The Briar Bull

My second hunt of the 2025 season was not off to a stellar start. With a heat wave at the tail end of a rainy summer, the mosquitoes were unbearable. I don’t have a mosquito contingency. In 15 years of bow hunting in Calgary, it’s never been an issue. This is the home of the late August snowstorm and the early hard frost.

On September 1, first day of the season and my first day in a stand, I had to put on a balaclava and keep my hands in my pockets in the midday heat so that only my eyes were exposed. I didn’t hunt again till the sixth, and I bought a mosquito net that will stretch over a head and hat, cinching at the collar. It’s been one of my better $14 purchases.

While the net made the hunt tolerable, I saw nothing moving that morning till about 10 a.m., and it seemed promising at first. In the trees 50 yards away, I saw antlers raking branches. It was a whitetail buck making his way toward me. I slowly positioned my body for a shot, taking my bow off its hook. Watching the antlers, I could see that he was a decent buck, but not huge. With four tines to a side, he’s what we call a 4 by 4 or an eight-pointer.

Here’s the problem: there’s a whole 85 days ahead of me, and I have game camera pictures of two bucks that dwarf this dude. One’s a 5 by 5 and the other is a 6 by 6. The pictures I pulled from the camera told me this little one usually comes along first, and the bigger ones show up together later. Now, if I were nearing the end of the season, this buck was respectable enough to drop, but I wanted to see if the others would make an appearance, so I waited.

This is not as easy as it might sound. When he made his way closer, and I could see his whole body, and he was well within range, I started to think how cool it would be to fill a tag so early in the season. And, of course, there’s no guarantee I will have another chance on a whitetail buck.

I watched him linger, feed, and rake a couple trees with his rack. When he moved on, I kept expecting the others to come trailing behind at any moment. No dice. Many moments passed, along with a couple hours.

I came out of the tree at noon thoroughly dejected, but I’m a firm believer that the hunt isn’t over until you’re driving away in a truck. I crept back to my truck with my bow in one hand, and a range finder in the other. It was a hot and sleepy beginning to the afternoon. The only sound was the incessant drone of the skeeters. The animals were all bedded down in shady cover until the cool of the evening.

At the truck, I was putting away my gear when I heard some rustling in the woods just east of me. This was nothing new. It came from a patch of trees that is impossible to hunt. It’s small, not even the size of a football field, and it’s on the side of a steep hill. It’s composed of dense, shoulder-high shrubs and tight trees, and it’s surrounded by open ground on all sides. The animals can see out of it, but it’s tough for a hunter to see into it. You also can’t shoot more than about 10 yards without hitting a trunk or a branch. It is a mess.

It's no coincidence that deer and moose sit out the heat of the day in there all the time. They know they’re safe. I once saw a Mule Deer bedded down in there that I’d dubbed the Elk Buck because his antlers where simply too large to be attached to a deer. But I swear that cagey veteran could see my thought process because he bolted along with five does almost as soon as I turned to face the Briar.

This scenario has repeated itself ad nauseum because I will always take a crack at it. But the script never changes. The deer and moose will sit there, a mere 50 yards from where I’m packing up my gear, and they will not budge, but if I make two steps in that direction, they take off. Prey animals have an uncanny sense of a person’s intentions. My landowner has a dump truck parked close to the Briar, and he can pop the hood and work on the engine for two hours, and they’ll lounge about without a care.

I scanned the trees for the source of the sound. Like I said, it’s thick, and they have to be disturbing the undergrowth for me to spot them. I saw a brown flash in the mottled greenery. Moose antlers. Big ones.

I sighed. I took my bow back out of the case, knowing exactly how this would play out, but I had to do my due diligence. Then a light breeze and a quick glance changed my outlook in a hurry. The prevailing westerlies carry my scent into the Briar about 90% of the time, but the wind was in my favor. I also saw the antlers were facing away from me, and he was quite close to the edge of that impenetrable thicket.

The summer rains left lush grass leading to the trees, ideal for silencing footfalls. I lined up a few very dense shrubs between me and him and started my stalk. I stopped at the edge of the trees and peered around the shrubs. He was still facing away, and he was feeding. I could hear him ripping young shoots off the bushes, chewing loudly, and swallowing. I could even hear him breathing.

At 20 yards, he was easily in range, but there was no clear shot. Not even close. I worked along the edge of the perimeter to find a spot where I could enter the thicket with the least amount of noise and took a few more steps in. Watching his head, I only stepped when his antlers were brushing the undergrowth, hoping his noise would cover my own. It mostly worked.

I got to within 10 yards, I could almost get a shot on him, when he turned his head and stopped chewing. With his butt still facing me, he craned his neck around, looking right at me. I froze. Neck-deep in undergrowth, my head-to-toe camo breaking up my outline, I’m sure he saw nothing out of the ordinary. But if I moved, he’d be onto me.

He watched, sniffed, and listened, but nothing tipped him off. He went back to grazing. I now had a clear shot at his rump, but that’s no good. I’d need him to turn to one side or the other. I waited, betting he’d take a wandering path as he browsed. I was sure he’d turn eventually. When he did, I almost lost him.

His antlers got tangled up in some bushes. He shook them free and turned broadside to me. I had an open shot on the lower part of his vitals, his heart, but I didn’t have my bow drawn. I had it up and ready, but I knew he’d see the motion as I drew, and he might run. I had to hope that he’d see me draw, and think, “What’s that?” long enough for me to find him in my sights and shoot.

I drew, and I saw his head come around as he zeroed in on me, ears twitching, nostrils flaring, but I got the shot off. He lurched, and I saw my fletchings sticking out of his ribs, right behind his front shoulder, a guaranteed swift fatality. He charged through the thicket, smashing branches and small trees in his panic. He passed me on my left, heading down the hill, nearly in the direction I’d just come from. He burst out of the Briar about 20 yards in front of my truck. He stopped, and I saw a long coil of bunched and twisted wire hanging off his antlers. He’d picked it up in his mad dash through the bush.

I took a few steps to get free of the trees, and he was standing broadside at 40 yards away. I got another arrow ready, but I never took the shot. I saw him sway, then his front legs went out entirely, and he pitched forward onto the ground. There was a deep, rumbling death rattle, as the last breath left his lungs, and that was it. I had just downed my biggest bull moose to date. I was stunned. I took a closer look at him and removed the tangled wire that he’d picked up. It looked like some kind of fencing from ages past.

I took a quick selfie before sending a couple messages to call in the cavalry. I knew that dad was out of town at a funeral, but I hadn’t realized that all our hunting friends were there with him. I let him know that I had a moose down, and he tried to think of some people who could help, but came up empty. I contacted a couple hunters who’ve helped in the past, one being the Brokeback Bowhunter himself, Heath Kai. But he was tied up for the next few hours, as was Joel, another hunter who’s usually ready to help. It took a minute for it to dawn on me: I had a bull moose to field dress, quarter, load, hang, and skin by myself, and it was a hot day. It had to happen fast.

Even though all I did was take a couple pictures and change into grubby clothes, the stomach had already swollen noticeably by the time I got to work with my knife. If you let it go too long, the gas expansion will cause ruptures in the guts, and the meat will spoil, so I got the guts out as fast as possible. I had to be very cautious when I got to the chest cavity. My arrow was no longer visible. The piece that was sticking out of him broke off as he ran, so that meant there was a three-bladed, razor-sharp broadhead somewhere in that chest. It took some careful poking around near the entry wound, but I found it near the heart, where it had left three gashes through the ventricles.

I got the guts out and separated his front half from the rear. The evisceration is work, but dividing the front from the back is an oddly quick job, even on a moose. Not much holds a mammal together at the midsection. With the viscera out, a slit along the ribs on each side, about 30 seconds sawing through a single vertebra, and you’ve got it halved.

The guy who owns the land, Ron, came rolling up on his ATV while I was working. I’d let him know that I’d gotten a bull. He saw I was pouring sweat, and I still had to quarter and load it. He took mercy on me, brought me a couple gallons of water, and offered to load it onto my truck. He owns an acreage; he’s got machines.

As much as it appealed to me to see the bull effortlessly scooped into my truck by some big diesel breathing beast, I wouldn’t be able to handle it later. I had to get it hanging from the rafters in dad’s garage. I could barely budge the halves, let alone hang them. I needed it in four pieces. I did let him know that I’d be sawing it length-wise along its backbone to get it quartered and said this is much easier with a battery powered Sawzall. Ron graciously and deftly picked up the hint, and even though he was hosting a barbeque, I had a Sawzall with a spare battery and extra blades in hand within 10 minutes. I drained two batteries and still had to finish it off with a handsaw, but Ron’s contribution probably saved me an hour and more labor than I care to imagine. I’ve had to quarter a moose in the bush with my little pack saw before, and it is tough slogging.

I then discovered that getting the hind quarter of a large bull on to the tailgate of a truck is the upper limit of my physical abilities. I didn’t think I was going to make it. Not only is a moose’s hind quarter really heavy (probably in the neighborhood of 200 lbs.) but it’s unbalanced and unwieldy. Deadlifting 200 is not too hard, but deadlifting a furry, bloody meat oblong with no handles is another matter.

When I got the quarters loaded, I put the head on top and stepped back. It was only then that I realized the bull was much bigger than I first thought. My quick selfies did not do justice to his size at all. Most of the time, I call someone, and before we get to work, they’ll take a decent picture of me in the standard “grip and grin” as hunters call it. But I had no cameraman, and I knew I was racing the clock. It’s way more important to get the meat harvested than waste time on some staged pic where I put the animal in the foreground to make it look bigger.

Seeing him in the truck, I realized this dude needed zero staging. He was plenty big without it. I only briefly noted it and snapped a pic because he still needed to get hung and skinned. The fur will keep the heat in the meat, and that’s no good. So I focused on getting the quarters swinging from the rafters as fast as I could.

It wasn’t until dad put a tape measure on the antlers and told me what his spread was (the widest distance made by the outside edge of the antlers) that I realized what a beast I had. This bull had a spread about as big as dad’s largest moose, and that one was a Western Moose.

See, moose come in four different flavors. They are all massive, but they range from uber-massive to just-sort-of-massive. The Alaska-Yukon moose is the big boy. A large bull can be north of 1500 lbs., and the record is closer to 2000. The Western and the Eastern Moose are the medium size at a couple hundred pounds smaller. But around Calgary, we have the smallest, the Shiras Moose, a paltry 1000-1200 lbs. for a big bull. Despite being of a smaller species, my bull was comparable to dad’s big Western bull.

I looked up the averages for the spreads of the varieties of moose. Alaskans can be up to six or seven feet. But down here, a large Shiras bull is 40”, a trophy bull is 45”, and an exceptional bull is 50”. Mine is 43.5”, not bad at all. Because I’d only shared my hastily taken photos from the field, friends and family were shocked when I showed them the head and horns after I’d boiled it out. Here’s the pic Abby took in the living room when I maneuvered the thing through the door.

But I want to finish with my favorite moment of the hunt, one that I almost missed out on. Getting that bull out of the field, hung, and skinned did me in. It took me six hours of non-stop heavy work, and all I wanted to do was go home and shower. I had nicks and cuts, I was tired and hungry, and I’d started wondering what pulls and strains I would discover when I woke up the next day. Even my hands were sore and throbbing. They felt swollen, like my skin was a set of gloves two sizes too small. But they had one last job to do.

I turned one of the hanging hinds to find the tenderloin and carefully began to slice it free. There’s nothing in a supermarket that resembles the meat of the Briar Bull. Lean and almost purple in color, it is more dense and flavorful than the feedlot fattened steers that we’ve grown accustomed to.

I love bowhunting for the solitary time I spend outdoors, and if every few years I get the windfall of a trophy-sized beastie, that’s nice. But the sharing of wild-harvested meat with friends around a fire is an even greater prize.

The Brokeback Bowhunter was freed up from his obligations once evening rolled around, and I told him to come over. We had people sitting around the firepit in the backyard, and I needed someone else to cook because I was dead tired.

Heath showed up with a cast iron pan, a brick of butter, and Montreal Steak Spice. He set to work on frying up the tenderloin “the way God intended,” as he loves to say, and we shared it around. Having at least a few token bites from the harvest is a sacred rite amongst hunters, and it’s one of the ways we honor the animal that we’ve killed.

Seared to perfection by Heath, the succulent cuts were the perfect way to finish off the day and pay our respects to the Briar Bull.