My family has had a relationship with moose that spans nearly one hundred years. My grandfather, Joe Johnson, emigrated from Norway in 1902 and shot his first moose in 1910 at the age of fourteen. He was a teenager when he shot 17 moose one winter, feeding the small settlement in Saskatchewan in which he lived. He grew up to be a trapper and fed his family, his friends, and his dog teams on moose.

There were three generations of Johnson men on this year’s hunt—my uncle Robert, his son Joe, me, and Matthew. Prior to our arrival Joe had scouted for moose, seeing two, and had secured landowner permissions for all of us in several different areas. 

We met in Grande Prairie on a Thursday night in November. We planned the coming hunt at Joe’s dining room table, using air photos and land ownership maps. Joe and Matthew were going to carry rifles and Robert and I, unarmed, were there to push bush for them. Joe, who used to work as a guide in a fly-in fishing camp at Scott Lake, Saskatchewan, is a natural leader, outdoorsman and tactician. He knows the area well and when he talks strategy, we listen.

On Friday morning we were in position an hour before first light, fortified with fresh coffee. Thirty minutes before sunrise we scouted the area where Joe had seen a cow and calf two weeks earlier, but saw nothing.

An hour after the sun came up we decided we were going to have to go into the bush and find them. We pulled out some air photos of creek beds and swamps and worked out where to position the rifles and where to start pushing bush.

We decided to push a long strip of bush near a lake. Joe and Matthew went south and set up, and Robert and I went north, pushing south. The snow in the bush was trampled flat with moose and deer tracks. At one point I left the bush on the lake side for a moment’s rest and saw a cow moose trotting north along the lakeshore two hundred metres away. To the south I saw a dot of orange against the snow—my son Matthew. A minute later I saw a cow and calf moose break out of the cover about 150 metres south of me. I heard Joe announce on the radio that he had seen two more antlerless moose crossing a track in the forest, headed south. Robert commented over the radio at around this point that we appeared to be in the Calgary Zoo, and the name entered the family oral history. 

Later, when we tried to make sense of what we had seen, Matthew told me that when I had first walked out of the bush there were two more antlerless moose close behind me that I never saw. When we did the math we found that we had flushed seven moose out of that bush. 

We learned a couple of important things in this push: ‘Calgary Zoo’ was thick with antlerless moose and for the most part they refused to be driven south, even breaking cover to flank us in their determination to go north. This information would be the key to our success the next day.

We finished the Friday hunt with the most miserable push I have ever been on. It was in an area that both Joe and I took moose from last year, so we knew it was productive. A deep and wide creek meandered through the forest and the snow was capped with a crust that wouldn’t support my weight. It had everything: deciduous forest, conifers, willow scrub, fallen logs, long grass, and snow. Robert and I headed into the bush and Matthew and Joe set up to our north.

Within a few minutes of the start of the push Joe reported seeing a cow and calf step out of the bush onto the barley field, then turn back. Matthew and Joe ran about 600 metres to set up a new fire position and Robert and I changed direction to push towards them.

Before long, my blaze orange jacket was soaked from the inside out with sweat from the effort of climbing down creek banks, climbing up creek banks, crawling over fallen logs, and doing the limbo under low-hanging branches. When Robert and I finally made it to the end of the drive my legs weighed four hundred pounds each and neither of us could have walked any farther. Other than a brief complaint about their run, Joe and Matthew looked well-rested. Joe retrieved the 4Runner and came back to pick us up.

By this time the sun was getting low in the sky. We checked a few more places, all of us secretly hoping that we wouldn’t see any moose so we wouldn’t have to gut and quarter one in the chill of the gathering dark and freshening wind. We returned to Grande Prairie, told stories and laughed for hours and then headed off to bed in reverse order of age.

The next morning we were up early and back out checking the fields we had hunted the day before. The air was cold and the wind was light. When no moose presented themselves we decided to head straight into ‘Calgary Zoo’ to find them. Joe and Matthew positioned themselves at a point about halfway up the strip of bush just north of where we had seen so many moose the day before. Matthew was on the east side of the bush, covering the field between the bush and the lake, and Joe took the west side, covering the farmer’s field to the west. Robert and I started about a kilometre south of them, pushing north, with me on the east side and Robert on the west.

Robert and I pushed north, coming within eyesight and a wave of each other a few times. After a half hour or so I took a wrong fork and the trail died in a thick stand of bush. I pushed straight east to break out into open ground, intending to skirt the outside of the bush until I found another trail back in.

Robert and Joe Johnson pose with their calf moose. - photo Ross Johnson

Suddenly a cow and a calf ran out into the field two hundred metres north and stopped, staring at me. I saw Matthew’s blaze orange vest three hundred meters north of them, and heard him on the radio calling Joe. The cow stepped back toward the bush, the calf following her. I didn’t want them to disappear into the bush, so I waved my arms and called. They stopped again and watched me carefully. About the same time that Joe reached the east side of the bush, both moose had had enough of me and headed north at a fast trot. They headed straight for Matthew and then, picking up his scent, swung around him, passing 150 metres to the east of him and Joe, headed for a long willow thicket.

The two animals ran past Joe and Matthew at a range of about 150 metres. They both aimed and fired, and the cow and calf dropped.

I traded my blaze orange jacket for a camouflage one that would hide stains better, and dug out the gut hook, knives, saw, axe, sharpener, gloves, towels, water, table, toboggan, campstool, cigars, and game bags.

The two moose had dropped within fifteen metres of each other, so Matthew and I had plenty of company while we dressed out the cow. The ground was flat and hard, so Joe brought his vehicle over. He and Robert used a deerskinner hoist on the back of the Toyota 4Runner to lift the calf off the ground while Matthew and I started to work. Joe and Robert finished the calf in three hours, and the cow took a little over four. We loaded up the vehicles and started the long drive back to Grande Prairie.

Later that evening Matthew and I phoned my father and told him about my son’s accomplishment. He told my son that his great grandfather had shot his first moose at the same age as him, and he told him about the community that his hunting had helped to feed. 

As I write this a week later, the meat is hanging at the butcher’s, the hide is at the tannery, and my son is outside boiling the skull in washing soda and cleaning the meat and connective tissue off of it. We will bleach it in hydrogen peroxide and it will hang on his wall for many years to come; a marker on the path of the shared history of our extended family, and passing to the next generation a tradition that my grandfather started in Saskatchewan 99 years ago. ■

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