Dave,
My first moose was a big Alaskan bull, taken very early in September when the rut had just started. My guide and I had just returned from the morning hunt, and he decided to take a midday nap. I decided to catch a silver salmon for dinner, as the run was on in the small river we were camped alongside. It didn't take much time, and after whacking the salmon on the head with a rock, I had just arrived in camp when I heard a loud splashing coming from upstream. So did my guide, who had just awakened and poked his head out of his tent.
Within seconds a large antler appeared around the river-side brush, followed by a big moose and another big antler. I dropped my salmon and fly rod and grabbed my .338 Winchester, which was lying on my daypack near the guide's jet-boat, then sat down and ran a round into the chamber.
The guide said, "He only has two brow tines." Three were required for an Alaskan bull moose to be legal--or an outside spread of at least 50 inches.
I said, "To hell with the brown tines. Is he fifty?"
The guide's eyes widened. "Oh, hell yes!" He paused for a second, then said, "But DON'T shoot him in the water!"
In the meantime the bull heard us, leaving the river and climbing the steep bank alongside the gravel shoreline. He paused near the top, angling toward me, next to the thick alders and willows paralleling the bank. I put a 230-grain Fail Safe just inside his left shoulder, whereupon he reared up on his hind legs like a bucking horse, then fell over backward down the bank to the gravel shore. I ran another round into the chamber, just as he stumbled into the shallow edge of the river--and the guide repeated, "DON'T shot him in the water!"
So I didn't--and watched the bull start across the river, which soon reached above his knees. He then stopped and subsided into the current, with only the tip of one antler poking above the surface.
After some discussion, I took the bowline of the guide's boat and walked up the edge of the river in my hip-boots, while the guide started the motor and slowly guided the boat upstream. My hip-boots were just tall enough for me to put a loop around the antler a foot or so below the surface of the river, and after it was tightened the guide towed the bull 100 yards downstream to a shallower riffle, where it caught firmly. Together we managed to drag the bull toward the shore on the opposite side of the river from the camp, where a meat-rack was already set up.
We started taking the bull apart from the top down, and after each chunk of meat was removed, we pulled he bull a little more toward shore. Within an hour the camp's meat-packer, an 18-year-old just out of high school, showed up with a hind-quarter from the caribou I'd taken the day before, and he started helping. But it took about five hours, as I recall, to get all the moose-meat onto the rack--while standing in a cloud of mosquitoes.
During the butchering we found the Fail Safe, perfectly expanded, lying against the front of the bull's pelvis on the opposite side from where it had entered the chest.
Have had to extract one other defunct moose from water, but it was a young cow Eileen got about three miles from our house, on the edge of one of the waterfowl nesting ponds at the upper end of Canyon Ferry Lake. You can't use a rifle in the Wildlife Management Area surrounding that part of the reservoir, so she was using my Remington 870 12-gauge with a rifled-slug barrel.
We'd found where moose were moving across one of the dikes to the pond, but hadn't found the right moose yet. That morning we did, standing on top of the dike about 50 yards away, and Eileen shot it. The moose, of course, ran into the brush alongside the dike, and died about 75 yards in there, where the water was about shin-deep on us. We took it apart, and after semi-floating the quarters to the dike, used a game cart to trundle them several hundred yards to the locked gate where we'd parked the pickup.
Luckily, our three other moose, all bulls, have died on dry land.
