Moose season!

Last week we drove about 250 miles to this place..Healy. It's an archery only area that allows ATV use. Lots of moose, we saw lots of bulls, maybe one was legal. The snow fell while we were there. It wasn't much and may as well have been rain.

The only blood that was shed was grouse. Archery only area means for all animals, including these delicious little birds.
This is Mike Rebarchak and me cooking a grouse on top of a mountain. He just got done stalking a moose for several hours and had no food with him. I shot this bird while coming up the mountain to see if he was successful. He wasn't. I got to watch the whole stalk through my bino's. It was very cool to see, even though he didn't get the moose. He stepped out of the trees 50 yards from the bull, and it was looking right at him. It turned and ran away up the hill. This was the closest we got to success.
So, the next day we drove back home, 250 miles and 6 days later, nothing but grouse blood on our arrows. The day after we got home Jon invited me up to his house to try our luck again. And here you go. He got this mature 3x2 brow tine, 47 inch bull. He's legal because of the 3 brow tines. The story of the hunt goes like this:

I got to his house at 0715 am. We got to the area we wanted to hunt around 0745am. We heard and saw nothing all morning. Just after noon we started cow calling and scraping on a tree. Around one o'clock a cow came walking up and got within about 25 yards from us. That was cool in and of itself. Less than an hour later, I was facing away from Jon and he said, "Is that a dog?". I turned and looked at him and saw this monster's rack swaying in the sunshine in the same area that we saw the cow. I told him no that wasn't a dog, it's a big bull coming right toward us. He slowly made his way even closer and Jon shot him at around 25 yards. He ran about 70 yards down hill towards our truck, then collapsed. After our we stopped shaking from adrenalin, Jon said he was asking me if the noise he was hearing was a dog. So he never saw the bull until it was very close!This is about 10 o'clock, we're pooped and cold and very stinky. Eric found out we killed a moose and came right out to help us. A true friend. He brought Skittles.