Northern Ontario prospectors Maurice Valliere and Pat Greba learned from a friend on Aug. 25, 2021 that a bull moose was stuck up to its neck in a deep mud hole in the Canadian wilderness not far from where they lived in the town of Timmins, according to a report from the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC).
“It was about three or four miles from my home, so I thought it wouldn’t be much of a job to go over there and try and get him out,” Valliere said, adding that if he and his friend hadn’t helped the moose, it would have died. “He was buried right up to his head. He was fighting, and fighting, and fighting just to keep his head out of the mud.”
Before helping the moose, the men tried contacting Canadian officials for guidance on how to properly deal with the bull. But they couldn’t reach authorities. And since time was of the essence, they handled the problem themselves.
“I was hoping to try to go around his stomach [with a heavy strap] and try and get him out, but he was in too deep,” Valliere told the CBC. “There’s no way I could have jumped in there, so the only option I had was to go around his horns [with a strap].”
If the moose had been a cow without antlers Valliere doesn’t think he’d have gotten the animla free because that’s where they placed a heavy-duty strap around the bull — pulling it out of the mud by its antlers with a large Argo ATV.
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Once extracted from the mud hole the moose lay on its side, exhausted, trying to collect itself from the ordeal. But it suddenly jumped to its feet and ran away.
“He scared me, so I ran away, too, and he was stuck with one of the straps hanging [onto his antlers].”
Valliere said the moose was stuck in a hole that likely was a ditch near an old road that was covered in mud.
“We didn’t think it was that much of a big deal because everyone in Timmins would have probably went out and helped,” Valliere explained to the CBC.