Molly Fills the Freezers

After other successes throughout the 2024 hunting season, Molly and I turned our sights towards the real prize. One that would complete our goal of filling our freezers with delicious, lean, organic wild meat. We would focus solely on killing a moose for the remainder of the fall. While we each held a tag, I wanted it to be Molly pulling the trigger. She had drawn a cow moose tag in Maine the year we decided to move to Alaska. We had donated that tag to the state program where they issue these tags that won’t be used to wounded veterans. The following fall my good friend Jacob accompanied me in a successful backpack-style hunt for moose in the mountains. In 2023, it was Molly’s turn and she put the time in, but we came up short. We camped on a mountain giving us a great vantage point when it wasn’t blizzard conditions. While we saw lots of moose and a few bulls, it did not come together and we had nearly run out of game meat come spring. Running low on meat and failing to kill had lit a fire in both of us, we were determined to put a moose in the freezer this go around.  

We arrived back from the caribou hunt up north to an already begun moose season. Most units offer over-the-counter availability of tags which allows everybody the opportunity to hunt. Molly had drawn an archery-only cow tag for the Fairbanks Management Unit that was open from September into November. We planned to hunt close to town for most of the season but did have a full week off later in the month where we had planned a “bigger” trip if we didn’t have a moose down yet. If this longer trip failed to produce, we would focus on the archery hunt until the freezer had been filled.

The unit around Fairbanks is only open to moose Sept 1-15th. This falls in “pre-rut” timing with bulls just beginning to move and responding to calls well after the 10th. The short season and the prospect of a full freezer draw everybody and their brother into the woods during this time. No road, 4-wheeler trail, or river suitable for a jet boat goes untouched. The bulls here are quite clever and do not show themselves often during these times. Barring dumb luck, which I will gladly accept any day, a hunter must consistently put themselves in the right places at prime times of day to stand a chance. We were fortunate to have 3 day weekends throughout the month which allowed for more hunting time than normal. We decided to do a float on our first available weekend. I borrowed a 14ft raft from work and we hit the river at first light that Friday. It was my first time on that stretch of river, but I had a few places I wanted to check out. After doing some calling on the way down I rowed the raft up into a beaver pond away from the river. Rounding the first corner I spotted a moose through the brush. Using my binoculars I could see it was a cow but we weren’t sure it was by itself. After a few minutes, it walked into view and made its way across the pond and into the trees. Nothing followed her so we rounded the corner. 400 yards down there was another cow in the water feeding. We watched her for a while before she too entered the trees. We spent the day in the area and relocated the larger of the two cows in another nearby pond. That evening we decided to float the river down during the last hour of daylight. We floated past a cow in the brush at 10 yards and thought we heard another moose in the trees. We spent the night camped on a large gravel bar, scraping brush as loud as we could before we went to bed.

The next two days didn’t turn much up, other than a nice bull seen running up the middle of the road. We wanted to get back into those areas with the cows the following week. We repeated the same float stopping at the first beaver pond we came to. We stood quietly and could hear water splashing. Soon I could see an ear of a moose through the brush roughly 75 yards away. It turned out to be a cow and her two calves. They walked by just across the beaver dams from us. We called from further up the pond for a few hours with no luck. We decided to move downriver to where we had seen the cows the prior weekend. Upon rowing into the slough, I spotted a hunter beside his tent set up among the spruce trees. He was facing the other direction and I rowed back the way we had come without him ever noticing. Realizing we needed to find another camp location we floated quite a few miles downriver to an area where I had been told a bull had been hanging out throughout the week. We set up the tent and called until dark. When we got back to the campsite I heard what I thought was the rumble of a motor. Then I heard it again more clearly and Molly decided it had to have been a bear off in the brush. I wanted to spend the night there but she insisted we pack up and row out in the dark. My attempts at convincing her it was just a motor were fruitless, I’m unsure what it was. Either way, she said she wasn’t going to get any sleep. I decided we’d have to switch gears and head out that night, having two more days to hunt that weekend in a different area. 

Having gotten home very late the night before I knew that Saturday would likely just be a scouting day. We hummed over the idea of bow hunting but Molly’s bow wasn’t shooting consistently. The arrow rest had been damaged, likely on the caribou hunt, and 1 out of 5 shots would be well off target. Having this option off the table we elected to check out some trails via wheeler. Well, I guess everybody else in the Fairbanks area had decided to do that as well. It is no exaggeration when I say there were 50 vehicles parked and 2 trooper trucks amongst the various access locations. What a joke this was turning into we thought to ourselves. It was a very nice day and a wheeler ride in a new area was enjoyable even though we knew the moose hunting here was pointless. After only about 2 hours over in this spot I put the thinking cap on and decided it’d be best to head into an area I had hunted some the year prior. 

Arriving in this location well into the afternoon, we rode in on the wheeler and saw a cow moose on the trail. We returned to this area after shooting a few grouse further along and did some calling. Major moose trails were heading into the open meadows where the cow had trotted off to earlier. Having no responses from the cow, we elected to go further into the timber to overlook a large marsh I had hunted the year prior. We were following a worn game trail when we came to a fork. One trail went straight ahead while another veered to the right. There was a very old blaze on a tree along the right trail. Knowing this likely was from a hunter in the past we decided to head down this path. A few hundred yards later we made it to the meadow and perched up in a clump of trees was a very old, half-rotting homemade tree stand. The wooden ladder looked suspiciously weak, but I climbed up to get a better view. From the stand, I had a commanding view of the meadow. It was old and rotting but stable enough. A set of small, bleached moose paddles hung from a nail in one of the trees. I had Molly climb up and sit on the bucket that had been left as a seat, while I sat on the floor of the platform and rested my feet on the ladder. We sat here until dark letting out cow calls and scraping the trees and brush with the paddles. We left knowing that we would be coming back in before the first light. For once this season, I felt we had found a worthwhile location that was sure to produce a bull. 

The morning of the 15th we raced down the trail on our wheeler. The air was cold and damp. Rain showers were forecasted throughout the day and we were bundled up for the ride into our new moose hunting location. No one else seemed to be out and we parked the wheeler near the overgrown trail leading to the stand. We climbed into it silently under the cover of darkness and wet undergrowth. Molly made her breakfast, Peak Refuel Mountain Berry cereal. I let out a series of loud cow calls and thinking since I wasn’t the shooter and she’d be on the lookout I decided to rest my eyes for a bit. I hadn’t been asleep for more than a few minutes before Molly woke me by tapping my shoulder and asking, “IS THAT A MOOSE RIGHT THERE??” I opened my tired eyes to see two light-colored paddles sticking up from across the meadow. My cow call had worked, I didn’t need to raise my binos before I knew. As I peered through the lenses of the binoculars I said “Yes, it is a nice bull, don’t move, he’s looking right at us.” It is amazing how moose can pinpoint the location of a call. He was staring across the meadow towards our tree. Being 600 yards away I could see that he was a nice bull but was not coming closer, he was scanning for the cow he had heard just minutes prior. 

After a few minutes, he started to walk parallel across the meadow, slightly getting closer but not committing to coming across. He dipped behind a small bump of willows and I was on the ground with the moose paddles before he came out the other side. I let out another long cow call to get his attention, then raised the antlers over my head and scraped them against the thick willows I stood behind. This clearly pissed him off since he quickly walked over to some willows of his own and started ripping them up with his paddles. At this moment I knew he was a dead moose walking. He was now fully convinced a small bull had a cow bedded up with him. It only took another round of scraping to have him turn to face us and start the walk over across the open meadow. As he got closer I continued to range him. At 400 yards, Molly asked when she could shoot. I had left her up in the tree and she had a clear view of her next kill. I told her to wait and I’d call out the yardage once he was close. At 250, he started to veer slightly down the meadow, I didn’t want to push it too much with the calling so I called out the yardage to Molly so she could zero her scope. At 225, I called yardage again and asked if she was ready for me to stop him. She said, “Of course I am.” I let out two short bull grunts and he turned and looked right at us. 

The first shot took him behind the front shoulder and through the lungs. He took off trotting away across the meadow and it wasn’t long before he got another bullet in him from Molly’s 30-06. The shot took his rear legs out from underneath him, but he quickly got back onto his feet. As he regained his balance a third shot rang out with a resounding thump confirming a third hit. This tough bull stood there and coughed as the lungs began to fill with blood. Air spewed from his mouth and nose, along with both sides of his chest cavity. We knew he was dying but was staying on his feet. Standing there coughing, I had Molly put a fourth and final round into him. This one barely made him flinch, but this only meant he was close to death. With what had taken a total of a few minutes, he finally fell over. Molly made her way down out of the tree and we watched as his head went down and he stopped moving. 

Knowing we had changes of clothes and waders back at the truck, we decided to walk straight out to the bull. The water was knee deep which meant we had a ton of work ahead of us. We reached the bull and saw that only one antler was above the water. After a swift poke with my rifle to its rump didn’t produce a response, Molly grabbed the bases of the antlers and did her best to raise them above water. It’s truly incredible how heavy these animals are. After a few pictures we headed back to the tree line and I left her to watch over the meadow while I headed back to the truck to grab waders, game bags, and dry clothes.

I let a few friends know we had a bull down and that we could use a hand. I headed back to Molly with the gear and we were soon working on skinning and quartering the bull. Due to the knee-deep water, we opted to use the gutless method. We would skin and remove all the meat without removing the guts. I discovered I had not put my Havalon knife back into my kill kit. I had another knife but after making it only a few inches down the back of the moose I decided it needed to be sharpened. I set the knife down and reached for my sharpener. Plop. The knife slid off the moose and into the murky water. Even though I watched where it had fallen we never found it. This left us with a small ax and my leatherman to begin quartering. It was not an easy task. Molly helped as much as she could with pulling the hide and holding the legs. The small, thin blade was barely able to cut through the thick hide. We were able to eventually skin the top half and remove the front and rear legs. While we were making progress, it was soon early afternoon and we were yet to be halfway done.

I got the text from Hunter that he was ready to get picked up and I headed to the truck with the two quarters. He brought plenty of sharp knives and we were soon back at the kill site making much quicker progress. Soon, my friend Trenton was there as well. Now, we had a meat train going as Hunter and I continued cutting and Molly and Trenton packed load after load to the wheeler. Thankful doesn’t begin to describe how we felt having them willing to come to lend a hand. The trail through the meadow got more packed down each trip causing the water to get deeper and deeper. It was impossible to keep all the meat clean. The 2nd half was almost completely submerged. We got the last load to the wheeler around 8 pm. Just as we were going to head out I heard another bull grunting back in the meadow. We half-heartedly called to it until dark. Trenton and Hunter both wanted to shoot it but we were all exhausted. In the end, it never made an appearance and we headed out of the woods in the dark. 

It was a very late night getting home. Once the meat was hung in the shed we went straight to bed. We now had plenty of meat for our freezers and Molly had completed her goal of getting a moose. While I love pulling the trigger, nothing made me happier than watching Molly hunt this Fall. It is a dream come true to share these moments with her.