After I spent several years trying unsuccessfully to draw a moose tag my wife said she thought it would be fun to go moose hunting. This year I put her in for a cow moose and she drew a tag. One pheasant hunt was her only prior experience, but she quickly became a better marksman than me with my own 30-06. We'd been out a few evenings and had seen a few moose, but hadn't gotten a shot. Finally, yesterday we both took the whole day off and my dad came up to go hunting with us. We hiked until 9am and found moose sign, but didn't see any. Then we drove some ridges, but didn't see any. At 10am we started working our way back home and found a bull moose bedded on the opposite hillside. We got to 150 yards so my wife could practice the stalk and go through some of the motions of hunting that she had never experienced. The bull had seen us and was getting nervous, so we backed off and decided to try him from the other side because the road we had been driving actually worked around the ridge to where we would be right above him. Twenty minutes later we were 50 yards above him, but couldn't yet see him in the thick brush. Then, on the opposite slope (where we had just been) I spotted a cow bedded down. We couldn't get my wife set up in time before that cow and another cow that emerged below us crested the ridge. We decided to back out and go over that ridge to try those two moose again. On the way back around we spotted the bull, with yet another even bigger cow. Now, my wife is picky when it comes to getting a good rest and taking a good shot so my dad and I were going crazy while she set up, then decided it was too low and brush was in the way, then set up again, then aimed, and aimed, and aimed. I know my wife pretty well and I had expected this, but I think my dad was ready to run down and tackle the moose. He later said that he would have fired 20 rounds by the time her gun cracked. But, she made a good choice, putting 180 grains of lead within an inch of the spot she had been practicing (I should have had her aiming for a heart shot instead of the more reliable, but less deadly lung shot). The side of the moose rippled with the impact and she turned to walk up the ridge. We told my wife to shoot again, which she did but put the round right in front of the moose's nose. This caused her to stop and turn broadside again. A third shot hit the neck and burst both carotid arteries and the moose dropped like a lead balloon. The bull, completely confused was still standing there. He walked up to the cow to see why she had laid down and then stood guard over her. I reloaded the gun and cautiously started toward the bull. When I got to 75 yards he finally stepped away from the cow and walked away, though he stopped frequently to watch us. Pretty quickly we learned just how big and heavy moose are. Even after she was gutted, we could only move her about 3 feet at a time. We grabbed some ratchet straps from the truck and used them to start moving her from tree to tree. After a while we gave up and drove to town to get a couple 2x12 planks and a come-a-long and managed to ratchet her up and using the planks as a ramp into the back of the truck. Once we got her home we started cranking her up into the big plum tree in the back yard. We had all but her head off the ground when the 10" branch snapped and came down. We cleaned up the tree and finally got her propped up for the night. We spent today skinning her and cutting her into more reasonable, but still about 200lb chunks of meat that wouldn't pull the rest of my trees down. Moose are definitely big animals.
Location: Undisclosed location in Idaho
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