The Amazing Tale of the 2004 Slim Lake Moose Hunt

By Herb Neufeld, Wilderness Air

Glen Wallskog has been hunting moose on Slim Lake with Wilderness Air for the last 20 plus years. He's had several different partners over the years, but their hunt has almost always been successful. Glen and his partners have shot calf moose, cows, and numerous great big beautiful bulls. One year they even got a white moose.

This year Glen had a friend from Indiana, Don Teller, with him and a good Canadian friend, Ivan McEwan, as hunting partners. Now, Glen and Don showed up on a Friday night, spent the night at Ivan's house and arrived at Wilderness Air Saturday morning ready to go. Glen's always been a fan of, shall we say, vintage Chevy pickup trucks, and the one Don and he arrived in was loaded to the max. I had previously left two outboard motors and a supply of fuel for them at Slim Lake, which turned out to be a good idea because we would not have had room for them. When we finished loading the Otter there was no room for anything else.

I flew them to Slim Lake and they proceeded to set up camp. Glen and Ivan have been hunting and camping long enough that they know how to set up a camp that more resembles a house more than a moose camp! This story is a least partially a story on myself, and you may have noticed that I'm spinning it out as much as possible.

Glen, Ivan and Don got their camp comfortable and then went about enjoying the weather and fishing, and scouting for a few days until they could begin hunting. They weren't too anxious to hunt because the weather stayed very warm. Mid week, the temperature started to drop and they began hunting in earnest. A few days later, they were lucky enough to shoot a beautiful 57" bull. Of course, those of you who have hunted moose know that the work really starts once you have an animal down.

They spent the next day getting the animal gutted, quartered, and moved back to camp where they were able to hang the quarters in a tree beside their camp so the meat could cool down properly. We had provided them with a satellite phone so, at this point, they called base and let us know they had been successful. In addition, they still had a calf tag left so they planned to hunt some more, and that they would be ready to be picked up on Saturday morning.

Saturday dawned clear and windless as I prepared the Otter to go get them. Arriving at the camp, I found they had even more to add to the story of the 2004 moose hunt. Sometime during the night Glen was wakened by a noise outside the camp. He didn't know for sure what it was but was probably thinking "Bear!" Now the camp they were living in was constructed of cedar poles shaped into a small house and covered with a layer of plastic {poly}. Glen was warm, comfortable in bed, and reluctant to get up and face the cold dark night. Also, he probably thought if it was a bear he would be better off being very quiet and maybe it would eat Ivan instead of him. Morning dawned and nobody had been eaten, so they started packing.

Upon checking their meat they discovered that it had indeed been a bear in camp during the night, and judging by the tracks a huge one. Later when I got there, they showed me the tracks and I found one track that couldn't be covered by my hand. The bear had checked out the two front quarters and pulled one of them down to where it touched the ground, and then went over to where the two hindquarters were hanging. Here the bear showed he knew what he was doing by eating the very best part out of one quarter.

When I got there, I had to turn the Otter around and back it in to the little dock on the little beach at the campsite. Now the water was pretty low and I couldn't get the airplane very close to shore, I pushed the aircraft as far back as I could with a paddle until it ran aground. At this point, the back end of the float was just able to reach the end of the little dock. Ivan tied a small rope from the end of the float to the dock to keep them together, and we started to load the airplane.

We loaded all the camp gear, cooking gear, power saws, outboard motors, duffle bags, etc. Once all the camp stuff was on the airplane we started with the moose, we got the four quarters onboard, leaving only the head. It took some doing but we managed to fit the moose head complete with 57" horns on the airplane. Now all that was left was to make a last check around camp to make sure we hadn't left anything behind. I got Ivan Glen and Don in the airplane, closed the doors and started the engine, we had put about 2000 lbs on the airplane so it took quite a bit of power to drag it off the beach.

The wind was out of the north that day which meant I had to taxi the airplane across the lake to the other side in order to turn around and takeoff into wind. We were quite heavily loaded and taxied slowly. About halfway across the lake I started thinking that something didn't feel right, the airplane didn't seem to steer very well, at first I thought it was because of the wind which by now was quite strong. That still didn't feel right so I opened my door to look behind me to see what the back of the floats looked like and -damn!- there was the dock still tied to the airplane!

I'd forgotten to untie the airplane from the dock and had not only pulled it off the shore but had towed it halfway across the lake. Now, if I'd had anyone other than Ivan and Glen in the airplane I probably would have been able to get away with telling them I was taking the dock across the lake for the winter. But Ivan and Glen would have never have believed that, so there was nothing else to do but admit that I'd done what we could all see. I shut off the engine, untied the dock and left it there floating in the middle of Slim Lake. I started back up again and we carried on, taking the moose hunters back to Vermilion Bay. Back in the Bay, we unloaded the airplane, reloaded the vintage Chevy, and sent the boys on their way. And that's the end of the 2004 Slim Lake moose hunt!

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