Moose-bombed
(Lou, Yukon)
We’ve spent most of the last week in a state I can only describe as being moose-bombed. Anyone who hunts will tell you that pulling the trigger is the easy part. It’s a lot of work and I think we both wondered at points whether it was too much. But as I reminded Neil in my usual sympathetic style- “It is fucking disgusting to destroy this magnificent creature and then whinge and bitch about having to deal with it.” (In fairness, Neil had to do most of the lifting.)
But we managed it and, after about 3 days of work, we are toasting our beautiful bull as we tuck into tenderloin, Moroccan moose stew, dill and beetroot moose stew (and so it will go on all winter...)
Last Saturday, a friend from Dawson stopped by in his boat after an unsuccessful hunting trip down river.
“Show us your moose calling then,” he asked. A bit shame-faced we gave it a go-
“Nah, needs to be more nasal. Shorter. With an ‘eaarlgh’ sound at the end.”
So we all practised bellowing and snorting til our pal was satisfied we had it right and off he went.
We had no intention of hunting at this point. We had nowhere to hang the meat, needed to revise our field-dressing skills (Youtube tutorials) and were about as unprepared as we could have been when, the following day, Neil heard a bull moose grunting for his sexy lady friend on the beach.
We toppled out of the cabin with the 30-06 and before either of us really had time to think, I was looking at him through the scope of the rifle. He was on our property, standing broadside on (the safest and easiest shot to hit vital organs) by the creek and extremely close at about 40 yards. We may not have been ready but this was the shot I had dreamed of.
My first shot was fatal. He did not collapse but just stood patiently. It was heart-breaking. I watched through the scope with tears rolling down my face. He took two steps towards the river. I shot again. I knew I was destroying more of the meat, but I couldn’t bear the idea he may get into the river and swim away, fatally wounded. Even if he just staggered into the creek and collapsed, we might risk losing meat as water carries bacteria that can cause it to rot.
What could not be undone
He stopped and waited. After a minute or so he sat down. he didn’t fall, he just gracefully sat down on the beach and waited. Then he lay his enormous head gently into the silt. I watched this event that could not be undone, through the scope of my rifle. A massive, healthy bull moose brought to its knees by one very small human. Finally, his head lolled sideways and his rack (antlers) stuck awkwardly into the sand.
We left him for 15 minutes, to ensure he was dead, and staggered back to the cabin to get knives and change our clothes in a state of shock.
You should always approach downed game from behind (if they happen to get up and run it's best not to be in their path.) This guy was dead. A prod in the eye with the rifle confirmed it.
We’d done this before with caribou, but getting the meat off an animal 5 times as big is really something else. Everyone does it differently but we did it like this-
How we quartered our moose
We got the guts out so the meat could cool. Easier said than done. (In fact it was all easier said than done.)
We managed not to split the stomach or bladder (which would then leak nastiness all over the meat) but cutting through the diaphragm which holds the viscera in place was a whole other matter. My shots hit the lungs and liver so we were knee deep in bloody mess and crawling inside the cavity at points trying to cut through.
We worked slowly into the night, continually sharpening knives, pondering, cutting, sawing, grumbling, remembering not to grumble. The Northern Lights rippled in the most spectacular pink and green swirls above our heads.
Our recent visitors really wanted to see a moose hunt and Northern Lights. In fact it was they who encouraged me to get my hunting licence as I wasn’t going to bother, having enough new experiences to deal with for one autumn.
So we have them to thank for our meat and are very grateful but sadly they saw neither the moose nor the aurora.
We worked until 4.30am, taking frequent breaks inside to warm up and ever vigilant for an approaching bear (with our dog, Homer’s, help on that front). Luckily, temps have just begun to dip and we were below freezing. Great for cooling the meat but not for our fingers. We pressed them into the warm blood and flesh to keep the chill off.
We had the animal staked and ratcheted off with rope and come-alongs (hand winches) to try to keep the cavity open but it was pretty much impossible to turn him over so we did our best to saw and slice. We wanted the quarters (legs) and rib cage in large chunks so that we could hang them to air dry.
First cut is the hind quarter- fairly easy as you just find the ball joint in the hip and cut that out. Then the front quarter (shoulder) on the same side. We found that harder as we simply couldn’t work out where to make the cut.
We guessed randomly in the end and it seemed to work out OK. As we couldn’t roll the moose, we had to take the next two quarters by cutting from the inside which was a bloody challenge, literally and figuratively. We sawed the leg and hooves off below the knees and hock to save weight but left most of the the hide on to try to keep silt off the meat. A mistake as it turns out, as the hide was full of silt which fell on to the meat when we skinned it the next day.
Each chunk of meat weighed about the same as your average washing machine and was wheel-barrowed up our incredibly steep bank.
We simply couldn’t manage the ribs in one piece so we sawed through with a handsaw, and eventually lugged the generator down and used an electric Sawsall. We got a sizable chunk from the lower ribs, including the prime meat of the backstraps (next to the spine on the outside) which is now hanging in our drying rack. What we should have done, I now know, is cut the ribs in a rack from each side.
After two hours’ sleep we got up before the ravens and were back at the carcass. We cut the meat from the rest of the rib cage, and still unable to move his huge, ponderous head, we had to cut the meat from the neck and bag it in situ.
My learning on that it is, don’t try to butcher the meat properly (i.e. following the membrane lining of the different muscle groups) if there is silt blowing. Just take it out in a big chunk and deal with it later. We lost a lot of meat to silt and hair when trimming it.
We were just about able to get the head into a wheel barrow once we had cut the rack (antlers) off with the Sawsall to finish trimming it.
All scraps- head, hide, etc. were loaded on to our boat and dumped in the river. We had to roll the viscera into a tarp and shove it into the creek as it proved somewhat difficult to pick up.
Sadly we didn’t use the viscera, tongue or brain. It’s awful to waste it but, without a village to feed and more hands to help, there is SO much meat to deal with and those parts will not keep so well, so most hunters here do not use them.
Hanging and sharing
We will give 2 or 3 of our quarters away to people who did not get a moose (including our friend who helped with calling) and have the rest of the meat hanging in our little drying rack. Much to our surprise its elderly logs are sturdier than they appear and it seems to be holding the weight.
Temps are going to -6C at night and so we have no worries about the meat holding. We’ll use the bagged neck meat first and let the rest air dry and then freeze.
By happy coincidence we saw the last of the blow flies the day before the kill. But just in case, the quarters are hanging in cloth meat bags and we rubbed vegetable oil on the ribs to help a crust form.
A selfish act
We could have lived a third winter on corned beef and dried beans. (With no fridge or freezer we cannot bring store-bought meat in as we must get our supplies before freeze up, so it will go off). I felt upset at the time but that passed because ultimately I’m at peace with what we’ve done.
This bull lived a wild and free life up until 1 minute before he died. I have always eaten meat. Have I ever toasted, thanked and felt so grateful to any cow, sheep or chicken I’ve eaten? No. Are they less worthy? Has my concern about the catastrophic damage we are doing to our oceans and sea-beds ever stopped me having fish n chips when I fancied it? No. Was my last new handbag hemp or leather? It was leather. Why? Because hemp looks shite.
These are every day choices and so we simply do not consider them so deeply.
Other news- total fucking clueless idiots, again.
It was my birthday.
Neil asked “what do you want to do?”
I thought about it- “I want to change the transmission fluid on the snowmachine.” More because I don’t want to have to do it when it gets colder than because I saw it as a special birthday treat, but anyhow that’s what we did.
Neil gave me a lovely card and a Moomin tin mug. We Skyped my mum who informed us it was not my birthday. It was the day before my birthday.
We are not very good at dates here in the wilderness, which is why we often undertake the arduous journey to Dawson on a Sunday when all the shops are closed.
Despite having the date on the computer, it is set to UK time and so a confusing 8 hours ahead, plus we don’t use it every day. We try to keep track of the days by writing what we did on my AC/DC calendar. However, often we forget and each day for the last week says “moose”. Anyhow, I’m blaming Angus Young.
My actual birthday was gorgeously sunny so we took the opportunity to scramble up the hill and explore the ridge behind our house.
And we got the snowmachine maintenance done. What more could a girl ask for on her birthday?
Will the simpletons make it to town?
We are planning our last supply run to Dawson on Tuesday. Will we make it or will we accidentally go on a Sunday again?
And if we do, will it be another one of those frequent and mysterious national or territorial holidays, so will all the shops be closed?
It’s a real cliff-hanger ending this one, for us anyway.
Some thank yous
Thanks to our visiting British friends who encouraged us and supported me getting my hunting licence. Sorry you missed it.
Thanks to Dave for perfecting our lonely lady moose calls.
Thanks to Homer for alerting us to the moose and for being our bear early warning system as we dealt with it.
And thank you to our beautiful bull.
We’ve spent most of the last week in a state I can only describe as being moose-bombed. Anyone who hunts will tell you that pulling the trigger is the easy part. It’s a lot of work and I think we both wondered at points whether it was too much. But as I reminded Neil in my usual sympathetic style- “It is fucking disgusting to destroy this magnificent creature and then whinge and bitch about having to deal with it.” (In fairness, Neil had to do most of the lifting.)
But we managed it and, after about 3 days of work, we are toasting our beautiful bull as we tuck into tenderloin, Moroccan moose stew, dill and beetroot moose stew (and so it will go on all winter...)
Last Saturday, a friend from Dawson stopped by in his boat after an unsuccessful hunting trip down river.
“Show us your moose calling then,” he asked. A bit shame-faced we gave it a go-
“Nah, needs to be more nasal. Shorter. With an ‘eaarlgh’ sound at the end.”
So we all practised bellowing and snorting til our pal was satisfied we had it right and off he went.
We had no intention of hunting at this point. We had nowhere to hang the meat, needed to revise our field-dressing skills (Youtube tutorials) and were about as unprepared as we could have been when, the following day, Neil heard a bull moose grunting for his sexy lady friend on the beach.
We toppled out of the cabin with the 30-06 and before either of us really had time to think, I was looking at him through the scope of the rifle. He was on our property, standing broadside on (the safest and easiest shot to hit vital organs) by the creek and extremely close at about 40 yards. We may not have been ready but this was the shot I had dreamed of.
My first shot was fatal. He did not collapse but just stood patiently. It was heart-breaking. I watched through the scope with tears rolling down my face. He took two steps towards the river. I shot again. I knew I was destroying more of the meat, but I couldn’t bear the idea he may get into the river and swim away, fatally wounded. Even if he just staggered into the creek and collapsed, we might risk losing meat as water carries bacteria that can cause it to rot.
What could not be undone
He stopped and waited. After a minute or so he sat down. he didn’t fall, he just gracefully sat down on the beach and waited. Then he lay his enormous head gently into the silt. I watched this event that could not be undone, through the scope of my rifle. A massive, healthy bull moose brought to its knees by one very small human. Finally, his head lolled sideways and his rack (antlers) stuck awkwardly into the sand.
We left him for 15 minutes, to ensure he was dead, and staggered back to the cabin to get knives and change our clothes in a state of shock.
You should always approach downed game from behind (if they happen to get up and run it's best not to be in their path.) This guy was dead. A prod in the eye with the rifle confirmed it.
We’d done this before with caribou, but getting the meat off an animal 5 times as big is really something else. Everyone does it differently but we did it like this-
How we quartered our moose
We got the guts out so the meat could cool. Easier said than done. (In fact it was all easier said than done.)
We managed not to split the stomach or bladder (which would then leak nastiness all over the meat) but cutting through the diaphragm which holds the viscera in place was a whole other matter. My shots hit the lungs and liver so we were knee deep in bloody mess and crawling inside the cavity at points trying to cut through.
We worked slowly into the night, continually sharpening knives, pondering, cutting, sawing, grumbling, remembering not to grumble. The Northern Lights rippled in the most spectacular pink and green swirls above our heads.
Our recent visitors really wanted to see a moose hunt and Northern Lights. In fact it was they who encouraged me to get my hunting licence as I wasn’t going to bother, having enough new experiences to deal with for one autumn.
So we have them to thank for our meat and are very grateful but sadly they saw neither the moose nor the aurora.
We worked until 4.30am, taking frequent breaks inside to warm up and ever vigilant for an approaching bear (with our dog, Homer’s, help on that front). Luckily, temps have just begun to dip and we were below freezing. Great for cooling the meat but not for our fingers. We pressed them into the warm blood and flesh to keep the chill off.
We had the animal staked and ratcheted off with rope and come-alongs (hand winches) to try to keep the cavity open but it was pretty much impossible to turn him over so we did our best to saw and slice. We wanted the quarters (legs) and rib cage in large chunks so that we could hang them to air dry.
First cut is the hind quarter- fairly easy as you just find the ball joint in the hip and cut that out. Then the front quarter (shoulder) on the same side. We found that harder as we simply couldn’t work out where to make the cut.
We guessed randomly in the end and it seemed to work out OK. As we couldn’t roll the moose, we had to take the next two quarters by cutting from the inside which was a bloody challenge, literally and figuratively. We sawed the leg and hooves off below the knees and hock to save weight but left most of the the hide on to try to keep silt off the meat. A mistake as it turns out, as the hide was full of silt which fell on to the meat when we skinned it the next day.
Each chunk of meat weighed about the same as your average washing machine and was wheel-barrowed up our incredibly steep bank.
We simply couldn’t manage the ribs in one piece so we sawed through with a handsaw, and eventually lugged the generator down and used an electric Sawsall. We got a sizable chunk from the lower ribs, including the prime meat of the backstraps (next to the spine on the outside) which is now hanging in our drying rack. What we should have done, I now know, is cut the ribs in a rack from each side.
After two hours’ sleep we got up before the ravens and were back at the carcass. We cut the meat from the rest of the rib cage, and still unable to move his huge, ponderous head, we had to cut the meat from the neck and bag it in situ.
My learning on that it is, don’t try to butcher the meat properly (i.e. following the membrane lining of the different muscle groups) if there is silt blowing. Just take it out in a big chunk and deal with it later. We lost a lot of meat to silt and hair when trimming it.
We were just about able to get the head into a wheel barrow once we had cut the rack (antlers) off with the Sawsall to finish trimming it.
All scraps- head, hide, etc. were loaded on to our boat and dumped in the river. We had to roll the viscera into a tarp and shove it into the creek as it proved somewhat difficult to pick up.
Sadly we didn’t use the viscera, tongue or brain. It’s awful to waste it but, without a village to feed and more hands to help, there is SO much meat to deal with and those parts will not keep so well, so most hunters here do not use them.
Hanging and sharing
We will give 2 or 3 of our quarters away to people who did not get a moose (including our friend who helped with calling) and have the rest of the meat hanging in our little drying rack. Much to our surprise its elderly logs are sturdier than they appear and it seems to be holding the weight.
Temps are going to -6C at night and so we have no worries about the meat holding. We’ll use the bagged neck meat first and let the rest air dry and then freeze.
By happy coincidence we saw the last of the blow flies the day before the kill. But just in case, the quarters are hanging in cloth meat bags and we rubbed vegetable oil on the ribs to help a crust form.
A selfish act
We could have lived a third winter on corned beef and dried beans. (With no fridge or freezer we cannot bring store-bought meat in as we must get our supplies before freeze up, so it will go off). I felt upset at the time but that passed because ultimately I’m at peace with what we’ve done.
This bull lived a wild and free life up until 1 minute before he died. I have always eaten meat. Have I ever toasted, thanked and felt so grateful to any cow, sheep or chicken I’ve eaten? No. Are they less worthy? Has my concern about the catastrophic damage we are doing to our oceans and sea-beds ever stopped me having fish n chips when I fancied it? No. Was my last new handbag hemp or leather? It was leather. Why? Because hemp looks shite.
These are every day choices and so we simply do not consider them so deeply.
Other news- total fucking clueless idiots, again.
It was my birthday.
Neil asked “what do you want to do?”
I thought about it- “I want to change the transmission fluid on the snowmachine.” More because I don’t want to have to do it when it gets colder than because I saw it as a special birthday treat, but anyhow that’s what we did.
Neil gave me a lovely card and a Moomin tin mug. We Skyped my mum who informed us it was not my birthday. It was the day before my birthday.
We are not very good at dates here in the wilderness, which is why we often undertake the arduous journey to Dawson on a Sunday when all the shops are closed.
Despite having the date on the computer, it is set to UK time and so a confusing 8 hours ahead, plus we don’t use it every day. We try to keep track of the days by writing what we did on my AC/DC calendar. However, often we forget and each day for the last week says “moose”. Anyhow, I’m blaming Angus Young.
My actual birthday was gorgeously sunny so we took the opportunity to scramble up the hill and explore the ridge behind our house.
And we got the snowmachine maintenance done. What more could a girl ask for on her birthday?
Will the simpletons make it to town?
We are planning our last supply run to Dawson on Tuesday. Will we make it or will we accidentally go on a Sunday again?
And if we do, will it be another one of those frequent and mysterious national or territorial holidays, so will all the shops be closed?
It’s a real cliff-hanger ending this one, for us anyway.
Some thank yous
Thanks to our visiting British friends who encouraged us and supported me getting my hunting licence. Sorry you missed it.
Thanks to Dave for perfecting our lonely lady moose calls.
Thanks to Homer for alerting us to the moose and for being our bear early warning system as we dealt with it.
And thank you to our beautiful bull.
Amazing. He is a beautiful animal. So proud of you both! It is such a deeply satisfying place to be...
ReplyDeleteThank you, hon. Yes it is.
DeleteVery enjoyable story to read, Amazing pictures... Sounds like a great experience. Alaska is world-famous hunting destination for moose. In this area, over many years of hunting bull Moose, hunters have experienced high success rates on trophy bulls. Thanks for sharing.
ReplyDeleteThank you. Good news you have plenty of moose. Where are you based? We got another a few days ago and are rushing to process the meat as we don't have a freezer. Got it all hung and now canning scraps and offal. It'll all be in the next blog!
Delete