Moose Hunting Quotes

You won't even take your bow? Are you planning to throttle a moose with your bare hands, then?" "I've a knife in my boot," she said, and then wondered, for a moment, if she could throttle a moose with her bare hands.

easy photos for the hunt—a moose on a sweatshirt, a picture of a cowboy, a dreidel, a snowflake on an ornament. A photo of an object with the words Ho, Ho, Ho.

I had recently read to my dismay that they have started hunting moose again in New England. Goodness knows why anyone would want to shoot an animal as harmless and retiring as the moose, but thousands of people do—so many, in fact, that states now hold lotteries to decide who gets a permit. Maine in 1996 received 82,000 applications for just 1,500 permits. Over 12,000 outof-staters happily parted with a nonrefundable $20 just to be allowed to take part in the draw. Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old. That’s all there is to it. Without doubt, the moose is the most improbable, endearingly hopeless creature ever to live in the wilds. Every bit of it—its spindly legs, its chronically puzzled expression, its comical oven-mitt antlers—looks like some droll evolutionary joke. It is wondrously ungainly: it runs as if its legs have never been introduced to each other. Above all, what distinguishes the moose is its almost boundless lack of intelligence. If you are driving down a highway and a moose steps from the woods ahead of you, he will stare at you for a long minute (moose are notoriously shortsighted), then abruptly try to run away from you, legs flailing in eight directions at once. Never mind that there are several thousand square miles of forest on either side of the highway. The moose does not think of this. Clueless as to what exactly is going on, he runs halfway to New Brunswick before his peculiar gait inadvertently steers him back into the woods, where he immediately stops and takes on a startled expression that says, “Hey—woods. Now how the heck did I get here?” Moose are so monumentally muddle-headed, in fact, that when they hear a car or truck approaching they will often bolt out of the woods and onto the highway in the curious hope that this will bring them to safety. Amazingly, given the moose’s lack of cunning and peculiarly-blunted survival instincts, it is one of the longest-surviving creatures in North America. Mastodons, saber-toothed tigers, wolves, caribou, wild horses, and even camels all once thrived in eastern North America alongside the moose but gradually stumbled into extinction, while the moose just plodded on. It hasn’t always been so. At the turn of this century, it was estimated that there were no more than a dozen moose in New Hampshire and probably none at all in Vermont. Today New Hampshire has an estimated 5,000 moose, Vermont 1,000, and Maine anywhere up to 30,000. It is because of these robust and growing numbers that hunting has been reintroduced as a way of keeping them from getting out of hand. There are, however, two problems with this that I can think of. First, the numbers are really just guesses. Moose clearly don’t line up for censuses. Some naturalists think the population may have been overstated by as much as 20 percent, which means that the moose aren’t being so much culled as slaughtered. No less pertinent is that there is just something deeply and unquestionably wrong about killing an animal that is so sweetly and dopily unassuming as a moose. I could have slain this one with a slingshot, with a rock or stick—with a folded newspaper, I’d almost bet—and all it wanted was a drink of water. You might as well hunt cows.

Big Brown Moose I'm a big brown moose, I'm a rascally moose, I'm a moose with a tough, shaggy hide; and I kick and I prance in a long-legged dance with my moose-mama close by my side. I shrug off the cold and I sneeze at the wind and I swivel my ears in the snow; and I tramp and I tromp over forest and swamp, 'cause there's nowhere a moose cannot go. I'm a big brown moose, I'm a ravenous moose as I hunt for the willow and yew; with a snort and a crunch, I rip off each bunch, and I chew and I chew and I chew. When together we slump in a comfortable clump -- my mountainous mama and I -- I give her a nuzzle of velvety muzzle. Our frosty breath drifts to the sky. I'm a big brown moose, I'm a slumberous moose, I'm a moose with a warm, snuggly hide; and I bask in the moon as the coyotes croon, with my moose-mama close by my side.

Somewhere along the line the American love affair with wilderness changed from the thoughtful, sensitive isolationism of Thoreau to the bully, manly, outdoorsman bravado of Teddy Roosevelt. It is not for me, as an outsider, either to bemoan or celebrate this fact, only to observe it. Deep in the male American psyche is a love affair with the backwoods, log-cabin, camping-out life. There is no living creature here that cannot, in its right season, be hunted or trapped. Deer, moose, bear, squirrel, partridge, beaver, otter, possum, raccoon, you name it, there's someone killing one right now. When I say hunted, I mean, of course, shot at with a high-velocity rifle. I have no particular brief for killing animals with dogs or falcons, but when I hear the word 'hunt' I think of something more than a man in a forage cap and tartan shirt armed with a powerful carbine. In America it is different. Hunting means 'man bonding with man, man bonding with son, man bonding with pickup truck, man bonding with wood cabin, man bonding with rifle, man bonding above all with plaid'.

a campus security officer who’d been waiting quietly in the corner of a stairwell landing told us that the top of the building was off-limits. He had an unlit cigarette in his mouth and a cell phone in his hands and looked for all the world like we’d just caught him about to take an unauthorized text and smoke break. What didn’t quite jibe with that image was that most campus security guards don’t look like they pick their teeth with a chainsaw, and their sidearms aren’t made for moose hunting.

For obvious reasons its farmers did not relish the prospect of buffalo herds trampling through their fields. Nor did they want deer, moose, or passenger pigeons eating the maize. They hunted them until they were scarce around their homes. At the same time, they tried to encourage these species to grow in number farther away, where they would be useful. “The net result was to keep that kind of animal at arm’s length,

Every once in a bestseller list, you come across a truly exceptional craftsman, a wordsmith so adept at cutting, shaping, and honing strings of words that you find yourself holding your breath while those words pass from page to eye to brain. You know the feeling: you inhale, hold it, then slowly let it out, like one about to take down a bull moose with a Winchester .30-06. You force your mind to the task, scope out the area, take penetrating aim, and . . . read. But instead of dropping the quarry, you find you’ve become the hunted, the target. The projectile has somehow boomeranged and with its heat-sensing abilities (you have raised a sweat) darts straight towards you. Duck! And turn the page lest it drill between your eyes.

experience, and to our consequent estrangement from the earthly world around us. So the ancient Hebrews, on the one hand, and the ancient Greeks on the other, are variously taken to task for providing the mental context that would foster civilization’s mistreatment of nonhuman nature. Each of these two ancient cultures seems to have sown the seeds of our contemporary estrangement—one seeming to establish the spiritual or religious ascendancy of humankind over nature, the other effecting a more philosophical or rational dissociation of the human intellect from the organic world. Long before the historical amalgamation of Hebraic religion and Hellenistic philosophy in the Christian New Testament, these two bodies of belief already shared—or seem to have shared—a similar intellectual distance from the nonhuman environment. In every other respect these two traditions, each one originating out of its own specific antecedents, and in its own terrain and time, were vastly different. In every other respect, that is, but one: they were both, from the start, profoundly informed by writing. Indeed, they both made use of the strange and potent technology which we have come to call “the alphabet.” — WRITING, LIKE HUMAN LANGUAGE, IS ENGENDERED NOT ONLY within the human community but between the human community and the animate landscape, born of the interplay and contact between the human and the more-than-human world. The earthly terrain in which we find ourselves, and upon which we depend for all our nourishment, is shot through with suggestive scrawls and traces, from the sinuous calligraphy of rivers winding across the land, inscribing arroyos and canyons into the parched earth of the desert, to the black slash burned by lightning into the trunk of an old elm. The swooping flight of birds is a kind of cursive script written on the wind; it is this script that was studied by the ancient “augurs,” who could read therein the course of the future. Leaf-miner insects make strange hieroglyphic tabloids of the leaves they consume. Wolves urinate on specific stumps and stones to mark off their territory. And today you read these printed words as tribal hunters once read the tracks of deer, moose, and bear printed in the soil of the forest floor. Archaeological evidence suggests that for more than a million years the subsistence of humankind has depended upon the acuity of such hunters, upon their ability to read the traces—a bit of scat here, a broken twig there—of these animal Others. These letters I print across the page, the scratches and scrawls you now focus upon, trailing off across the white surface, are hardly different from the footprints of prey left in the snow. We read these traces with organs honed over millennia by our tribal ancestors, moving instinctively from one track to the next, picking up the trail afresh whenever it leaves off, hunting the meaning, which would be the meeting with the Other.2

The simple fact is that domestic dogs and wolves are different animals, adapted to different environments, and cannot live (well) in the other’s niche. Wolves are consummate predators, but it’s rare to find a dog that can hunt down and kill a moose for food. Dogs will track deer or chase wild hogs as they “hunt” with humans for sport, but it’s highly doubtful they could ever earn a living by hunting on their own. For their part, wolves rarely become tame enough to get by in the household dog’s world of human hearth and home. They may occasionally live on their own in or near human habitation, but they tend not to be able to eat in the presence of people. Whereas even free-living dogs that are raised in garbage dumps or just outside town are able to dine in the company of humans.

Mule deer, elk, moose, big horn sheep and mountain goats live in the mountains that surround the valley where I live. I'm not bragging (but I am showing off), but I can usually find elk, mule deer or moose with a 10 minute drive and a 20 minute hike. I watch elk most of the winter and mule deer almost everyday with a spotting scope from my bedroom window.

Bruce was sneaking through the shadows, hunting his prey, Jack. No way was he going to let that human call him a moose. He was a far superior being- a cat- and a ninja cat at that. Slowly he snuck into the shadows of a corner of the shelter and while Jack was walking backwards to place dirt blocks, Bruce snuck behind him.  Jack was just about to turn a corner when Bruce launched himself at the boy, landing straight on his head. “Yahhhh!” Jack screamed and fell off the shelter. Bruce leapt with ninja-like grace and landed on the half-built wall. He looked at Jack laying on the ground and began cleaning his paw.

When you're in the bush, you're not just there to learn how to set a trap, how to hunt moose and caribou or how to set a net. It's about how you take care of yourself and how you deal with yourself in your life.

For two months, nearly every single human he encountered would be armed. These were men who lived their lives solely for the reward in the fall of their one-week or two-week hunt. They wanted to drink hard, eat like soldiers after a year-long march, hunt a pronghorn antelope, mule deer, elk, or moose, and burn out all of the primal energy and desire that they’d stored up during the previous year of humiliation and frustration. Sometimes, he encountered men in the field who didn’t want to meet a game warden that day. That’s when things got interesting.

This was not the last time she remembered those nightmarish times when he went to hunt the devil. It is an animal of evil, a demon in animal form, and a scavenger from hell. No one had ever walked out alive on the crutches of death. My father was the only one to be spared alive to this day. I don’t know; maybe it's luck or he is a skilled hunter. I believe in the latter. I have heard stories of my father killing wolverines, moose, wolves, Kamchatka, and polar bears. The skins and heads of these animals are hanging as trophies in my house. It was only once that my father took me hunting polar bears along with Barbos.

Before going for hunting, Gathering lake Outfitters makes you well aware of grouse hunting regulations in Ontario. For us, laws and fun goes hand in hand.

Leaving the Connecticut River March 8, 1704 Temperature 40 degrees Eben realized that he need not worry about being burned or tortured. He was going to starve to death. Eben had thought that up here, where nobody lived or ever had, the deer would be standing in rows in the woods awaiting a bullet. He had expected rabbits and grouse, moose and beaver. But there was no game. They built shelters from woven branches, piling spruce and hemlock on top to keep out the snow. Each day some of the Indians left to hunt and each day they came back with nothing. It had never occurred to Eben that an Indian could go hunting and find nothing. He was not sure how far they still had to go to reach Canada. He had seen a map once that showed the Connecticut River, how it split the colony of Connecticut in half, then cut up through Massachusetts, headed north through unknown lands and bumped into Canada. The northern part of the map was guesswork. Eben needed a French map, which would show the city of Montreal, where the French kept their government, and the St. Lawrence River, down which fortunes in fur were shipped. He could not ask his master. An Indian kept his map in his head.

The Connecticut River March 2, 1704 Temperature 10 degrees The Indians, it seemed, had paused here on their journey south from Canada to go hunting before the battle. Under the snow were stored the carcasses of twenty moose. Twenty! Eben had to count them himself before he could believe it, and even then, he could not believe it. Eben was no hunter. If he’d gotten one moose, it would have been pure luck.

The Connecticut River March 2, 1704 Temperature 10 degrees The Indians, it seemed, had paused here on their journey south from Canada to go hunting before the battle. Under the snow were stored the carcasses of twenty moose. Twenty! Eben had to count them himself before he could believe it, and even then, he could not believe it. Eben was no hunter. If he’d gotten one moose, it would have been pure luck. But for this war party to have killed twenty, dragged every huge carcass here so there would be feasting on the journey home--Eben was filled with respect as much as hunger. The Indians made several bonfires and built spits to cook entire haunches. They chopped the frozen moose meat, and Thorakwaneken and Tannhahorens sharpened dozens of thin sticks and shoved small cubes of moose meat onto these skewers. The women and children were each handed a stick to cook. The men were kept under watch, but at last their hands were freed and they too were allowed to eat. The prisoners were too hungry to wait for the meat to cook through and wolfed it down half raw. They ripped off strips for the littlest ones, who ate like baby birds: open mouths turned up, bolting one morsel, calling loudly for the next. When the captives had eaten until their stomachs ached, they dried stockings and moccasins and turned themselves in front of the flames, warming each side, while the Indians not on watch gathered around the largest bonfire, squatting to smoke their pipes and talk. The smell of their tobacco was rich and comforting. The wounded were put closest to the warmth, and hurt English found themselves sharing flames with hurt Mohawk and Abenaki and Huron. One of the Sheldon boys had frozen his toes. His Indian came over to look but shook his head. There was nothing to be done. Ebenezer Sheldon could limp to Canada or give up. “Guess I’ll limp,” said Ebenezer, grinning.

Kahnawake August 1704 Temperature 75 degrees By summer, Kahnawake children had stopped wearing clothing. Mercy could not get over the sight of hundreds of naked children playing tag, or hide-and-seek, or competing in footraces. The boys--naked!--went into the woods to shoot squirrels and rabbits and partridge. They used bow and arrow, since their fathers did not like them using guns yet. Even the six- and seven-year-olds had excellent aim. Joseph didn’t go entirely bare, being a little too old, but wore a breechclout, a small square of deerskin in back and another square in front, laced on a slender cord. The boys played constantly. They were stalking, shooting, running, chasing, aiming, fishing, swimming--they never sat down. The men, however, mainly rested. They liked to smoke and talk, and when they were showing a son or nephew or captive how to feather an arrow or find ducks, they did it slowly and sometimes forgot about it in the middle. A Puritan must rise before dawn and never take his ease. Puritans believed in working hard. But for an Indian man, working hard was something to do for an hour or a week. After he killed the moose or fought the battle, an Indian took his ease. Hunting men and animals were dangerous; he deserved rest afterward, and besides, he had to prepare himself to do it again. A Deerfield man didn’t risk much plowing a field. A Kahnawake man risked everything going into a cave to rouse a sleeping bear.

You're wolves. But a wolf can't subdue a moose. You have to hunt and attack as a pack

Environmental historian Valeria Fogleman wrote that perhaps the early Christian colonists saw themselves figuratively as the wolves’ prey based on the New Testament’s anecdote of Jesus sending his followers out as sheep among wolves. Their antipathy and fear toward wolves was a physical manifestation of their spiritual protectiveness, she wrote, for “wolves were considered capable of murdering a person’s soul.” Wolves were also viewed through a religious and cultural lens as animals that made pacts with the devil, thereby garnering them the stigma of being full of trickery and evil. Livestock damages may have been the rational argument for clearing wolves from the woods around settlements, but wolves likely also symbolized a potent religious threat in the minds of some early colonists. The Native Americans did not view wolves so negatively, and some even tattooed images of wolves - along with moose, deer, bears, and birds - on their cheeks and arms, according to William Wood, writing about New England in 1634, described the “ravenous howling Wolfe: Whose meagre paunch suckes like a swallowing gulfe” in a passage that imparts the belief that wolves consumed more prey than was necessary. Wood wished that all the wolves of the country could be replaced by bears, but only on the condition that the wolves were banished completely, because he believed wolves hunted and ate black bears. He also lamented that “common devourer,” the wolf, preying upon moose and deer. No doubt, the colonists wanted the bears, moose, and deer for their own meat and hide supplies. Yet Wood also observed the wolves of New England to be different from wolves in other countries. He wrote that they were not known to attack people, and that they did not attack horses or cows but went after pigs, goats, and red calves. The colonists seemed to believe the wolves mistook calves that were more coppery colored for deer, so much so that a red-colored calf sold for much less than a black one.

Chappell had brought a Mrs. Frazer to the island. She used an unorthodox divining method, much like water-witching, to detect metals under the surface. She found indications that copper, gold, and silver lay everywhere underground. Dad’s goodwill evaporated when she insisted that she needed to work at the Money Pit. It is clear, from a description of Mrs. Frazer in Dad’s letter to Fred Sparham, dated May 20, that Dad did not believe in the woman’s methods: Chappell brought a woman over who had a secret sort of metal finder. She has been back twice since. Mildred calls her Witch Hazel, and it’s more fun that a barrel of Monkeys. She runs around dangling a piece of plastic hose (clear) with a piece of metal in it that looks like a steel and brass plum bob. She has the whole lot hanging from a chain. She also has a gadget she takes out of a bag that looks like a pair of horns. Then she puts these horns against her forehead and goes around like a Moose. You just can’t believe it at all.

The reserve swarms with game; it would be of little value except as a reserve; and the attraction it now offers to travellers renders it an asset of real consequence to the whole colony. The wise people of Maine, in our own country, have discovered that intelligent game preservation, carried out in good faith, and in a spirit of common-sense as far removed from mushy sentimentality as from brutality, results in adding one more to the State’s natural resources of value; and in consequence there are more moose and deer in Maine to-day than there were forty years ago; there is a better chance for every man m Maine, rich or poor, provided that he is not a game butcher, to enjoy his share of good hunting;