Moose Snot and Grizz Cubs...

[squirrel]

No doubt a lot of people are out there with way too much time grating on their hands right now. A long story, of a long hunt, to occupy you for this long spring.



In the late 80’s when I started making some decent money I made a decision to start applying in some of the neighboring states for some of the hard to draw species. This would give me some additional chances to go on a hunt for sheep, goats, and moose. I wanted to try for WY sheep very badly and sent off for the packet of non-resident information. Almost as an afterthought I sent an additional $750 for Shiras moose also. The application asked for a “type” of license, in addition to species and unit, this confused me a little and when I got drawn just a few weeks later my first thought was I had screwed up and drawn a nonresident cow moose tag by mistake. This proved to be incorrect and I was a bull moose hunter on my very first attempt.

I was very excited about this and immediately headed off with my girlfriend on a camping trip in the late spring to the unit I had drawn near Jackson Hole. We pulled in to set up camp in the dark next to a creek and early the next morning I let her sleep in while I was off to see the surrounding country. I was very excited to find some “moose eggs” and some old tracks in the willows around the creek I hiked up. When I got back to camp I found my girl had just watched two young bulls walk 10 yards from the tent while she held the dogs. We followed in the direction they had gone and easily caught up with them and they were in no way concerned about us from only 50 yards away as we watched them. I immediately decided to chase these semi-tame critters with a bow, since it would be so easy!

We spent the rest of the long weekend scouting the areas’ roads and trailheads and going on a few short walks up trails all signed to beware of the grizzly bears. Special camping restrictions were in force throughout the unit, specifically food storage rules. We had no issues as we were “car camping” and I figured I could always out run my darling if push came to shove, as long as I pushed and shoved first… We saw no bears, just a lot of elk and beautiful country, but no more moose.

I set up to take the entire season off from work- 2 full months, counting the early archery only part of the hunt. I got everything finished up and was able to head out with my dog, truck, ATV, and camping trailer on about 8-27 for a 9-1 opening day. I set up my camping trailer in the geographic center of the unit and figured if I had need I would spike out to the outer edges of the unit in a tent camp to save gas and travel time. I was delighted to see a cow and her calf come in to the beaver ponds that first evening just a quarter mile from my base camp. I spent the next couple days hiking up the creeks around there and driving some of the main roads during the middle of the day to get the general idea of the lay of the land. Moose sign was abundant and the moose were visible right at first and last light as it was very hot and dry. I quickly figured out that the bulls were still in bachelor groups and in a velvet horn state. I located some clear cuts a few miles from camp that consistently held moose in the evening and I decided to concentrate there.



I had some trouble finding a moose for the first couple days but then on about the third evening I saw 3 young bulls come out to feed on the shaded side of the cuts and I had enough time to make an approach. For the last half hour of daylight I watched in wonder from about 40 yards away as they fed and interacted with each other. I was hooked even though they were skinny horned little guys- they were HUGE. I desperately wanted a moose that looked like a moose, palmated horns with a decent spread were my bare minimums, and of course I would have really liked a monster, if he happened to show up. I continued to poke around these cuts and had trouble seeing approachable moose as they were like vampires in the heat of late summer. As soon as the sun was up they were gone, but there they would be, crossing the road in my headlights on my way back to camp in the evenings. Around the 10th of Sept. the bulls started to shed their velvet and almost immediately it cooled a bit and they were out a bit earlier and later in daylight as the rifle season started. I stuck with my decision to use a bow.

It was about the 12th when I was running a few minutes late to my clear cut spot and a mile before I got there and I saw my first real bull out of the truck window. I parked and came in from the north and found him with 2 other bull buddies- one little guy and a very good bull, but not nearly as big as the best one. I shadowed the group from around a hundred yards back, as they fed up the little gulch without giving me an opportunity to get in bow range. I gave the big one the name “Horny” and his buddy was “Blackie” as he was black as coal. They were all hard-horned and though he would have been an acceptable trophy just a day before, Blackie was safe, as I really wanted Horny badly. They gave me the slip when they disappeared into the timber to bed for the day and I left them without a clue that I had been there. That evening I missed them but the following morning there they were feeding in the tiny creek at the upper end of a long clearing. I made a stalk and just missed getting into range of Horny as he walked to the timber and started beating up a 20 foot tall lodge pole pine. I used the racket to sneak up on him, walking directly in his fresh tracks. I was close to being in position for a shot when I saw Blackie leaving the creek and coming up the exact way Horny had used to get into the timber. This was going to be a problem as I was crouched right in Horney’s tracks; I was crouched next to a little clump of willow brush maybe 3 feet tall and 3 feet around.

I froze and watched Blackie come in behind me and stop dead when he saw me. His hooves were maybe 4 feet from my butt; I could see his left antler out of the corner of my eye and was amazed when it rotated as he stretched out his huge snoot to take a whiff of this strange object in his path. I felt the suction from his inhalation when he sniffed the back of my neck. I watched his shadow snap up as he recoiled his head at the stench but didn’t move, then slowly stretched out and did it a second time more cautiously, as if needing a second take to verify this strange development. This time he whiffed and blew out a huge moose snort, and when he blew, he blew moose snot all over the back of my neck. This scared the piss out of me and I flinched and he ran a small circle around me and went over by his now alert buddy and they both stared at me for a few minutes. I was unable to get a shot as they worked up into the timber and bedded down for the day. I retreated to clean the snot off of the back of my neck and get set up for the evening- as there was no doubt where I would hunt that evening!

 

[BAKPAKR]

You have me interested and wondering about the evening hunt...

 

[Salmonchaser]

Damn, this is as bad as going to the movies when I was a kid.

 

[Scrappy]

Just what I needed this morning at work. Now I'll be distracted all day. Love the story so far. Dang I miss the mountains.

 

[squirrel]

I hung out at camp and shot my bow all day with my dog hanging out with me. A couple hours before dark, I headed out, and got set up directly downhill from the bedded bulls. At dark-thirty, here they came, down the same way they went up, with Horny bringing up the rear. I came to full draw and went to pieces with him at 35 yards and pulled the shot low, barely nicking his sternum as the arrow buried into the dirt, the equivalent of missing the barn door… It was a long and sleepless night. I re-lived that bad release a thousand times over, coming up with an equal number of reasons why it happened. I was back at the long park the next am and was thrilled to see him out by the creek beating up on Blackie, obviously none the worse for my poor shooting, I crept to within 35 yards but was so under-confident after the night before I did not take the shot, and while trying to knock off a few more yards I spooked them into the same hillside they had bedded on the day before. I thought I was set up for that evening but never laid eyes on the trio again. It is likely they were about to split up in preparation for the rut anyway.



So with my first disappointment out of the way I started covering serious amounts of ground, the unit was huge and there were moose in all of it. I was up and hiking before light and singing bear repellant songs on my way in well after dark as well, often covering fifteen or more miles/day, napping during the hottest parts next to a creek then hunting the homeward direction for the evening. Within a week I had hiked all of the major creeks in a 6-8 mile radius from my base camp, and almost all of the not-so major- creeks, finding cows and young bulls in most of them, but nothing I wanted to shoot after seeing Horny and Blackie up close, they were the new benchmark. There were elk everywhere, with some very big bulls starting to set up their harems of girls, and though I didn’t have a tag they certainly made for interesting viewing. It seemed to not be very good deer country but there were a few black bears spotted. Almost every day I was hiking trails covered in bear tracks, so when I drove out to fill up on gas and groceries I stopped into a sporting store to buy a bear tag. The clerk educated me on my bear sign identification and assured me that most of what I was seeing was grizzly sign after I sketched out what tracks looked like that I had been seeing.

I started to travel out from base camp in my truck and hunting other drainages in the same fashion, hunting my way up a creek for 3-8 miles sleeping mid-day and hunting either a parallel draw or back down the same creek in the evening. I was seeing an awful lot of amazing country, and running into some pretty colorful people along the way, all of which were very nice, after they made the obligatory comments on my “greeny” plates! I was always searching for greener moose hunting pastures but if I found moose, and often did, I would stay in that draw and look for a big bull. I knew they were there because on several occasions they would be standing in my headlights in the middle of the road either on my way to or from the trailhead. The big boys were very nocturnal.



I moved 50 miles to the western side of the unit outside of Teton Park and spent a week or more in a dome tent hunting new country over there with much the same results, cows, calves and young bulls while hunting, and huge palmated bulls in my headlights after dark. There seemed to be even more grizzly sign over on that side, poop and tracks were everywhere on the trails. I kept up with my nocturnal singing and gripped my bow a little tighter. On a couple of occasions when the sign was so plentiful and fresh I threw in my .44 into my day pack, in case my singing wasn’t quite bad enough. I’m not sure what it would have accomplished, but it made me braver. (a little)

While the grizzlies were the obvious threat there was also no shortage of bachelor bison on the edges of Teton Park. One was a huge old guy I called “Billy the Bison”, and I saw him every time I went up that one creek. Once I was 75 yards away from him before I saw him up against a 4” diameter lodge pole pine that was bent over double. He was in heaven, rubbing his black bald butt on that tree, hitting what had obviously been an annoying itch. I watched for a few minutes and then stepped out where he could see me, and he stepped away and that little tail went as straight up as a lightning rod, as did that 20 foot tall tree, it wasn’t bent over he had forced it over with his pure power, and now he was pissed that I had gotten too close to him. I beat a hasty retreat until that tail relaxed and made sure to never come in on him blindly again lest I get bent over like that tree. I got to watch some of the bulls fighting and their power and agility belie their huge size, they are the total package if they choose to be. Fortunately they are generally docile if given a bit of personal space. They do not care much for dogs, four big bulls were strolling up the dirt road past my tent mid-day once and hadn’t a care in the world about me and my tent a few yards away until my dog stuck his head out and growled at them. This was about like throwing a rock at a hornets’ nest and ended with him hiding under my truck while they circled looking for a way to kill him. I was sure glad he hadn’t chosen my tent to hide in; as I would have needed a new camp and a new dog…

 

[squirrel]

After a week or so over on the west side without getting any shot opportunities on big bulls I retreated to my base camp in less scenic surroundings. The west had been stunningly beautiful with the Tetons towering off to the west every sunrise, it was truly incredible. I went back to a large basin where there had been moose spotted every day I had hunted it. I parked at the closed gate, told my dog to stay and headed up to get to the flat swampy basin at first light, about a 4 mile hike in the dark. I got to the lower edge with a half hour to spare, took a wheeze break, and then gingerly edged up the road. Daylight was slowly spreading over the willow flats as I worked my way glassing as I went. I was about in the middle of the large swampy basin and there was some crunching/snapping in the timber beside me. I snuggled up to a six foot tall pine tree, as I was in the midst of second growth clear cuttings.

The snapping got louder and I just knew it was a huge bull headed right for me; I knocked an arrow and got ready, as whatever it was, it was going to come out into the open at close range. Then at 25 yards it was in the open and broadside, a mama grizzly with a tiny cub under her belly, OH SHIT! She was moving slowly and then I saw as bad as things appeared they could always get worse, a coyote pup was circling her and lunging at her cub. He was just being a puppy, being obnoxious just for the sheer joy of it. She wasn’t seeing it quite that way, it turns out that the brush popping I had thought I heard was her clicking her teeth together, I had read about it, but it is much more impressive when up close and personal. She was swatting at the pup with her front paws as he dodged and nipped at her flanks. Then he would dive under her and nip at her cub. The cub was getting nipped by the coyote, also getting stepped on by mom, and was squealing and squalling up a storm from underneath her. She had great goobers of drool hanging out of her mouth dripping down maybe a foot or more, swinging back and forth as she spun to meet the pup’s lunges. He was just too quick, and it was irritating the hell out of her.

And through this all there I was less than thirty yards away trying to melt into a 6 foot tall sapling holding a suddenly very puny looking bow with an arrow knocked. I figured she had to have seen me, I had almost no cover at all and it was beside me, not between us. The fight raged on for what seemed like hours but was most likely a minute or so and I decided to back out of there as they were edging closer with each swat and a miss. I slowly backed up a step and it was immediately apparent that she had NOT seen me yet as the entire circus froze and stared at me. The pup was 5 feet beyond the bear and stopped cold and looked at me, the cub was crying terribly from under her belly and Mama spun her tiny pig eyes to pierce me right to my core. To steal a phrase from a much better writer than I, she looked at me, like I owed her money… As she spun her head to stare a big glop of goo from her mouth on a tether of more goo spun up and over and landed smack on the top middle of her short snout making a wet splat noise. As she fixed me in her glare I knew one thing with perfect clarity, she was coming. Her eyes told me that as clearly as if she spoke perfect English. She was frustrated, mad and there I was in range and not nearly as fast as that puppy. I was dead meat and we both knew it with zero doubt. Push was coming to shove, and I had nobody to push or shove…

Now I have been known to say bad things about Wile E. Coyote on occasion. After he poaches my ducks or chickens from my yard for instance, but on that flat, on that morning, I came to realize all God’s creatures have their place, and they can sometimes be man’s best friend. After everyone but the cub freezing for several seconds, the pup decided I was a harmless spectator to his recreation. He lunged right in between her front paws and nipped the cub in the ass, making it squeal in pain. Mama Grizz spun to swat him dead and I was instantly on the back burner, and with her back turned! I reverse marched faster than a French caterer serving dinner at an SS reunion. Upon reaching a shallow gully completely shielding me from her view, I sped it up a bit. An objective observer might have referred to it as “fleeing in headlong, terrified flight”. But there were no objective observers there that I could see. I will refer to it as carefully skirting the area to find more suitable hunting terrain elsewhere…

 

[Salmonchaser]

Getting better!

 

[teej89]

haha man this is great! I was being amazingly productive at home and then this.....

 

[squirrel]

I could hear the puppy yipping and playing his silly game of chicken for the next hour or so, from high on the opposing ridge, where I stopped to clean out my under drawers… err … I mean glass for moose.

My bear hang-over meant that for the next several days I archery hunted moose, bow in hand, but with my .300 slung over my shoulder, but my testicles slowly grew back and allowed me to leave it back in the camp/truck. But when walking up the creeks in the morning seeing muddy grizzly tracks from the night before I found my steps were more carefully chosen and my eyes more careful about panning my surroundings than perhaps ever before in my life. In short being scared shitless made me a better hunter.

I had been hunting moose all day every day for six weeks when I made the mistake of going into town and calling my girlfriend, who invited herself up to see me. (This was pre-marriage when she used to love me…) We arranged a meeting point she could find and on that morning I took a short hike up the creek right next to my base camp. Rifle elk season had begun and there were lots of locals chasing elk, especially as this was a weekend. It was called Grizzly creek, and based on the tracks it was an accurate description. For the first time in over a month of chasing moose I took only my rifle, naturally upon reaching the headwaters of the creek a big bull moose was standing there in his wallow with a couple of cows nearby.

The cows saw me and moved off up the hill but the bull just kept thrashing the willows next to his wallow with his antlers. I was torn on whether to shoot him with the rifle or not, but it didn’t matter as I had no clear shot, the willows being 10-12 feet tall. I decided to wait for him to follow the girls up the hill, and when in the clear I could look him over better and decide then, as he would be 75 yards away in the open timber. I sat down and watched him and suddenly he went on red alert and I heard the clip-clop of horse hooves coming up the trail behind me. I had to decide, and right now, whether to take him with the rifle or let him walk. I caught a side view of wide palms and a front view of a good spread; he was the second biggest moose I had seen in daylight hours. He showed me his shoulder and my shot reflected my decision. He was down, as in straight down, right in his muddy hell hole of a wallow.



As I surveyed my predicament, he was in a bad spot for clean butchering; I saw I needed to roll him a bit. I grabbed a front leg at his ankle, and threw my whole self into rolling him over to gut him. I was young, rock solid from a summer of hard construction work and several weeks of a brutal hunting regimen. For this prodigious effort his front leg barely lifted up, and his torso never even wiggled, for all my straining. This guy was a giant, until they are a dead pile of moose in front of you, you just cannot envision the mass of their front quarters compared to a puny little elk. The horse mounted hunters came up behind me and asked a kind of silly question, if I would like to have him 15 yards away on the grassy flat instead of in the ten inches of mud he was lying in… Uh…YEP!! But I didn’t think even the three of us could move him, let alone that far through the willows. I was about to get an education about what a good horse can do. The cowboy (and these were real cowboys, not pretenders) backed his horse towards the bull, his partner looped his rope around the bull’s head and around the puller’s horn and I got ready to help push/pull/maneuver the moose through the willows. That horse’s eyes were about 3” around from the stench of that rutty bull when the cowboy clicked his tongue and touched his spurs to his flanks. My only job was to save myself from getting smashed as that bull flipped in midair and scarcely touched the ground all the way to the grass. In fact the biggest issue was would he stop before getting all the way back down to the safety of his trailer at the road. I was completely overwhelmed at the spectacle and at their generosity to a total stranger. They wouldn’t take either money or meat, which they correctly pointed out, would be illegal, so I thanked them profusely and fervently wished them good luck on their hunt for a bull elk.

The hard work began in earnest then, as I had a meeting to make it to with my little princess that evening. I found myself not enough of a man to carry a bone-in hind quarter more than a few yards. I could not help but ponder all those times I had been 7-8 miles from my truck, what-the-hell had I been thinking?? I wrestled my previously useless ATV within a mile of the kill site, and then wrestled huge hunks of meat, as big as I could muster the strength to lift, down the valley to it, strapped it all down tight, and walked beside it as I crawled it back to base camp. The afternoon chunks of meat were considerably smaller than the morning chunks had been! Finally I got it all home, packed in the trailer, broke camp and headed out to find ice and my moose date…

The trailer was loaded so heavy it blew a tire from rubbing on the frame but I got everything fixed up and headed south to meet my darling. After five weeks of weekly (very weakly) cold water bathing and a back breaking day of meat packing her reaction to meeting her honey was to recoil in disgust at getting down wind of me, and insist on renting a room to make me shower three times, she coined the term “you have stink stains” (which she still uses to this day) to describe my post hunt odor.



The next day I hit a mandatory check station where all hunters must stop, coming, or going. I was immediately swarmed with agents as I had a big moose and no entry log. They immediately thought I was trying to sneak an extra moose out of the unit and when I told them I had not stopped on my way in to the area because I had not seen any sign of such a station, they now had me for being a big fat liar. They informed me they had set up on August 31st before hunting season even opened, so they knew I was lying… Oh I said that explains it as I came in 4 days before that. They refused to believe that I had been in the woods for a month and a half without crossing their check station line. My princess said they should just smell me instead of giving me a polygraph and it would be conclusive proof of 6 weeks of back country living. Eventually after carefully checking every detail they let us drive home with my mountain of moose meat. The only violation I was guilty of was hunting for too long of time, and they couldn’t find that regulation in the code book.
I hunted every day for about 45 days straight, logged well over 500 miles on foot and looked over 180 moose and at least 60 different bulls before pulling the trigger on my beautiful Shiras trophy, who I named Bullwinkle, looking at him, I don’t see him, I feel moose snot on the back of my neck and see that ball of goo splatting on the top of Mama Grizz’s nose, in slow motion with perfect clarity… It was a glorious adventure.




I know this story taxes the attention span of internet readers, but it is very difficult to condense 45 days of intense wilderness adventure into less than 4000 words. To tell all the funny sub stories and such it would have easily been double this already too long rendition.

Maybe corona induced attention spans will be able to handle it better, I hope it distracts some from the doom, gloom, and bickering prevalent elsewhere.


Cheers from Bullwinkle...

 

[Brittany Chukarman]

Thanks, I needed that.

 

[Jape]

Great story, and I see that bullwinkle has friends!

 

[Western Traveler1]

Great read, nice photo journal and fun to follow. That is a sweet Shiras!...and he still has his dewlap..

 

[EYJONAS!]

I love your stories! Thanks for sharing!

 

[elkrchr]

Great write up! What an adventure and thank you for sharing.

 

[MITCHMO]

Just awesome! Thanks for sharing!!!

3 bighorns? Makes me all sorts of sad and jealous all at the same time.

 

[kansasdad]

Another uniquely told squirrel story. Thank you sir.

 

[matt0550]

Squirrel you are a gentleman and a scholar. What an adventure, what a story, and what a well written recounting of your experience.

And I really did needed a break from the news...I've cleaned every gun in both of my safes, rotated and cataloged all of my ammo, repacked all of my hunting gear, restrung a bow, sharpened all but two pieces of cutlery in the house (those next)...next is gonna be seeing what type of home improvements I can manage without going to any stores lol...oh God how will I do this for 4 or 6 or 12 more weeks

 

[PA deer hunter]

Sounds like an awesome adventure, well told !

 

[LuketheDog]

Thanks for the story! And yes, moose are big, and they look twice as big after you shoot one...

 

[ashersdad]

What a great adventure! Thanks for sharing.