A U.S. Marine Captain matches wits with Canada moose in the wilds of northern British Columbia.
Jan 18, 2008
BORN TO HUNT Donlon was one of two winners of OL's 2006 Battle Lines contest, in which U.S. servicemen and -women were asked to submit essays that told how hunting and fishing had helped them to become better soldiers. This hunt, sponsored by Prophet-Muskwa and OL, was his prize. Donlon wrote about roaming his grandparents' 500-acre farm in Chancellorsville, Va., as a youngster, pellet gun in hand, plinking away at various targets. Today he is an avid, self-taught deer and turkey hunter. Growing up in a military family (his father, seven uncles, an aunt and both grandfathers served in the U.S. Navy, another uncle in the Army), Donlon often didn't have hunting partners, so most of what he knows about hunting he gained through experience. The oldest of six children, Donlon, 28, is the only serious outdoorsman in his family, though he's working on recruiting his siblings, he says.
He scouts stand locations on the farm religiously and spends as much time as he can in the woods throughout the deer seasons. That is, when he's not in Iraq; Donlon has served two deployments there (and one in Japan). "If I could leave tomorrow for Iraq, I would," he says. "When you're there, every single day you wake up and can immediately see the importance and value of your efforts." He is eligible for deployment again in summer 2009.
SUICIDE ISN'T PAINLESS Over breakfast on our first morning in camp, we spotted the same bull across the lake, but our guides, Christine Bartosch and Paul Stone, were confident we'd find better bulls elsewhere in the area.
"He's a good bull, for sure," said Bartosch in her lilting Austrian accent. "But he's not huge. We know he's there, and if it comes down to it, maybe we'll go after him later in the week." So we set out to glass some hillsides and find a bigger bull to go after. Spotting and stalking is really the only way to hunt moose successfully in this region of northeastern B.C. Relatively open areas of land between the mountains and hills are dotted with extremely thick stands of willows, aspen and conifers. Pushing through them to a stander would prove futile, as Canada moose are not as wary as whitetails and tend to hold tight to their beds unless they come face-to-face with serious danger. If you were to jump one, the likelihood of getting off a shot would be low, considering how thick the vegetation can be. And those open spaces are not as open as they appear. Several times one of us would pass over an area with our glass, only to look again and see a moose standing where there had been nothing before. It's easy to understand how moose have survived so long in the wild, their bodies blending into the vegetation like black logs. Except for the twitch of an ear, they are hard to spot unless they are up and moving.
The Muskwa Region of northeastern B.C. is a paradoxical land; at once stunningly beautiful to the eye and torturously painful to the legs, back, heart and lungs. At least for flatlanders like myself. One of Stone and Bartosch's favorite glassing locations is atop a ridge known as Suicide Hill. It's not entirely clear whether it got that name because climbing it can be considered a legitimate form of suicide, or if killing oneself is a better option for overweight, deskbound outdoors magazine editors. The case could be made for either. We had to walk the horses up the hill to roughly the midway point, where it flattened out enough that we could hitch them. This in itself was a tricky proposition, since there was a good chance a horse could lose its footing, fall backward and cause a disastrous chain of events.
The climb was a combination of carefully, methodically choosing your footfalls and going quickly enough to keep ahead of your horse so he wouldn't step on the back of your leg. The torrential rain we'd had the night before made the trail as greasy as pomade. "Come on, Lonesome," I would urge my horse. "Whoa, Archie," Donlon would say to his as it tried to go too fast at once. Mercifully, 20 minutes after we left the main trail, we crested Suicide. The view from the top was staggering. We could see for miles in every direction. Over the course of several hours we saw a couple of small bulls, in addition to several cows and calves and countless elk, but nothing to put a stalk on.
After 11 hours of hunting, we rode back into Grizzly Lake camp, where our wrangler, 18-year-old Scott Sawchuk, an aspiring guide, was waiting for us. The group of us formed a tight, family-like bond over our eight days together at Grizzly Lake camp. When you spend that much time alone with the same people, you either clash and the experience quickly becomes miserable, or you mesh and a tight-knit dynamic is formed. Luckily for us, the latter happened.
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