2007 - Dual shooter moose kill

October 23, 2007 • Voyageur Press

Scott Maki, his father Charlie, and Robert Dahl recently got to experience a successful moose hunt near Isabella, Minnesota.

The three received a letter in the mail earlier this year saying that they had been drawn for a moose license. According to Scott, they were pretty excited. “The thing that I think that was going through everyone’s head is that we wanted to get a nice moose.”

In preparation for the hunt, the group needed to find a good spot to locate a bull moose. Scott’s uncle, Bob Maki, who works for the DNR, printed the three maps of the recent logging areas that they had done near Isabella. “I did a little bit of research of my own,” Scott said. “I hit the computer and looked at images of the area that we would be hunting so that I had a little better idea of the area that we would be looking around in.”

“We laced up our hiking boots and drove up to Isabella to do an all day scouting expedition,” Scott said. 

The only signs of a moose the guys saw on that day were a few tracks and a couple of beds. “We saw a lot of deer tracks, and while scouting an area, Robert almost got run over by a 10-point white tail buck,” Scott said.

The next day on Sunday, the three decided to go scouting again. During the week Isabella got over seven inches of rain, Scott said, which then limited their traveling through swamps. During the last hour of their scouting day, Robert and Scott found a large 200 acre logging area about three to four years old. It had many large moose beds, tracks, and moose droppings; and Robert even found a nice-sized antler shed. So they decided that this would be the place to hunt.

The weekend before moose season, Robert and Scott headed back up to Isabella with a covered trailer. “We did some more scouting in the area that we found the previous weekend and picked some good looking areas to put up the moose stands,” Scott said.

On opening morning the three woke up to rain. “The only animal we saw the opening day was a couple white tail deer that looked about as happy with the pouring rain as I was,” Scott said. “To best put the opening day of moose hunting in a couple words, I would have to say cold, wet, windy and no moose.”

On September 30 – the group’s second day of moose hunting – rain once again dampened the hunters. Scott and Robert headed out to the stands, when around noon, Scott got tired of sitting in his tree and decided to go for a walk and talk to Robert in his stand. “As I walked up to Robert’s stand, I asked the usual, ‘Ya see anything?’ Except this time to my surprise he said Yes,” Scott said.

“Robert said that he saw a bull moose across the swamp he was watching, but said he didn’t have a good shot at the moose so he didn’t take it.”

The two both tried calling the moose back out of the swamp but to no avail. So they decided to go back to the camper and make a plan on what to do from there. “On the way back I radioed my dad and let him know of our intentions, and he said ‘why don’t you guys go check out that black spruce logging that we saw some moose sign in before?’” Scott said.

After Scott got some dry clothes on, the two started walking down a snowmobile trail toward the loggings. “About halfway to the loggings we saw a bunch of crows and a couple eagles take off from the ground. So we headed up the trail some more, and we found the remains of a cow moose in the middle of the trail. We went by the smelly carcass and on to the logging area that we wanted to be at,” Scott said.

There the two found an area where the whole logging area could be seen. The loggers had pushed up all the refuse into a pile. “I picked a cushy pine stump, and Robert found a rock about five feet away from me to sit on,” Scott said. “We then started doing our cow moose calls and talking back and forth because there wasn’t anything else to do. Then out of the corner of our eyes we saw this big black animal creeping out into the logging area about 150 yards away.”

They looked at it through their scopes and according to Scott, Robert was pretty sure that it was the one he had seen earlier in the day. “Robert and I decided that this was the perfect opportunity to take a bull moose seeing as we both would be able to shoot it,” Scott said. “We waited till it walked out a couple more yards, and I took a shot at it, then Robert took a shot immediately after mine, and as I regained my focus, I looked, and the bull moose was still standing there and didn’t move. I shot a quick glance over to Robert, as to say, Why didn’t he do anything? Because we know we hit him on our first shot. So I took two more shots at the moose, one right after another, and Robert took one final shot, then the bull moose dropped right in its tracks. After the adrenaline stopped running through our veins and many high fives, we radioed my dad and told him that we had just shot a moose.”

They originally decided to wait at least half an hour to go approach the moose, just to make sure it was dead. “Well, not even five minutes later we approached the moose cautiously and found that it was dead,” Scott said.

The two then went back to camp to get the four wheeler and the truck with all of their processing equipment in it. They took a few pictures and according to Scott, by the time they started cleaning the moose it was pitch black already. “We had the pleasure of cleaning and quartering the moose under a lantern and flashlights,” Scott said. “We quartered the moose and put it on ice and spent two days after the hunt processing the meat.”

Robert does taxidermy, so he will be doing a head mount on the moose.

Many people go a lifetime without being selected for a moose hunt. For Scott, Charlie, and Robert this was only their fourth year of applying. “I would have to say that it was definitely a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”