I had a great hunt this weekend, and managed to fill my moose tag with my 5 year old son by my side.
I had been chasing moose for the last couple weeks without much action (called out one small bull, but couldn’t get a shot at him), and moose sightings were minimal…things had been unusually slow on the moose front in my area this year. However, on Saturday morning just driving around I saw more moose than I had the rest of the season combined, so it was looking like things would be good for doing some calling later on. I went home, grabbed my son and we headed out for an evening hunt. At this point I should mention that my son has really, really wanted to tag along a moose hunt….we have seen them while sitting for deer together, and just driving around our area, but I haven’t drawn a tag since he’s been old enough to come. So this year when I told him I had a tag, he has been excited to go ever since. He even practices his calling every day (and to tell you the truth, if he was a bit louder then I’d have no problems letting him call for me, haha)!
We got into an area that I have seen tons of moose before, and an area that I had a couple trail cam pics of a decent bull. We walked in a little ways, got set up and started calling. About 10 minutes in, I heard a grunt in the distance…..I grabbed the bino’s, and could see what looked like a nice bull coming in, and he was coming in fast grunting every step. Based on where he was, we had to move a bit to get into a good position for a shot, so me and the boy quickly moved ourselves into position. The moose stepped out into cutline about 60 yards from us, turned our direction and kept coming in. At this point, my sons eyes were as wide as saucers….I don’t think he moved an inch or even blinked from that point until it was all over, haha!
As the bull was coming in perfectly, I just let him keep coming. Finally, at 7 yards he was in as good of a position as he was going to get for a shot (plus, I was more than a little nervous at this point, much more so because of the kid being with me, but the opportunity for a good shot didn’t present itself beforehand as he was head-on). I let the arrow go, and saw that it was a good looking hit, however, the shot was a quartering one, so based on the amount of light left I decided to leave him overnight and not risk pushing him any further into the swamp off the cutline. My son was ok with that, but he still needed to call and tell mom & both sets of grandparents that we had gotten a moose! From my standpoint, I could have done without him telling the exact details to my wife, as she wasn’t terribly impressed that I had let the bull get that close to us, lol.
Unfortunately, my son couldn’t come with us the next day for the recovery due to some family thanksgiving commitments that I missed to go get the bull. I couldn’t believe how fast the birds had found him, but I think because he went down right at the edge of a large clearing, it must have been pretty apparent to the birds or something as they were all over him (made the tracking job easy though as there was no question where he was). He was down about 200yds from where we shot him. Unfortunately, the birds got the eyes and a bit of hair off his neck, so it looks like its in rough shape in the field photos. The night was pretty cool though, so the meat was in fine shape. The bull was a scrapper for sure, and his left paddle was cracked (old crack) and had a few of the tines busted off.
All in all, this was one of the best hunts of my life, both because of the way it all happened and the fact I got to do it with my son at my side. The only problem is that my son was my “binocular man” and at some point when we were moving around decided that he didn’t need to carry them any more, and put them on the ground…..I wasn’t able to find them anywhere, so this moose cost me a few hundred extra bucks for a new set of binos, lol!
2014 Bull Moose - A Hunt I'll Never Forget with my Son
Awesome!!!
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