Charged by a Bull Moose
This Happened to Me, and I Lived to Tell About It
On Wednesday, September 18, 2019, I was in the first week of my annual four week stay in Northwest Ontario, Canada. I always try to plan my arrival around the opening of the ruffed grouse hunting season and some of Canada’s premier walleye and smallmouth bass fishing.
Northwest Ontario has some of the best grouse hunting in North America. They are usually plentiful and easy to hunt. I often drive old logging roads and try to shoot them with a .22 rifle. Yes, it is legal and also not very sporting. The .22 rifle and my bifocals make it more of a challenge.
My preferred way to hunt grouse is to go on long walks down old logging roads that have now grown into very narrow paths. When the weather turns colder, the grouse move to these old roads for the clover that grows in the sunlight and other choice forage. The bush in the fall has a memorable smell of damp earth, falling leaves, and decaying vegetation. Mushrooms are everywhere.
In this part of Canada, the vegetation is very dense. It is often impossible to see more than a few feet off the trail. As the leaves fall, the bush opens up to give a better view of the forest floor and surrounding area. It is a country of mixed hardwoods along with every type of coniferous trees imaginable. As you look into the bush from the trail, you have a view of fallen trees, thick underbrush, soggy lowlands, and rocky outcroppings. This is very remote country. These old trails run for miles.
On this particular afternoon, I was hunting on my favorite walking trail. It is about an hour out and an hour back as you ease along, hoping to see a grouse. I occasionally have my limit of five birds before I reach the end of the trail and often have at least a couple for a nice dinner. They are delicious! Their Latin name being “Bonassa Umbellus”, which means, good when roasted.
A third of the way down the trail and old abandoned beaver pond opens up the bush to allow for a better view. Due to the beaver’s industrious work of building dams and flooding timber to build networks of ponds, these areas are often magnets for wildlife. These ponds, consisting of intricate dams and numerous lodges, create a fantastic view of the fall foliage. They are great places to sit and take a break from walking and fill your lungs with cold, crisp air. They are wild, and they are spectacular.
Moose live and thrive in these dense, soggy places, and I have had the pleasure of seeing several of them. Last year I arrived at this pond and found a young bull moose standing on the far bank. He had not seen me and was slowly walking back toward the bush. I was hidden well, behind some vegetation growing around the pond, and so I cow called to him. It is a voice call used by moose hunters to attract bulls during the fall breeding season. The idea is to make this bull moose think that you are a cow moose. Moose have great hearing and sense of smell, but they are notoriously near sighted. When he heard my call, he turned around and moved back out in to the open ground. I was about fifty yards away on the opposite bank. He stayed in the open for about fifteen minutes and then leisurely walked away.
Since he left in the opposite direction I was headed, I felt safe walking on down the trail and continuing my grouse hunt. In just a short distance, a different bull moose walked out of the bush right in front of me and very close. He saw me about the same time I saw him. We had a stand-off from about thirty feet away. I had no idea what to do so I took a phone video of him and didn’t move. He was smaller than the first bull and eventually walked on down the trail. I followed for a short distance until he moved back into the bush and quickly evaporated. It was amazing how quietly he moved through such thick cover. I continued on down the trail with no further moose encounters.
I told a friend of mine about my encounters. He had a cow archery tag and had been hunting hard with no success. We thought with those bulls hanging around, there must be a cow somewhere nearby. The next day he went out to the pond to sit awhile, hoping a cow might emerge. After sitting for an hour, he decided to cow call. To his astonishment, a giant bull moose walked out into the open area of the pond. My friend has a very shaky video of this moose.
Big bull moose are amazing animals, and they can be very dangerous. They are the largest member of the deer family, and while in rut, they are the only animal that may know that you are a human and just don’t care. This bull was probably a 1100-1200 pound animal and capable of moving very quickly. As soon as my friend could, he left the area. We both felt fortunate to have been that close to three different bull moose without anything bad happening.
That was last year. On this afternoon, I was walking out the same trail again. I passed the first pond and headed out the trail toward the second pond. This pond is an active beaver pond, where the beavers have flooded the whole trail,
making it nearly impossible to navigate around it. As I drew near the pond, a grouse walked out in front of me. I took a quick shot with my .20 gauge shotgun and missed. I eased on to the pond, and to my surprise, ducks started rising up from all over the surface of the water. There must have been close to 100. They just kept coming off of the water. It was very beautiful. There were a couple of beavers swimming around, and so I sat down to rest for a few minutes and just enjoyed the beauty of the place.
I stood up and started walking back toward my truck. I stopped because I heard a frog croaking from a water filled ditch beside the trail. This was very odd for late September, but it had been unusually warm. Because I stopped for the frog, I heard something else. It was the unmistakable deep throated sound of a bull moose grunt. It wasn’t loud, but I knew what it was. I stood for a minute, and I heard nothing else. I decided to grunt at him. He immediately grunted right back at me and then nothing else happened. I had no idea how far away he was, but I knew he was to my left and up on a small ridge.
The vegetation was so thick that it was hard to see more than a few feet up the ridge. I really wanted to see that bull moose. I wanted to be able to say that I had called in a bull moose. As a young boy, I had read every hunting magazine I could find, and I had been entranced by stories of hunters dressed in red woolen shirts calling bull moose out in to the open for a shot. I faced the ridge and cow called a couple of times. I instantly heard three rapid, aggressive grunts and then the sound of small trees being knocked down. I looked up the ridge and saw the tops of the trees as they were unbelievably being pushed over. He was coming down the ridge, and he was coming fast! He was much closer than I expected.
The first glimpse I got of him was at about 90 feet. I could only see him from his shoulder back, but his body was enormous. I yelled at the top of my lungs, “Hey, Hey, Hey”. He was running down the ridge at an angle. At my yell, he paused for maybe a second and then turned and came straight at me, head down, incredibly wide antlers smashing everything in his path. I had nowhere to go. I remember thinking, “This is going to be bad!” When he was about fifteen feet away, I pointed my shotgun over his head and fired a shot. I moved to my left and tried to get behind some cover. He stopped only a few feet away from me and turned to his left, showing me his giant antlers. He raised his head and looked back at me with his enormous dark eye. I had never seen a bull moose that big in my life. He was massive! He stared at me for a second and then pivoted to his left. I wasn’t sure if he was leaving or turning to charge again. I took off on a dead run and heard him crashing away as he headed back up the ridge. I was alive!
I made it back to my truck in what seemed like minutes, and I think I was both laughing and crying. I drove the few minutes back to camp and found my friend walking down the road to his cabin. When I told him my story, he was amazed and asked me if I got a picture of the moose. “No I didn’t get a picture of the moose,” I said. “I thought he was going to kill me.” The experience was that powerful.
I didn’t sleep much that night. I kept playing the scene over and over in my head. I realized that he was the top bull in that area. When he grunted, he was letting cows know where he was and telling other bulls to stay away. When I grunted back at him, I was challenging him. Then to add fuel to the fire, I cow called. Now he thought I was a bull and that I had a cow with me. I was on his turf, and he came down that ridge with the intention of running off an interloper. He was ready to fight and kill.
The only thing I really can’t describe is the sound he made as he came down that ridge. I am sure it was part of the intimidation factor. The only way I could replicate that sound would be to park a loaded dump truck up on that ridge, have someone release the emergency brake, and let it roll down the hill knocking everything down in its path and picking up speed as it is about to smash you to death. Imagine standing in the path of that truck as it comes down that hill, and you will get a little idea of what it felt like. The whole thing probably lasted less than thirty seconds.
When I was a boy in Illinois, we had a neighborhood barbershop where my father took me to get my hair cut. The barber was a hunter. He always had a huge pile of Field & Steam and Outdoor Life magazines. I would look forward to going to the barbershop and reading those stories as the barber cut my father’s hair. Later, when I got older, I would walk to the barbershop on my own and just sit and read. He would call my house and let me know when he had some new magazines.
Outdoor Life had a story each month about some hunter or fisherman having a near deadly encounter with a dangerous animal. The story was called, “This Happened to Me, and I Lived to Tell about It.” I am very grateful for my near death experience with a dangerous animal, and I am very grateful that “I Lived to Tell about It”.
