The Laughing Moose

I always wanted to kill a bull moose with my bow. There’s just something about going after the biggest thing out there.

I’m hunting out of Calgary, Alberta, and there’s no bigger critter to put an arrow in than a bull moose. Bull elk are nearly as big, and they are definitely considered to be the more illustrious prize in the bow hunting world. They are much more cagey and skittish, and there is nothing more exhilarating than when they deliver a soul-piercing bugle at you from 50 yards away.

But I had already taken a bull elk with a bow, and I’d yet to have an opportunity on a moose.

Part of the issue is that Alberta regulations make moose hunting a rare event. Most locations in the province require a 3 to 10 year wait to get a bull license. But everything changed for me when I met someone with land in the Bow Zone.

The Bow Zone is probably my favorite place on the planet. See, you can’t have hunters missing shots on deer, moose, and elk within a couple miles of playgrounds and hospitals, so there has to be a minimum distance that hunting is allowed from a city.

But an errant arrow doesn’t go more than a couple hundred yards, and a significant number of bow hunters are firing down out of trees, so those are only off by a couple of feet when they miss. This means you can hunt very close to the city, so they’ve created an archers only perimeter around Calgary. Furthermore, there are so many collisions between cars and wildlife that the Fish and Game Management folks have seen fit to sell hunting tags by the bushel for the Bow Zone.

Instead of waiting for years and years, I can buy a moose tag every year in the Bow Zone. The only catch is that it is 100% acreages. It’s all privately owned, so you need to find someone willing to let you go hunting in their backyard.

It took six years, but I finally found someone who trusted me enough to not put an arrow through his shed while pursuing my bow hunting dreams. On Labor Day of 2017, one of those dreams came true.

The little section of Bow Zone where I’m allowed to hunt is only a 13-acre property, and the huntable area is only about 3.5 wooded acres. The rest is all open area that has a direct view of a house, so I stick to the trees. This is a small space to hunt, but it’s in a natural watershed, and animals are always moving through there. On this September morning, I was up a tree that gave me a view of a small clearing.

I had open shots in front of me and to my right. It was still forested, but I could shoot animals up to 30 yards away before they’d be protected by branches and trunks. To my left and behind me, the cover was so thick that I’d only be able to shoot an animal almost directly under my tree.

I climbed up the tree about a half hour before sunrise: 6:00am. This is a standard practice for treestand hunters. We get in place before the animals are moving around and let the forest wake up around us. I had a very quiet start with the usual accompaniment of birds and squirrels greeting the day. The morning chill was just beginning to wear off when I heard crashing behind me.

This is how bow hunting always plays out. You sit there, completely still, completely silent, and you watch and listen attentively. Then your mind starts wandering a bit and the action takes you off guard.

I was sitting there musing about the Labor Day feast I’d be eating later on, thinking of what wine to pair with the ham dad was baking, when there was a sudden snapping of branches and stomping in the undergrowth of something huge barreling through the woods.

It scared me. I could say that as a veteran hunter, knowledgeable of how an ungulate’s eyes track for motion in the canopy, I turned my head very slowly to see if I could spot my quarry. But the truth of the matter is that the sound was so alarming and abrupt that I was freaked out, and I turned my head slowly like a person in a horror movie might fearfully glance over their shoulder.

However, the fear was swiftly swapped out for excitement and elation. Framed by leaves and aspen trunks, I saw the head, neck, and the glorious antlers of a bull moose staring at me from about 25 yards away.

Even though his head was pointed in my direction, I was quite certain he wasn’t looking at me. Most of me was blocked by the tree I was sitting in, and even if it weren’t, moose are known for their poor eyesight. He probably stopped where he did because he was nearing the open area that I was hunting. Prey animals will often hesitate at the edge of clearings and suss out the situation. They’ll wait there until they are good and sure it’s safe to cross the open ground. If they decide it isn’t, they turnaround and go back the way they came, or they will skirt the edge of the clearing until they are on the far side of it and then continue on their heading. Prey animals learn caution quickly in a world full of cougars, coyotes, wolves, bears, and bowhunters.

I knew he’d be onto me if I stood up or moved to grab my bow from the hook I had it hanging on, so I just watched him. He stood there long enough that my neck got sore from keeping my head turned. Ears twitching and turning in different directions, nostrils opening, closing, and flaring. He watched the clearing and took it all in.

I had the wind in my favor, but I was concerned that a random gust would grab a couple of my molecules and whisk them into those gaping nostrils, and that would be the end of my hunt, but he finally turned his head and shook himself. He browsed on some leaves and twigs, visibly relaxing.

But despite this all-clear assessment of the area, he diverted off to my lefthand side instead of continuing straight ahead. He tromped and thrashed about 20 yards in that direction and dropped to the ground as though his legs had instantaneously disintegrated. It’s times like this when I’m chagrined by the care I take in moving quietly through the woods.

When he dropped, I lost direct line of sight to him, so I reasoned that I was likewise out of sight. I still did this at a speed that would be comical to anyone who’s not a hunter. Almost every animal that we hunt has limitations on what they can see in terms of color, but they are all extremely adept at tracking movement. You need to move very slowly to not get busted, and I probably took more than a minute to stand up and grasp my bow.

Once I was up, I could pick out his body through the trees. In the lush green of early September, the black hide of a moose stands out. Moving slightly to see around branches and leaves, I could get nearly a full picture of him, though never all at one time. I had a side view of him, broadside as hunters put it. He was still looking in my general direction, but I believe that he was merely keeping an eye on the clearing.

My mind noted these observations, but my focus was looking for a shot window. At 30 yards, he was well within my range for an ethical shot, but I needed a clear path for the arrow.

As long as a hunter can see the orientation of a target animal, they only need to have a clear shot at one small spot. This is because a hunter, at least a successful one, does not aim at a moose. Rather, they aim at the moose’s heart and lungs. On a moose, that’s the size of a crockpot: very easy to hit at 30 yards.

But as the saying goes: Aim small, miss small. Meaning, if you aim at the crockpot, there’s a good chance you’ll hit it, but if you aim for the top of the dial that’s in the center of the crockpot, you’re damn sure going to hit it. So the successful hunter not only aims at that crockpot-sized spot on a moose, they’ll stare at the center of that spot, find a small contour of the muscle or ruffle in the hide, and that’s where they send the arrow.

I had a clear line of sight on his vitals, I knew how he was oriented, so I knew where to aim on the outside of his body to hit those vitals, and he was in range. There was just one tickbox that I couldn’t check off on the “Do I take this shot” checklist. Clear path for the arrow.

The problem with arrows is that they are not lasers. Like any projectile, an arrow loses altitude when you fire it. So when I take aim with my bow, and I look through my sight at a moose, my arrow will hit precisely where I aim, but it will not follow that path. My vision is not susceptible to gravity, so it takes a straight line to the moose, while my arrow takes an arcing path to that moose.

My picture of the moose’s body was framed tightly by branches and leaves, some were only 5 yards away, some about 10 yards away, and some within a few yards of the bull himself. That virtually guarantees that my arrow’s path would take it through those branches and leaves on the way to the moose. And, as many a hunter has found out to their dismay, that arrow will surely be deflected off its course. It’s very easy to start rationalizing how this particular shot will work out just fine: It’s really only one or two leaves; That’s a really thin branch; or It’s so close to the animal, I’m sure it’ll only deflect an inch or two at most. Every bowhunter reading this is likely remembering a time when they returned to the camp or the truck one arrow short, hoping no one would notice so they wouldn’t have to admit to falling prey to this rookie mistake.

Yes, that's actually a picture from that day. I texted it to dad to explain why I wasn't flinging a dart at the bull bedded near my stand. An arrow in the middle of that black spot would kill him in seconds, but you just can't get it through there.

I went down the rationalizing path a few steps but decided against it. I then tried to direct my interior monologue down more productive and helpful pathways. Bowhunting is a mental game. You have to stay focused throughout an entire hunt, wherein you might see only a few seconds of action or none at all. When you make a critical mistake like moving at the wrong time and getting busted by an animal, or taking a bad shot, or taking a good shot but not recalling exactly where that animal was standing to go pick up the blood trail, you learn from it by going back in your mind and thinking about where you lost your focus on the task at hand.

When you’ve been given a gift as I had: A prime target animal in your range, along with a bit of down time to make decisions, you can start thinking productively. I generally refer to myself by my last name in these self talks.

Okay, Schnell, it’s happening: bull moose right there. He didn’t see you. He can’t smell you. He didn’t hear you. We’re good.

Why didn’t he just keep coming? Two or three more steps and we’d have him.

Doesn’t matter. He’s there now, and where’s he going to go? He looked like he was headed toward the open, so he’ll probably head that way again. That’ll give you a shot. Watch, wait, be ready.

He could go back the way he came.

He could.

And the wind could shift too.

Yeah, it could.

He could start feeding in the other direction.

Yeah, and maybe a coyote comes blasting through and spooks him, or another moose or deer startles him, or a car horn freaks him out, or he gives you a perfect shot and you miss. Is there some hidden benefit to torturing ourselves like this? We wait. This is a good position. Why don’t we go ahead and stop shaking and start some slow breathing while we wait?

My knees were shaking horribly, and my breath was ragged with excitement. If the bull had come through, I might not have been in great condition to make a shot anyway. So I forced myself to start breathing slowly and tried to heed the calmer Schnell who was giving commentary.

I watched the moose closely, trying to figure out what he was up to insofar as I know what moose get up to. I have way more experience hunting whitetails and elk. When I watch them, I tend to have a good idea of what they’re about to do next because I’ve seen it before. Moose are novel for me.

On closer observation, I could see that his legs weren’t folded underneath him in the typical way of a bedded animal. When you come across a spot in the snow or grass where an animal has bedded down, you often see a perfect outline of the four legs folded neatly underneath the body. This bull was lying down with his legs splayed out to the side, not underneath him. This is usually how you find an animal after it’s been shot.

But when I leaned to one side to have a clear view of his head, he didn’t act like an animal who’d been wounded. He was steadily chewing the cud. Fun (and disgusting) fact: moose regurgitate their food and give it another chew before swallowing again. Apparently, it helps to get more nutrients out of it. I’m guessing it helps to mash it up again too. They eat a lot of twigs and shoots, and on the first trip down the hatch, I imagine it’s like swallowing a mouthful of pencils.

I watched him chew for about 15 minutes before I started to get bored. Yes, it was exciting to have my dream animal right there within shooting range, but I began to wonder how long this would go on. I took my palm-sized rangefinder out and watched him through it for a few minutes. It has a slight magnification in addition to a digital read out that shows exactly how many yards away an object is. My big, black, chewing object was 27 yards away.

Through the rangefinder, I could see a closeup view of his chest and stomach. He was panting heavily. It wasn’t hot yet, only about 15 degrees Celsius, and he had been lying there for a while, so I couldn’t account for the panting. I began to wonder if he was wounded by an arrow, and he came here to lie down in cover. Panicky Schnell took that ball and ran with it.

That’s why he’s lying there like that. He’s gut-shot.

There’s no way to know that.

There’s no way to know he’s NOT gut-shot.

Well… no, but… shut up. There’s no way to know a lot of things.

What if a hunter is on his blood trail and comes through here?

The bull probably pops up and takes off. The guy would get to that spot and not even know how long it had been since the bull was there.

Right, but what do we do? Just sit and watch him go by or talk to him?

I don’t know. We figure it out when it happens. IF it happens.

I think he’s gut-shot.

Fine, he’s gut-shot. It doesn’t change anything.

It could. I mean, if we think he’s got an arrow in him, do we shoot when he stands up? He’s, like, another guy’s moose.

That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. You’re going to pass up a shot on a bull because he MIGHT already be wounded?

My inconclusive internal dialogue went on. And on, and on. And the bull just kept up with his chewing and panting. After an hour and a half, I started to wonder if he was gut-shot how long it would take him to die. And if he was just chillin’, I started to wonder exactly how long a moose could sit there chillin’.

I texted dad to let him know my situation. I had to leave at about 2:00pm to go to his house for Labor Day with the family. As a hunter and a lover of moose meat, dad would be happy to let me sit there till the Lord’s triumphant return if it meant a shot on a moose, but the rest of the family expected me for dinner.

He advised me to wait and watch. He didn’t have any direction on how long a moose could sit and chew, or how long they’d sit there if wounded, but he did ask me the question that every bowhunter is probably asking right now.

Did you try calling him?

During mating season, or the rut as it’s called by hunters, bull moose will grunt: a loud and guttural WRUUNH! I’ve heard and seen them grunt with each step of a swaggering strut through their territory. In moose vernacular, it means: Listen up! This here’s my swamp, and imma screw every mama moose within a mile of it. You best clear out if you don’t want one of these antlers up yer ass!

The females have a call too. When a cow is ready to breed, she’ll let out an elongated version of the grunt. It’s a moan that drawls on for 10-15 seconds. Both the cow and bull call will attract bulls. They will answer the challenge of a rival bull, and when the female says she’s ready to mate… well, it’s much like the human mating ritual: The males come in like fish on a line.

So why wasn’t I calling? It’s a matter of timing and the advantage of surprise. September 4 is not the best time for calling moose. These animals mate only once a year, and the ritual is triggered by the interval between sunrise and sunset.

Calves need to be born at the right time, or they will not survive the winter. For moose, I believe this is about mid May. The gestation time doesn’t change, so the moose instinctually mate at the same time every year, the end of September and beginning of October. Despite popular myth that they mate on the first cold week, it always happens at the same time. If a warm fall delayed the mating, every calve would die the next winter because it’d be too young to survive.

So it’s not really calling time yet. That said, it’s not totally uncommon to hear moose call a couple weeks early as their bodies and brains begin to hint that go-time is just around the corner. Once again, just like in the human world, the males are the more likely of the sexes to be lured in by mating behavior.

I hadn’t called because the bull didn’t know there was anybody else in the clearing, moose or man, and I liked it that way. The second that you make a call, you give up your position. Call to an elk, deer, or moose, and their ears will twitch, turn in your direction, and instantly pinpoint your location. And I do mean pinpoint. I saw a whitetail through the woods at about 200 yards last year, and I gave one grunt on my buck call. It was about a 30-minute wait, but that buck came creeping through the bush and approached the exact tree that I was in.

If I call to the bull, he may be interested, he may not be, but he will know exactly where a moose should be standing, and he will look for it. This puts an animal on alert. It doesn’t mean Danger! necessarily, but it does make them very watchful and critical. I was waiting for the bull’s next move. If he looked like he’d move away from me, I’d try calling. If he moved toward me, then an arrow in his lungs could be his first indication he wasn’t alone.

I made my game plan. I was going to wait him out. He’d been there for 90 minutes, and I had three and a half hours till I needed to go. If he went the wrong direction, I’d call. If he continued on his previous heading, I’d put one through his lungs.

Of course, none of that played out the way I’d hoped.

Around three hours into this moose’s siesta, I heard the landowner and his kids playing in the yard. The house wasn’t visible, but it was only about 100 yards away, and the kids’ squealing as they played on a swing set and slide was just as piercing and imminent as though they were under my tree. I thought this would surely have some effect on the bull, but it did not. The kids and landowner eventually piled into a car and drove away, the gravel driveway taking them to within just 50 yards of me and the moose. He didn’t even twitch.

I believe it was around one o’clock, four hours into nap time, when I heard the sonic boom.

The sound was overwhelming. It shook my stand. I instinctually wrapped one arm around the tree, and I almost dropped my bow. I looked up and saw a jet scream by and stood there trying to compose myself in the fading roar of its aftermath. I was stunned. The property isn’t near a base, or anything, and it took me some time to piece together why a fighter jet would be blasting along at low altitude. Eventually, I remembered that several of my friends were attending something called the Labor Day Classic: a football game between the Calgary Stampeders and the Edmonton Eskimos. And, for some reason, we fly jets over football games.

How did the military flyover land with my antlered companion? It’s like he didn’t even clock it. He didn’t move a muscle, and I began to wonder if he was stone deaf.  

At 1:45, I realized the moose had waited me out, and I was going to have to make the first move. I wished that I was in what we call a permanent stand, rather than a climbing stand. A permanent is a platform 20-30 feet up a tree with pegs or a ladder leading to it. If you are very careful, you can descend one nearly silently.

A climbing stand is a two-piece platform that you use to climb any given tree. Though a skilled climber can make a fairly quiet descent, nobody can get down from a tree in one of those things with an animal 27 yards away without them knowing. Maybe if the wind was howling I could, but this was a very still day.

I tried calling to the bull first. I used grunts to see if I could get him to come over and check me out. He stopped chewing, he zeroed in on me, and he kept his ass seated right there. Nothing.

I tried a few more times. I even mixed in a cow call, but the moose resumed chewing and reacted in no way whatsoever. I’d have to try to get to him.

I reached over to another tree and snapped off a branch. I whacked it against the trunk of my tree and a few branches, grunting all the while, mimicking the sound of a bull raking trees and bushes with his antlers in a display of dominance. I had a feeling he wouldn’t react, but it was cover-sound. I began descending the tree, stopping every time my stand made an un-moosey sound, then whacking branches and grunting enthusiastically.

As I came down, I watched to see if the changed angle presented an open shot at the bull, but it never did. Once I was two feet off the ground, I detached from my fall arrest, took off my pack and lowered it to the ground, and got an arrow nocked and ready to shoot. With my rangefinder in one hand and bow in the other, I had all I needed to attempt a stalk on the bull.

When I made the last hop off my stand onto the ground, the bull leapt up from his bed. I thought I had all my gear fastened down, but that kind of synchronization can’t be a coincidence; I must have allowed a piece of my fall arrest to clink as I dropped to the ground. He was up, staring at me, and he looked ready to bolt.

Not one to give up, I stood behind the tree I’d descended and kept up the grunting and thrashing. I didn’t have a clear shot at his body, but I could see his face, and if it had a thought bubble above it, it would say: I don’t think so, bub. You ain’t no moose.

Stalking on the ground is a completely different game from treestands. Now I had the undergrowth to deal with. It provided the advantage of good cover in that I began creeping towards him, keeping bushes and downed trees from giving him line of sight. But that same cover prevents open shots.

I was looking between him and I for a lane of open ground. As I moved toward a promising angle, he took a few strides away from me, doubling the distance between us, and that’s when despair set in.

I could see how this would end, he’d keep to the edge of my range, always with cover between us. He’d let this cat and mouse continue for two or three repetitions, and then he’d move in earnest, trotting a couple hundred yards, moving out of range and off the property.

I slowly and steadily moved to where he’d bedded down. I had to lose line of sight on him several times as I approached, each time sure that I’d never see him again. But despite not believing that I was a moose, I don’t think he was sure I was a human either. He stayed about 25 yards from where he’d bedded, and when I got to his bed, I ranged the small patch of him that I could see through the leaves: 24 yards. Perfect distance.

He was facing up hill, and he looked like he was getting ready to move, not away from me, but parallel to me. Looking at the path I thought he’d take, a few steps would bring him into an open lane, broadside to me at 25 yards.

These are the decisions that make or break a hunt. You can’t wait for that opportunity and then draw your bow. You have to be ready when it comes. I drew my bow and held on that open spot.

He did move, and he went the right direction. When he got to the open lane, I made a loud, sharp grunt, unlike any I had before. He stopped and looked at me, and I fired.

A few things happen when you shoot an arrow at big game, and they tell you whether you’ve killed or not. Arrows out of a compound bow fly fast, but not so fast that your eye doesn’t track them. If you’ve aimed and followed through, you’ll see your arrow hit the spot you aimed at, either disappearing through the animal, or sticking out. I saw my arrow strike true and disappear.

You’ll hear it hit too. If you hit between the ribs, it’s thwap! If you hit a rib, it’s thrack! I heard thwap!

Most rewarding of all by far is how the animal reacts. I’ve arrowed many deer, and I can tell you that the whole world over, there is an instant reaction that deer have when they are hit fatally. The hind end jumps up, the rear hooves come forward, often right past where the front hooves are planted, before they shoot backward, raking the ground and flying out high behind them. Picture a bucking bronco. And then they are off like a shot.

Deer don’t do that every single time, but every time they do it, you have yourself a fatally shot deer. When I hit this moose, I saw its back end rise up, and the rear legs kick out. It was very subtle compared to deer, and I’d never shot a moose, but that reaction was immediately familiar to me, and I knew he was mine.

I stood still for a minute, which means I’d managed to keep my wits about me. When you’ve shot an animal with an arrow, it’s important to ignore the very old saying: Don’t just stand there; do something! You need to do the exact opposite: Don’t just do something; stand there! This is important for finding the point of impact and the start of the blood trail.

I stood there, put my rangefinder on the last spot I’d ranged him, and confirmed it was the right spot. I raised my bow and aimed at the exact spot where I’d shot him. I then stared at the tree closest to that spot, memorized it, and then walked towards it only taking my eyes off of it for fractions of a second to find footing.

It sounds tedious, but if you can find the exact spot where the animal was standing when you plugged it, your chances of recovering it rise astronomically.

I found the spot where I’d hit him, and now the undergrowth was very helpful. Bright, arterial blood was spattered on grass and bushes at about my chest height. There were splashes every foot or so, and it was easy tracking. As I followed it, his course veered towards the gravel driveway of the property, back in the direction that I’d heard him come from five hours ago.

I only followed it for about 30 yards before I came to a 10-yard-wide opening in the trees where the grass was growing waist-high. He was facing away from me on the far side of the clearing, head down, labored breathing. He was clearly about to drop.

But one doesn’t take chances. First of all, swift, ethical kills are the bowhunter way. Second, while I was sure he was about to drop, you can never be 100%. I’d nocked another arrow within seconds of firing the first. I drew and put one right through his heart, and he dropped as soon as the arrow impacted.

As I approached him, I found a long branch on the ground, and I prodded him with it several times before getting too close. A kick from a moose is nothing you want to mess around with, even if he is dying.

Confirming that I’d finally bagged a bull moose, I made the calls. I got dad on the line first and dropped a pin for him to come find me and help with extraction. I called my friend Heath for an extra hand. And then I took a few pics with just me and my moose.

When I got to thinking of how we’d get him out of the bush and onto a truck so we could go butcher him, I looked at the pin I’d dropped for dad and wondered if it was accurate. It looked like I was on a road. I walked in the direction the moose was heading. About five yards ahead of it, the trees cleared, and there was the driveway. It was easily the most convenient moose extraction in the history of man vs. beast.

But here’s the million-dollar question: Why’d I call this story The Laughing Moose? All he did in this story was flop down and chew. To wrap up, I think it’s best to rely on a picture rather than spill another thousand words.

Upon seeing these photos that dad snapped, Heath asked, “Why does this moose look like he’s laughing?”

Afterword: Any moose hunters out there will note that this is a very small bull (insofar as any moose can be "small"). But I assure you, to this smiling guy in the picture who just got his first moose, and it was a bull, and it was with a bow... that might as well be a record-breaking Alaskan monster.