Surprise, surprise ........ after years of applying, Ralph drew moose tags for both Vermont and New Hampshire in 2007. Nobody needs two moose in 1 year, but, these tags are pretty difficult to draw, and turning one down means you may well never draw another. So ....... a few days after coming home from New Hampshire, Alex and I headed North to see if we could fill our Vermont Cow Tag.

It was mid-July, and I was getting psyched for our New Hampshire moose hunt. I checked the mail and found a fat packet from the Vermont Fish & Game folks. What the!!!! Can't be ..... but it had to be!! There was no other reason for Vermont to be writing to me. Sure enough, I'd drawn a tag for a cow moose in Vermont Zone E1, which is in the extreme Northeastern corner of Vermont, bordering Quebec and New Hampshire. Vermont's regular moose season runs concurrently with New Hampshire's, but Vermont's cow season starts a week later, October 27, 2007, which is the 8th day of New Hampshire's 9-day moose season. Our Vermont tag was another reason Alex and I were pretty well set on taking the first good New Hampshire moose that presented itself --- we didn't have all that much time to spend hunting.

A couple of days after I got the news from Vermont, I got a call from Denis Ducharme, who was looking for some more wool. Denis had been wearing KOM for a while, and I'd gotten to know him some over the phone. I knew Denis was from northern VT, and it turned out that Denis has a deer camp right at the Western border of Vermont's zone E1! Denis was extremely gracious to volunteer to help Alex and I fill moose tag #2!

So .... a few days after getting home from New Hampshire, Alex and I were headed North again. Denis lives in Derby Line, Vermont, an amazing spot. Derby Line is literally, and I mean literally, on the Canadian border. The houses across the street from Denis are in Quebec! Derby Line and Stanstead Quebec were obviously developed in a bygone era when the international border was not the big deal it is supposed to be now. These two towns appear at first glance to be one town, but with a big twist .... the Southern side of Caswell Street is in the USA, and the Northern side is in Canada! There is even one house that straddles the border, with the front door in Vermont and the back door in Quebec. It used to be an everyday non-event to go from Canada to the USA, or vice versa, to pick up a quart of milk. But now, you're supposed to notify government authorities first. It's disrupted the normal flow of life in this border area. If you're ever crossing the US/Canada border at I-91 in Vermont, stop off in Derby Line and check it out. It's really interesting and Derby Line is a great little town.

Vermont's Northeast Kingdom is pretty sparsely populated, and we'd be hunting in an area with few residents and just a couple of small towns. Most of the land is owned by timber companies, who are none too fond of moose, because of the damage the moose do to the trees. Moose like to eat bark, stripping a tree with their teeth. The tree usually does not die, but is typically seriously damaged when a moose strips a 3-foot long section of bark and cambium from a young tree. This is pretty big country, with hills and some very serious winter. You don't want to get lost, and we relied heavily on Denis and his GPS.

Denis, with Quebec in the background

Denis, Alex and I all wore various KOM for the hunt. It wasn't cold, generally above freezing, and opening day was heavy rain. Both Denis and Alex are quite lean, and Denis was surprised to see me wearing Omnilite. I explained to him that he'd be better suited to light clothes in chilly weather if he gained a respectable 75 pounds or so.

The first day we got into some truly gorgeous moose country. Denis took us to some semi-remote areas that were a couple miles back in on overgrown timber trails. Wow!!! The moose loved these wet, semi-swampy areas. There were moose trails and moose beds everywhere. I couldn't believe we did not see any moose. Quite a few times we could smell them. A lot of people have experienced moose that are not afraid of people. And that certainly was our experience in New Hampshire. But these Vermont moose are hunted fairly hard, and act a lot like whitetails. They don't like people and don't want to be seen. We tromped about 7 hours and despite very heavy sign, did not see a moose!! We were probably less than 100 miles from the site of our New Hampshire hunt, and yet the moose behaved completely differently. As we exited the timber property toward the end of the day, we did see a nice young bull jog across the road, but he was the only moose we saw on day one.

Bull Rubs

As someone who mostly hunts whitetail, I get a huge kick out of moose sign. Our New Hampshire hunt was Alex's first moose outing, and he was startled when I showed him where moose had been browsing 8 feet off the ground. Same thing with the rubs. When you see a bull's rub, you can't help but be reminded that you are hunting an animal that dwarfs you. These rubs go up 7 or 8 feet. But where were the moose!!!??? I had to smile, because I knew they were nearby, but too keen to let us get close.

Alex had stumbled during our New Hampshire hunt, and the way his knee twisted under him did not look good at the time. For a while it didn't bother him, but by the end of our 1st day in Vermont, the knee was bothering him a lot. On the 2nd day, I thought it might help to just go straight up the hill to the "moose meadows", rather than take the longer, gentler route on the logging trails. Judging by the strong scent of moose in the evergreen thickets, and the extremely fresh droppings, we were awfully close to the animals. And I came away from this morning's hunt with my Vermont trophy, a nice non-typical moose shed! It had been chewed by rodents, and the paddle was gone, but porcupines left for me a really nice non-typical point, prominent in the below photo, and I've always had a weakness for non-typicals.

Non-Typical Moose Shed

But no dice on a live cow. Alex was in severe pain, and could not bend his knee. We were going to have to get back to the truck and try to find someplace flat that Alex could traverse with one locked knee.

Denis took us to a flat spot to try for the afternoon, and Alex decided to stay in the truck and rest his leg. We were only a few hundred yards from the truck and moving slowly through a recent timber cut that the moose had obviously been using heavily, when we stopped to examine another bull rub.

That ain't no whitetail!

It was here that I got my only chance at a Vermont moose. Just after we took the above pic, Denis spotted a cow angling across in front of us. Buck fever is a funny thing. You just never know when it will strike, or exactly why. The moose before me was not a monster, it was not a bull, and I'd killed a few moose previously, one just a week before. And yet, one look at this moose at 75 yards and my heart rate rocketed up to about 200 instantly, and I knew there was no way I should take an offhand shot, even tho I shoot offhand regularly at the range. I needed some kind of a shooting rest, and pushed ahead through 10 yards of overgrown timber slash to a sapling to steady my aim. The cow moved off, sort of looping in front of us in that wonderful kind of jog that only a moose can manage over the impossible terrain left behind by a logging operation. Just before she entered some thick timber, she stopped broadside and gave me a beautiful shot ..... except that she chose to stop in just the spot that put tall brush between us. Moose chest in the scope, safety off, finger on the trigger ...... but that bush bothered me. Most likely, the .375 would shoot through it. It wasn't much. I could see through it well enough. But still, if you don't hit a moose just right, and sometimes even if you do, things don't work out right and you leave a hit moose in the woods. If she'd move ahead a little, I'd have a clear shot. But she stopped for only a couple of seconds and then broke into the moose-jog and into the trees and disappeared.

And that was it for action. In the next couple of days, we did try a few more flat spots that Alex could get to stiff-legged, and we came back and worked over this same area, hoping that cow might be hanging around, but we didn't see another moose, and with various family and business needs calling me home, and one moose already stashed, we decided to end our moose season.

Alex chose this spot for lunch

In this picture, Alex is wearing Blowdown on top and Bunlite Pants in the old Timber pattern. We found that in these Northeast Kingdom woods, Blowdown, Autumn Brown, Timber and Tamarack all worked very well. We wore a mix of Omnitherm and Omnilite.

Denis Ducharme

Alex and I would like to thank our friend Denis Ducharme for being a wonderful host and guide on this trip. Denis got us into great moose country, put us up at his deepwoods deer camp, and kept us from getting lost in the big woods of the Northeast Kingdom. A couple of times I was completely turned around, but fortunately for us, Denis knows how to use his GPS. I also appreciate that Denis didn't get aggravated with me when I decided not to pull the trigger on what should have been a cupcake shot. And, THANKS to Denis's wife Paula for bringing dinner to deer camp, and for letting Denis spend a few days out in the woods with us when he wasn't even hunting.