The awesome size and majesty of the moose makes it both the greatest of Ontario’s hunting animals and the most challenging.
There are few moose hunts that don’t include great highs and some serious lows. Yet, they all make for memorable experiences. Sometimes you get a moose, often you don’t. Each hunt is unique.
I did not grow up in a moose-hunting house. Gord Sr. was a deer hunter, but hunting the swamp donkey was not on his radar. However, his father Ora Ellis had hunted moose quite a bit, and travelled from the family farm in Smithville to the wilds of Longlac in search of moose. In my collection of hunting pics of Ora, I have one of him standing next to an enormous cow moose he harvested. The animal is whole and is hanging in a barn. It looks three times as large as my grandfather. This picture was etched into my mind at an early age. How could anyone even move a moose that large, never mind hang it whole? What was the magic trick?
Moose hunting interest evolved
Despite my interest in them, I didn’t start hunting moose until I was nearly 30. Dating my now-wife, Cheryl, put me on the moose-hunting trajectory. Her grandfather, Ed Marsh, loved to moose hunt and had many great stories of epic outings. He had several dozen moose to his credit. Yet by the time I got to hunt with him, when he was in his late 70s, Ed was mostly driving his truck around on bush roads listening to country music. A fun time, but not how I wanted to hunt. He was a wealth of knowledge, however, and I learned a lot. Ed also bought me my first moose gun — a Remington 30.06 — because “I needed something decent.” When he got too old to hunt, he sold me his beloved bolt-action Sako 30.06.
I still own both guns and cherish them.
The next step in moose hunting was to find like-minded individuals to join the chase in the bush. My late friend and outdoor writer from Thunder Bay, Russ Swerdlyk, was a keen moose hunter. He liked to hunt in the snow — often with snowshoes — and preferred to do small pushes. It was a full-on cardio blast type of hunting. He and I would head out to an area near Dog River, north of Thunder Bay, and spend the day following moose tracks and working the bush. Although Swerdlyk and I never killed a moose together, we had some wild things happen.
One memorable time, he did a push through a chunk of swamp that opened into a large cutover. The denuded area had some brush and shrubs, but seemed mostly open. There were bull tracks heading into the woodlot, but none out. I sat on a high point of the cut and Russ went in to push. About 15 minutes in, there were a few loud cracks that signalled a moose was moving. I never saw a thing, however. After about 40 minutes, Russ appeared and was waving at me. This was in the pre-radio/walkie talkie days, so I went over to talk to him.
“Why didn’t you shoot,” he said.
“At what?” I replied.
“The bull I kicked up. It went your way.”
We went to look for tracks and discovered there was a ravine hidden in the cut. That little creekbed provided an escape route for the bull. There was just enough brush to screen the movement of an 800-pound animal. It had crossed the cut all right, about 250 yards from me, but had snuck through like a ghost. Seems impossible, but it happened.
Group formed
In the early 1990s, I began chasing deer with a guy named Rich Brochu, who I met while hunting near Thunder Bay. Sometime in the late 1990s, we put a small moose hunting group together made up of family members and a couple friends. It was during these early moose hunts that I killed my first two bulls in WMU 15B. Brochu had a nice piece of property in WMU 13, and some interesting moose hunts happened there as well. One that sticks out took place during a snow hunt in the mid 2000s.
I’d snowmobiled up a trail to a series of browse-rich hills that held moose late in the season. There was a bull tag in my pocket burning a hole and not many dates left on the calendar. I parked the sled and began walking along the edge of a hill choked with red willow. A cow and bull had been feeding here, and the fresh tracks and steaming droppings spiked my heart rate. The animals were close. It is amazing how the hunting senses go into overdrive when you know the game is in play. My eyes slowly scanned the horizon for any dark shapes standing out against the white snow. The moose tracks disappeared over a knoll and went down into some thicker woods. I carefully followed the tracks, stopping to look and listen after a few steps.
Then there was a crack.
These moose were in the thick stuff about 100 yards below my position down a hill. I saw the cow first, standing wide open and broadside. Then there was a flash of antler. I put the scope up, found the antler, then the head of the bull. The body was screened. Through the scope I could even see one eye of the bull. Still, there was no clean shot. The cow started to walk, and the bull followed, disappearing like a ghost. The brush was moving, and snow fell from branches as the pair vanished into the woods.
Oh, I did try and follow them, but it was hopeless in the thick cover.
The bull tag went unfilled that year, but that moment is forever.
Just part of the magic of moose hunting.
Originally published in the Fall 2023 issue of Ontario OUT of DOORS
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