This story, “Bulls in the Snow,” appeared in the November 1947 issue of Outdoor Life.
When the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced a December open season on moose in Alaska last year, it started something. Personally, I would have bet that moose hunting on snowshoes in subzero cold never would prove popular with nonresident sportsmen. Moose hunting, I figured, always would be regarded as a sport that went inseparably with the sunny, blue-hazed magic of autumn, not with the frigid temperatures of the northern winter. But I was wrong. Apparently the trophy hunters we get up here are snow-country adventurers at heart, cherishing a fondness for nature in her harsher aspects.
At any rate, when the “extra” season opened, a near-record army of valiant sportsmen donned moccasins, woolly underwear, and Mackinaw pants and shirts and fared forth enthusiastically into the big frost on the trail of Alces gigas. Before they saw civilization again they had their full share of unique experiences — and so did their guides. The hunt that Tex Cobb and I made on the Kenai Peninsula with our long-time client and friend, Doc Waters, was typical.
It was 30 below, with three feet of snow on the ground and a congealing wind crying off the glaciers of the Coast Range. Tex and I were taking turns breaking trail, while Doc slogged along behind, slack-kneed with weariness and shuffling his six-foot webs through the powdery drifts as if they were weighted with lead. Doc is a fine sportsman and a charming companion, but on snowshoes he becomes a problem. In the first place, he was born clumsy, and in the second place he weighs 250 pounds. Combine these two qualities with long webs and three feet of snow, and you have the ingredients of trouble.
“You know what I think?” Doc panted as we topped a wind-sculptured drift on the crest of a ridge. “I think this damned moose we’re following is going south for the winter. He’s leaving the country. He hasn’t hesitated or looked back once since we picked up his trail this morning.”
“Nope,” Tex said. “I’m betting we find him right down there in that hollow. He’s been heading fer a place to git outa the wind. Moose hate wind.”
Tex was right. He should be. He has hunted moose in Alaska for forty years and can practically read their minds.
We got out our binoculars and began taking apart the thickets and the clumps of timber. When you look for moose in timber you look for color rather than form. You analyze the shadows, the patches of light and shade, and when you locate something off-tint, you hold your glasses on it and wait for movement.
After ten minutes or so, I spotted a daub of gray-roan the size of a dinner plate m the depths of a spruce clump. I watched it, resting the glasses over a snowbank and trying to cut the focus finer. Five minutes passed. Then I caught a flicker of movement. At once, like a magic-lantern trick, the forward half of a moose’s body came into view.
I could see the animal’s head, his hump, and part of his left shoulder, as he lay in the snow. The outline of his antlers was indistinct through the low-hanging spruce branches, but I could tell that the spread was fair, probably around sixty inches. The moose was about 150 yards away.
“Make him stand up,” Doc said, when I had pointed the animal out. “If he’ll go sixty, I want him.”
The events of the next few minutes were very educational. Doc stepped forward into the lee of a snow-weighted spruce and slipped off the safety of his rifle. When he was ready, I whistled at the bull. The animal stood up slowly, gazing toward us, big ears semaphoring, his breath rising in white plumes from his nostrils. His antlers were still partly concealed.
Doc, trying for a clear look at him, moved to one side and brushed against the bole of the spruce. It was only a slight jar, but the result was almost disastrous. Several cubic feet of snow cascaded off the tree, half burying Doc and filling the air with a blinding veil of frost particles, which the light breeze held suspended between us and the clump of timber in which the moose stood. Doc uttered a groan of dismay and floundered down the slope until he could again see the bull. The animal had moved into the open now, and I saw that his antlers would easily go sixty inches.
Doc slapped his rifle to dislodge snow from the sights and fired as the moose started obliquely across the slope. He missed, batted the rifle again, and once more raised it. This time he didn’t fire. He muttered something I didn’t catch and brushed his mittened left hand across his eyes. The bull was now within a few yards of the timber. Doc shot and missed again. He tried once more and scored another miss. The bull, in full panicky flight, hit the timber with a crash and went out of sight.
Doc turned to Tex and me with a look of utter disbelief. “Something wrong with my eyes,” he said in a half-scared voice. “There was snow in the sights at first, but after that it was something else. I just couldn’t see him when I had the gun at my shoulder. Everything sort of wavered.”
I took the rifle, a .375 Magnum. I put it to my shoulder and sighted at a bush. For a moment I thought my eyes had gone bad too. The bush was wavering. I couldn’t have hit it with a dead rest. Then I realized what had happened. In the severe cold the heavy Magnum powder charge had caused heat waves to dance along the barrel, blurring the front sight and the target. It was the first time I had ever heard of this happening. I know that it does not happen with a .30/06 or a .300 Magnum, but in intense cold it can happen with a .375 Magnum.
“Some day I’m gonna have my horoscope cast,” Doc told us, when he was convinced his eyes were all right, “to find out why everything happens to me.”
This was the third day of the hunt. We had chartered a plane at Anchorage on opening day and flown seventy-five miles south to the mouth of Grass Creek on the south side of Kenai Lake. Doc had decided to make a winter hunt because he hoped it would be possible at this season to find a large concentration of bulls from which to select his trophy. At this time of year, with the madness of the rutting moon largely past, the bulls are willing to associate with one another, after a fashion, and so bring their harems in from the isolated pockets of the hills to form the great winter herds.
Our trouble was we hadn’t yet been able to locate one of their yards. We had found two abandoned gathering places — the heads of draws in which the snow was trampled to ice over an area of several acres and stippled with frozen droppings — but apparently the moose had been gone for at least a week. The only moose we had seen was the bull Doc had just lost. He was probably an outcast from the herds, past his prime or for one reason or another unfit for breeding.
We ate breakfast next morning by candlelight and were on our webs while stars were still burning over the summits of the mountains. We scouted the red-willow flats above Grass Creek until noon with no success. Then as we were working into a shallow basin that came down in a wide curve from the upslope of the peaks, we sighted two cows crossing the skyline on our left. One was roan, the other brown, and both looked young — three-year-olds, I thought. The brown cow in the lead was following a trail, sniffing it out like a great, oversized dog eagerly nosing game tracks.
They came down off the slope to the frozen creek that meandered through the basin, then turned upstream into a broad brush flat. They were still following the trail: I could see the brown cow nosing the bushes as she passed through them.
As soon as they were out of sight, we hurried up the basin until we cut their tracks. They were following the trail of a third moose. Tex pulled off a mitten and thrust his hand down into one of this animal’s tracks.
“It’s a bull,” he said. “Track’s as wide as my hand. And he ain’t fur ahead.”
The cows snooped through the snowy willows for twenty minutes, while we followed a quarter of a mile behind. Presently the brown one, who was apparently for some reason late in the rut, halted, stretched out her neck, and uttered a quavering wail. The second cow, showing every indication of being bored by this, snipped off a willow twig and chewed meditatively.
Tex had his glasses out and after a moment or two said he thought he could see the bull. There was a dark shadow behind a tangle of willows and at one end of it a patch of yellow. The yellow spot could be the broken end of a windthrown spruce or it could be the polished upper surface of a bull’s antler.
We closed in and climbed a low knoll that gave us a somewhat better view of the flat. The cows were moving ahead again now, so we decided to remain where we were and let them do our investigating for us.
“It’s him, all right,” Tex said suddenly. “I jest saw him move. I think he’s gonna git up.”
The bull of course had heard the approach of the cows, but was suspicious — or else a reluctant Romeo — because when he bounded up he was poised for flight. As his head was half-hidden by the brush, I couldn’t tell anything about it. Doc held the animal in his sights, waiting. He was determined this time to make his kill with the first shot to avoid a repetition of yesterday’s fiasco when heat waves on the gun barrel caused him to shoot wild.
The two cows halted in a narrow lane about eighty yards from the bull, and the brown one moaned again and coughed. The bull tossed his head, and I heard his antlers rake the frozen brush. He took several steps toward the cows. His left side was toward us, and I could see that the left antler was a freak. The palm was heavy and wide, and it had a double row of points, one above the other. I couldn’t, however, see the right antler.
“He looks good to me,” Doc muttered. “I’m gonna take him.”
Tex had the glasses glued to his eyes. “Hold on!” he said urgently. “Don’t shoot!”
As he spoke, the bull abruptly began trotting toward the cows, coming into plain view. It was at once clear why I hadn’t been able to see the right antler. There wasn’t any right antler. He had shed it. He plowed through the drifts in a grotesque crabwise gait, head tilted to carry the overbalancing weight of the remaining antler. Doc stared at the bull, blinking. Then he stood up, sighed heavily, and reached for a cigarette.
“Moose hunting in December!” he said. “Tra-la, tra-la!”
Bulls ordinarily begin shedding their antlers in mid-January, although now and then in December, as in this case, you see one that is slick-headed or carrying only a single antler. The time of losing their antlers seems to depend upon the age and physical condition of the individual animal, old bulls and ribby, rough-coated ones dropping theirs earlier than young, vigorous animals.
In the course of this hunt we saw several cast antlers, but in no case had both of an animal’s antlers been dropped at the same spot. Indians say that when a bull has shed one antler he retires to a safe, secluded place and waits there until the other has loosened to the point where he can knock it off against a tree or boulder. Sometimes he has to wait a week or more before he can do so.
Next morning dawned bright and still and cold, with the freezing trees banging like pistol shots and such a drift of prismatic frost particles in the air that all the stark peaks and the timbered valley shimmered as if in a mirage. And then when we were less than an hour out of camp we had an experience with a bull moose that was both hair-raising and enlightening.
We were skirting the rim of a burn when we saw the top of a tall willow sapling swaying violently. We approached the spot quietly, staying in the cover of the timber, and presently sighted a bull. He was engaged in stripping the bark from the willow. He was heavybodied, fat, with a sleek black coat, but his antlers were not even approximately trophy size. They had a spread of about thirty inches and the palms were not more than eight inches wide. He was another lone bull who presumably had been hazed out of his herd by more dominant males.
As we watched, he reared on his hind legs and, reaching as far up the sapling as he could, bit loose a strip of bark and peeled it down to the snow with a jerk of his head. We were so close to him that we could hear his stomach rumble as he chewed and swallowed.
“If neither o’ you fellers want that moose,” Tex whispered, “I reckon I’ll take him and have the meat flown back to town. You can’t beat a black moose fer eating purposes, and that critter is jest about the blackest I ever seen.”
Tex carries a venerable .30/06 Sauer Mauser, a beautiful and quite accurate rifle, the gift of a British peer whom he once guided. Ordinarily he is a crack field shot with it, but in this case something went wrong. He held on the bull’s neck, intending to break the animal’s spine, but the bullet went high. The bull dropped, but lunged up in a flash and turned to face us.
Tex told us later he supposed he had hit the animal through the throat, below the spine, and that in a moment it would go down again and stay down. For this reason, and because he didn’t want to ruin any more meat than was necessary, he held his fire, and started to walk toward the moose. He was within about eighty feet of the animal when suddenly it laid back its ears and charged.
Its progress over the litter of down timber that crisscrossed the burn was so erratic that Tex, trying a snapshot at its head, missed, the bullet going through one of the antler beams where it joined the bull’s skull. The animal was now almost upon him. For a split second it looked as if he wouldn’t have time to fire again before the animal reached him. Doc and I stood watching in open-mouthed horror. Neither of us could shoot because Tex was in our way. He worked the Mauser’s bolt, and fired without raising the gun to his shoulder. It was a good shot and well placed. The 180-grain open point smashed through the bull’s left shoulder, and when the animal went down, kicking and snorting on top of a small dead spruce, Tex finished it with a shot between the eyes.
THIS incident serves to bolster the growing conviction among northern woodsmen that the temperament of Alaska moose is undergoing a change, that they are yearly becoming more belligerent and prone to charge. Twenty years ago you almost never heard of a moose charging a human. In fact, when Hal Evarts, a well-known outdoor authority, came north in 1927 to gather material for a series of articles about Alaska big game, he spent some time trying to discover an authentic instance of a moose charging, and failed. Now, however, attacks by Alaska moose are fairly common.
Late the following afternoon, as we were sitting on a windfall five miles from camp, eating a lunch of frozen-bacon sandwiches, we sighted a bull crossing an opening half a mile distant.
I put my glasses on him and saw his head was good. He looked to be in his prime, slick-coated and active — no herd outcast — so I figured that at last we might be in the vicinity of one of the big yards we had been searching for so diligently. As he was moving directly away from us, we could only follow him and try to keep him in sight.
When we reached the opening in which we had first sighted him, we found the entire bottom cut up with moose tracks, all of them fairly fresh. The animals seemed to have come over a low ridge from the west and gone up the creek valley. But it was difficult to be certain about this, as Doc presently discovered.
“It may sound like a tenderfoot’s question,” he said when we had been following the tangle of trails for half an hour, “but how can you tell which way a moose is going when you find his trail in deep snow like this?”
“Well, the fact is,” Tex told him, “sometimes you can’t. If the tracks are fresh and the snow at the bottom of ’em ain’t froze yet, you can put your hand down in ’em and try to feel which way the critter’s toes or his dew claws was pointed. But if the snow in the tracks has froze, it’s a hell of a chore. All you got is a line o’ holes in the snow, and they don’t tell you much. If’n there’s a crust, it will scrape some hair off the moose’s shins, and o’ course the side o’ the hole the hair’s on is the way he was going.”
The bull we were following left the creek valley and climbed an alder-grown ridge to our right. To avoid being seen, we waited below in the timber until he had gone over the crest. Then we began the laborious task of breaking a switchback trail up the slope. It was 4 o’clock and purple dusk was pouring into the valleys when we topped the rise. Below us was a small circular basin heavily grown with spruce and birch. The bull had gone into the timber.
I figured we had thirty minutes of daylight left and that it would take us a good fifteen of them to get down into the basin. We took the slope on a long slant that brought us out at the downwind edge of the timber and began working back and forth in the snowy gloom under the close-packed trees, trying to cut the bull’s trail again.
Suddenly somewhere close ahead a branch cracked. Then a moose snorted. This was bad, I thought. If our bull was spooked, he would leave the timber on the far side, and we wouldn’t know it until we reached the open ground, when it would be too late to do anything about it. I touched Doc’s arm and motioned for him to hurry.
He tried, but didn’t achieve any great speed. After five days spent on webs, he still didn’t have the knack of managing them easily. He walked like a man with a tub on each foot. Every step was a conscious effort, and when it was necessary to execute a sharp turn he had to stop and make an advance mental chart of the maneuver.
“There’s your bull!” Tex said abruptly.
The animal was about 200 feet away, standing just beyond the base of a ten-foot cutbank which extended through the strip of timber. In the dim light he looked black and enormous, a fabulous beast, with great shadowy antlers that lay out flat from his skull, studded with a wonderful array of points. He stood motionless for perhaps a second after Tex spoke, then moved under a spread of low branches and disappeared.
Doc gave a stricken moan and plowed forward in a sort of ding-toed gallop, smashing through the undergrowth, keeping upright, so far as I could tell, only by sheer momentum. I didn’t think the bull had fled, but the light was so poor I couldn’t locate him again.
As I was trying to sort him out of the shadows, I saw movement off to our right. It wasn’t one animal there, but several. Then, beyond the place where the first moose had disappeared, there was additional shadowy movement. The timber was full of moose. We were into the big herd.
“Great day in the morning!” Tex breathed. “Stop the sawbones afore he skeers ’em clear out of the country.”
“Hold it, Doc!” I said, running after him. “Take it easy!”
“Take it easy yourself,” Doc called over his shoulder. “I’m gonna get a shot at that bull or bust something trying.”
He hadn’t seen the other moose. He thought there was only one bull here and that he had to work fast or lose him. When he came to the cutbank, he swung his arms like a ski runner and jumped. As I said, it was a ten-foot bank. At the bottom he crashed through the top of a windfall to land with a grunt on his knees in a deep drift. At any rate, it looked as if he had landed on his knees.
I slid down the bank to him, and just as I reached his side the band of moose I had seen on our right spooked suddenly and moved into the open and began to mill. There appeared to be about forty of the animals in sight at one time. There were trophy heads among them, but in this light an accurate appraisal was impossible. Doc, still apparently kneeling, saw the animals for the first time.
“Gosh!” he said. “Which one shall I take?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. Pick a big one.”
“Which is a big one? ” Doc persisted.
Tex saved the day. “It’s that monster right there with the big horns.”
They all looked like monsters with big horns. There must have been twenty bulls moving in and out among the black trees, and because they alternately appeared and disappeared they gave the impression that there were two or three times this number. Doc, for some reason still kneeling or standing in a crouch, leveled his rifle and fired. The flash of the shot blinded me momentarily, but I heard a moose grunt as they do when hard hit. Then the herd stampeded, smashing through the brush, antlers banging against the frozen trees.
One moose was left standing in the trampled clearing. He stood with his head down, facing us. Doc’s Magnum blasted again, and with the report and the bright lance of flame the animal went down as if his legs had been jerked from under him. I watched the bull a moment to make certain he was finished, then motioned for Doc to stand up and go over to it.
“I can’t move,” Doc said. “I’m trapped.”
Startled, Tex and I turned to see what was wrong.
“Well, dang my eyes!” Tex exclaimed. “Look at that, will you? When he jumped off that bank he went through both snowshoes. He’s standing on the ground, wearing the webs ‘way up around his knees.”
It was a fact. The impact of Doc’s 250 pounds had ripped the babiche foot filling out of the snowshoes as if it had been packing twine. We helped him extricate himself, and broke trail for him to the kill. It was a good trophy head, with a spread of sixty-three inches. I went to work taking off the head and cape while Tex did an extensive repair job on Doc’s webs.
It was close to midnight and the aurora was blazing in the hard, cold sky when we went back up the ridge, heading for camp. Doc was happy, pleased with the hunt, with Tex and me, with the Kenai, and with himself.
“These snow hunts,” he declared, “are all right. A little rugged, maybe, but they’ve got that old adventure appeal. Besides, you learn a lot of things about snowshoeing and such that you never knew before.”
“Yes, sir,” said Tex a shade too gravely. “Yes sir, you’re absolutely right. You sure do!”
Author’s note: Because it appears that hunting moose in Alaska in the winter is going to be almost as popular as in the fall, some information about cold-weather equipment probably will help. In the way of clothing, you will need wool trousers, a good wool shirt, silk-wool underwear, a light fur cap with earlaps, leather mittens with removable wool fillers, a light knee-length drill parka, at least half a dozen pairs of the heaviest wool socks you can buy, and a pair of Hudson Bay moccasins with felt inner soles. It will be advisable to purchase these items in Alaska where the outfitters are stocked with brands which have proved satisfactory for winter use in the territory. You will also need a good pair of sunglasses, preferably the type with curved lenses which protect the eyes from light reflected from the side.
The standard Army sleeping bag developed for troops in Alaska is the best available, although it leaves much to be desired. This bag is down-filled, and like all down bags it gives you perfect insulation everywhere except where you need it most — under you. Your weight compresses the down and the cold seeps through. When the side you are lying on becomes cold, you turn over, and you repeat this until presently you are revolving every few minutes. At this point you’ll probably decide the sensible thing to do is get up and build a fire.
The only solution is the one employed by the Eskimos, who use an inner insulating strip of moose or caribou hide about eighteen inches wide and four feet long. The hollow hair of these animals, thus used, will keep you warm and comfortable on snow in the most extreme temperatures you are likely to encounter.
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By all means include in your outfit a roll of adhesive tape with which to cover the muzzle of your rifle when hunting through snow-weighted brush or timber. As all northern riflemen know, snow will often get into a rifle bore undetected, and firing a gun so blocked is an invitation to death or mutilation. Don’t worry about forgetting to remove the tape before shooting. A single thickness will not build up dangerous back pressure on the bolt nor will it impair accuracy. Troops in the north tape the muzzles of all save gas-operated semi-automatic rifles, and field manuals state that tape is the best and most practical covering to keep rifles clear of snow.
Currently there are two open seasons on moose in the Kenai-from September 1 to 20, and from December 1 to 10. Sportsmen coming north for the latter season should arrive in Anchorage two days before, to allow for possible delays in reaching the moose country because of weather. The airplane is the only practical means of reaching the hunting grounds after freeze-up. Dog-team travel is slow and unreliable, pack trains can be used only in the summer and autumn, and foot travel in deep snow is impossible because of the weight of winter gear that must be carried. The cost of airplane transportation from Anchorage to the Kenai moose country and return for yourself, your guide, and your outfit will average about $300.