Tuesday morning was supposed to be an uneventful trip into the woods for Caleb Lewis. The 27-year-old from Maine’s northernmost Aroostook County had some game cameras to hang and some areas to scout, and he’s always on the lookout for sheds. Lewis and his wife own a shed antler dog chew company together.
But things took a turn when Lewis found himself in the middle of rutting moose action, with three nearby bulls loudly grunting and competing over a cow. Only when Lewis turned and realized one of the bulls was approaching him did he pull his phone out to record the close encounter.
That footage now lives on Lewis’ Instagram, where it garnered 2.4 million views over just a few days.
“I got out of my truck and noticed a bunch of moose rubs on the alders,” Lewis tells Outdoor Life. “It’s rut season, so of course they’re going to be active.”
Lewis was headed for a swamp about a half-mile from his truck. He worked through the woods and dropped down a ridge into the boggy area. He started plotting out his camera set-up when, out of nowhere, a cow moose started bellowing nearby.
“She was fairly close, and kept getting closer and closer,” Lewis says.
Pretty soon, a chorus of bull grunts started responding to every bellow. Lewis listened hard, and discerned at least three bulls with unique vocalizations — and they were all headed his way.
Then, a bull ripped a grunt right next to him. Lewis turned to see the bull some 50 yards away, swaying his head back and forth, moving through the thin trees toward him. The swaying antlers were a sure sign that the bull was worked up.
“That’s when I pulled out my camera and started recording,” Lewis says. “He slowly started wandering up to me, and raked some bushes probably 30 yards from me. There weren’t many trees to hide behind. It all happened so fast, it sort of caught me off guard. He walked downwind of me, and he must have smelled me. But he didn’t care. When they’re in the rut like that, they just don’t care.”
The bull started walking parallel to Lewis, bulging his eyes at him in what commenters on the video dubbed “bombastic side eye.” Then he started approaching Lewis head-on, still swaying his head back and forth and knocking his large paddles against trees.
Lewis realized how precarious his situation was, but he’s also experienced more than one close encounter with a moose. His go-to strategy is simply to talk at them; usually, moose want nothing to do with humans and spook at the sound of his voice.
“But I got overconfident in the idea that me talking would spook him,” Lewis says. “This guy was so fired up, he just wasn’t even phased. His eyes bulged when I told him he was close enough. After I say that three times, he starts swaying his head back and forth again like he doesn’t care, he just thinks I’m another bull. Then I took three steps backward and that’s when he charged me.”
Lewis turned his back and put his hand out behind him out of instinct. One of the moose’s tines nicked his hand. Lewis took two more steps and then, before he knew it, he was sliding across the forest floor. The moose had used a paddle to knock Lewis down, not so much whacking him as giving him a push.
Lewis kept yelling at the bull throughout the ordeal, and it eventually realized that Lewis was a human and not another rut-crazed competitor. After pushing Lewis to the ground, the moose turned and ran away. Lewis estimates he skidded roughly 6 feet. He sat on the ground for a moment and collected himself. He was bruised, but not bleeding and there were no broken bones.
“I was sitting there in the dirt, and I called my wife to tell her I’d just got run over by a moose. She was not thrilled,” Lewis says. “But as I was talking on the phone, that cow was still behind me, and the two other bulls were still grunting at her and circling her. They didn’t even care that I was on the phone talking and had just screamed at the other bull. So I hung up and went back to the truck.
“Needless to say, I did not get the cameras hung up.”