Ted's Moose 4

Ted Kuch was on a moose hunt and ran into a cow, a calf, a young spike bull and a monster bull, all traveling together after playing cat and mouse with the big bull. He finally got off a shot and there was no reaction on the part of the bull. Ted took a couple of steps toward his target, stepped on a branch and broke it and thought that he had blown his opportunity. Let's pick it up from there. I thought, Oh man, I’ve really blown it. So I peeked around the corner and there's that giant bull standing, looking at me with my arrow sticking out of his side, but it looked far back. Well, it turns out it was a perfect shot. It was angling forward and that bull turns to trot out of the Aspen stand, and he stumbles and hits his antler on a snowy bunch of willows and dumps a bunch of snow, which they never do that, they're really smooth. So that's when I knew I probably had him. And sure enough, he went 100 yards in the sagebrush, laid down and died, and I couldn't believe it. My buddy watched this from above the whole time and I got out there, I called him up on the radio and said I just killed the big bull, he said I know I see it. It was awesome because I had just had knee replacement surgery three months earlier. So he drove back to camp, got my wife who was waiting in camp. The two of them came back, parked a quarter mile away. I spent four hours cutting up this moose and they packed it on a packed field all the way to the truck and we were back in camp by four o'clock. It was incredible. They were traveling as a family. It's not a family thing. At that point, it's the rut. So the cow and the calf were a family, and that yearling might have been the previous year's offspring of the cow. Or maybe not, but that bull was just as likely to not be the father as to have been the father of that calf. Quite the story.