unmistakable double flash of white. Bull! None of us questioned whether we would go after the bull, even though to do so would mean a long cold night quartering and skinning the huge animal if we were lucky enough to get it.
At my first cow call, the bull started coming hard, closing the distance so quickly we barely had time to set up. At 20 yards, the bull’s vitals were still hidden in the six-foot tall alders. His antlers were not! Massive and white, they towered over us. Finally, at 12 yards, the bull gave Bart the two-second opportunity he was looking for. The arrow flashed through the bull’s ribcage and we had our second huge bull moose.
With the first segment of our experiment over, it was time to take my father out to see if there was a bull willing to commit suicide. Dad had already been in camp for nearly two weeks and in one of the remotest parts of the world. I was beginning to feel the need to get him back home, or at least somewhere closer to hospitals and help. Not that he wasn’t happy where he was, but he only sees out of one eye, is missing a foot or so of his innards, gets dizzy and has no balance when he walks and suffers from a chronic and very loud cough. In my opinion, fun is fun, but the quicker we could get him a moose, the better. Quick, unfortunately, is not a word that one can realistically apply to my father. The first morning of his hunt took until the afternoon to get started. Eventually though, we got him lifted and loaded into the Argo and headed off in search of what would undoubtedly have to be a mentally challenged bull moose. Two hours later, we stopped, left Dad in the Argo, and climbed up a small knob that gave us some vantage. I called, and 30 seconds later, there were two enormous white paddles sticking out over the now leafless grey alders a mile down the valley. If we were going to get an octogenarian hunter close to that bull, we were going to need every minute of daylight we had left.
My father, my hero, closed the distance, a single 80-year old trudging step at a time. He put one foot in front of the other, for the most part at least, and kept on. One loud coughing fit after another, he didn’t give up. He tripped, he stumbled, he cussed, he managed to catch his pocket or his sleeve on every branch of every mountain alder between his bull and us, and yet he never quit. Before you can say “Thank-you-Lord-for-providing-us-with-this-less-than-brilliant-moose,” we were standing within 150 yards of the bedded bull.
It took my father a shot or maybe two to do the deed; and when the shooting was over, he was the proud hunter of the largest bull moose he had ever taken in his life, a huge 65-inch wide brute replete with one bullet hole through a tine! Dad actually smiled, a rare display of emotion!
It was pitch black and 3:00 a.m. when the last of our group successfully got his moose. Again, thanks to the Argo, they were all winging their way to the butchers the next day.