It was a beautiful day driving home from work. Not much for wind and the temp was around 80 degrees. As I pulled up to the mailbox on my motorcycle, I wasn’t expecting what I found in my mailbox, a letter from the MN DNR. Could it be? Being out on the road, I held back from opening the envelope. I drove the bike up to the garage and parked it. Being there were two envelopes from the DNR, one for Bill, my husband, and one for me, which could only mean one thing – moose hunt – I used my box cutter from work and opened the envelope and carefully took out the letter. Yippee! A Minnesota moose hunt, which, once you are drawn you can never apply again..

Grabbing the cell phone I dialed Bill's number. As he answered I could tell he was hard at it, he is a dozer operator (a little noisy) He said what’s up? Just when I said we got drawn for the moose hunt all I heard was beep beep beep, he was backing up the dozer. He said could you repeat that. I replied we got drawn for the moose hunt; again all I heard was the beeping noise. This time when he asked me to repeat I waited until after the beep. Then I said again, we got drawn for the moose hunt, Bill said you are kidding me-no I said. We were notified in June and the hunt wasn’t until October 4^th; a long but  short wait.

Well, as the next months passed we did a lot of scouting when we could get up to Isabella. Our bear hunt started September 1^st   and since I had to save my vacation for the moose hunt, I had to cut my bear hunt short. So I took a bear with my bow. She wasn’t a large bear but it put some great tasting meat in the freezer. 

It was a week before the hunt Bill left to do more scouting where we were going to hunt. I’ll tell you it was hard trying to work while having your mind on the hunt. It just doesn’t work. Bill called every day to fill me in on the scouting. He had a few places picked out where he said there was very good sign. Well, when he went out Thursday, it was tent city - here the other hunters drawn for moose hunting had arrived and put up tents, blocking the areas where Bill had done his scouting. Well, back to square one. He had to start scouting all over again. He did find tracks of a cow, calf, and a bull on the road so he got out of the truck and covered them up along with some sign in a different spot.

Well, I got home early on Friday, got chores done and the truck loaded and took off for the arrowhead. After five and a half hours of driving I finally arrived in Isabella after dark. Bill filled me in about what he found and we hit the bed since tomorrow was going to be a long day.

The alarm went off about 4 am. I glanced outside and there was a very heavy frost on the ground; every thing was white. As we drove to the first place we were going to hunt, it seemed to take forever to get there. We still had a little time to spare when we got there.

Well it was time! We quietly got out of the truck and loaded our guns. I have a 300 Wsm and Bill has a 7mm. As we walked off the forest road it was a little noisy, everything was covered in frost and there was no way to be quiet. So we took our time. I was trying to step in Bill's footprint to minimize the noise. We got in about 600 yards when we decided to start calling. I had mastered the cow call with my own voice and that was what I was using and Bill had a coffee can with a flat string out the bottom of the can and when you rubbed the string it made a grunting noise. So I started to call, OHHHHHHHO, (a moaning type call, starting low with my voice, going up and ending low) I did this every 15 minutes.

We did notice that nothing had moved through where we were because the frost wasn’t disturbed. We decided to get back in a little farther and sit down on a log pile. The sun just peaked over the tall pines and the frost came alive: it looked like millions of diamonds dancing in the sun. Boy, that was a beautiful sight. We took out the GPS and notice we were off the road about a mile and being that we were in like a peat bog we decided to look some place else. If we got one back there we would have had to quarter it up and carry it out.

We checked another area out. We had seen a lot of sign but it didn’t pan out. So we took the ATV down this small forest road that was a dead end after about 7 miles. It was very remote. It was about 1:00 when we arrived at the place we were going to hunt for the evening. The area was logged about 20 years ago and the ridge that we were going to set up on never really had trees grow back on it so we were able to see down on both sides of the ridge. To the right of us was a low grassy area that had water in it. The forest to the left of us, which was northwest, was a small grassy area then a boggy area with evergreen trees. We ate our lunch and took a quick nap; the sun felt pretty good beating down on us on the ridge.

It was about 2:00 when we started to call. I would make a cow call and Bill would follow up with a grunt call. About every 15 minutes I would do the cow call. I would even get up and do the call on each side of the ridge.

It was about 5:10 when I made a cow call OHHHHHHHHHHHO. All a sudden a bull answered back. I looked at Bill; he looked at me. I don’t know who’s eyes were bigger mine or Bill's. That’s when we got nervous. I made another cow call OHHHHHHHHHO, and then there was a rumph of the bull calling back. He was coming in from the northwest and the wind was coming from the west. I made another call, and that’s when he became very vocal. RRRUMPH, RRRUMPH, RRRUMPH. He was so vocal that I thought that someone was playing a trick on us.

We slowly walked to the edge of the ridge we were on to see if we could spot the moose. There he was, he was still in the trees moving towards us. That’s when I began to shake. Bill describes me-if you go to the store before Halloween, there are those skeletons and when you shake them they would rattle. I guess that’s how I sounded. He put his hand on my shoulder and that’s when I started to calm down. Well, I put the gun under my left arm, put my hands to my mouth and made another cow call. That’s when he became nuts, he started to sway his antlers back and forth and licking his nose with his tongue. Holy buckets! He is a big moose and his antlers are not bad either. I brought the gun up and all I could see was black. All I heard was aren’t you going to shoot, from Bill. For one thing he was facing me and I do not like taking those kinds of shots even though he was only 50 to 60 yards from us. Well that’s when he turned and that’s when I realized I was crowding my scope. I moved my head back, took deep breath, slowly exhaled, aimed and fired.

The moose ran a short distance, about 20 yards, stopped and then Bill shot. The moose walked a couple of steps and fell. Yippee, my first moose! I thought calling in turkeys and deer was great but calling in this big moose, that was awesome, nothing gets better.

Bill reached the moose before I did. As I approach the moose I stood there in awe. I never ever dreamed it would be this big in both weight and antler size. The spread was about 54 1/4 inches! How could this animal of this size maneuver in the thick forest? And his weight was estimated to be about 1200 to 1300 pounds- live weight.

Well, time to get to work, after a few pictures; we had to get him on his back. You had to move his antlers a little then his body. Boy talk about a big animal! After a little bit we got him on his back. But before we did anything else we called a friend to help us out. Tim brought out his ATV and after the moose was gutted we tied his antlers to the ATV and hooked his ATV to our ATV. If we did not do that, all the ATV would do was wheelies. Since we were close to the forest road we dragged the moose to the pickups. Then we placed our ATV ramps on the back of our truck, took a three inch tow strap and hooked it around the moose’s neck, through the tow strap over the cab of the truck and tied it to Tim’s truck and pulled it up on the truck with Bill and me guiding the antlers. Then we tied his back legs to the box of the truck.

Well it was 9:00 when we arrived at Knotted Pine Inn, the local establishment, to show our friends the moose. I think everyone came out to see the moose. There was a group of 5 young ladies that had to take pictures of the moose. A lot of them never had seen a moose let alone being able to touch one. I was glad we stopped. Seeing the look on there faces made my day again.

The next morning the work began. Friends of ours brought over a bobcat with forks on it and that’s what we used to hang up the large moose. Then we commenced to skinning and breaking down the moose. We had a freezer with us so we bagged up the meat and put it in the freezer. We got a hold of our taxidermy guy and he told Bill how to take the hide off the skull. Then we salted the hide and got that into the freezer. Between the two of us we could barely lift the whole hide. Once we got cleaned up, it was time to relax. We grabbed our fishing poles and went trout fishing.