Bullwinkle wins the moose lottery
A GOLDEN MORNING spreads across a remote willow flat at 11,400 feet in the San Juan Mountains of western Colorado. I’ve waited nearly two decades for this moment, my first season to hunt moose.
Cupping my hands over my mouth, I inhale a deep breath of crisp air and bellow the call of a bull in rut: Ooo-Wah! Ooo-Wah! Ooo-WAH! Before the chorus ends, a gangly brown cow appears from the edge of the timber 100 yards away and approaches as I call again -- Ungh! Ungh! -- to summon any lurking bull to respond or come fight for the cow. A young paddle-horn, tall and black with a bulging shoulder hump, trots from the forest and deftly herds her back to the woods.
He’s mine for the taking, assuming I maneuver to within longbow range. Yet I pass, hoping for a trophy-size bull with antlers spanning 50 inches. It is the first morning here, camp is stocked with a week’s supply of provisions, you can hardly take a step here without kicking fresh moose dung. By day’s end, four respectable bulls pass by.
And yet, I feel uneasy as I slouch back to camp in the dark. Discomfort grows during the night, until morning when I pack up and head 150 miles home days earlier than expected. A worrisome pattern has formed. The previous week, after setting up another camp four miles from the nearest road, I grew inexplicably morose after just two days of hunting, broke camp and headed home. Before that, an outfitter friend offered to pack me into the wildest heart of Colorado’s Weminuche Wilderness, the haunt of many big bulls, recently opened to moose hunting. Yet, as the time for that weeklong dream trip approached, I backed out. As each moose hunt opportunity availed, I opted to hurry home, unpack, hunt elk for a few evenings, repack and hurry off on yet another wild moose chase like a human yo-yo.
I started playing the moose lottery at age 40, and finally drew a tag at 58. But during that interval, I fell passionately in love with bowhunting elk in a local place so special that missing even one day seems unbearable. The addiction became clear a few years ago when I declined a free hunting and fishing trip to Alaska in September, unwilling or unable to interrupt my elk hunting routine.
My precious homeboy elk hunts aren’t exceptionally exciting. No heart-thumping bugling contests with raging bulls and no exacting stalks. Rather, each afternoon I hike up the mountain beyond my backyard to a tiny spring-fed pool in an aspen grove and sit motionless until dark. It would bore most hunters, but for me it’s what Thoreau called “soothing employment.”
Across those quiet September evenings, I see elk, deer and bears without them seeing me. I slap summer’s last mosquito and, by month’s end, feel the first snap of frost. I hear hundreds of bugles, near and far, and watch the aspens turn gold. One year I killed a gorgeous bull on opening day and suffered the rest of the month because, with a one-elk limit, killing kills the hunt. These days, it seems, what matters most is the hunt itself.
Moose season, unfortunately, overlaps and competes with elk season. To go for one species was to forgo the other. So I flip-flopped, never fully satisfied, until time ran down and, forced to choose, decided on elk. In the end, after four aborted tries, feeling spineless and mercurial, I gave in to my heart and finished the only moose season I will ever know sitting at my local elk spring.
Passions unfold in mysterious ways. The weekend angler dangling his line from the pier might watch with aching heart as private charters motor to sea where big ones lurk. But some find contentment in smaller pleasures and familiar places, at peace with themselves and the world.
Sometimes perhaps, these are the luckier ones.
To read previous Fair Game columns, go to latimes.com /outdoors.
