Below are a few photos send by Sam Bertoni from his recent annual Alaskan Moose and Caribou hunt.  One photo shows the "beast" that his friend, Fred Bergander, shot.  He's 68 and this is his first moose.  Fred's the one with the gun sitting on top of the moose.

       Sam?  He's the one bent over cutting brush in preparations for the big
cleaning job.  Sam's doing the cleaning in the other photo, too.

       Sam reports the following:

    "Fred fired 4 maybe 5 shots and another guy fired once.  We only found 2 holes and the first 4 shots were fired off-hand at approx. 220 yds., I know - I stepped it off.  Three of us shoot the same caliber guns - .338 Winchester magnum, mine is a Ruger.  While I wasn’t at the kill this other guy and I did most of the cutting and skinning and luckily we had to haul it only 50 yds. or so to the trucks – two big diesel rigs we take with us.  Our one ATV - an Argo - couldn’t be used since it was shot on the west side of the highway and the regs say no motorized vehicles on that side of the road in our area.  It took us 6 hours to skin, gut, cut, put in game bags, and haul it to the trucks.  We wear those batter powered head lamps and have a Coleman lantern with us for light when it gets dark.  This cleaning job went pretty well; one we did about 4 years ago took us until 2 AM and we had to leave the meat, coming back in the AM to haul it out – that one was a severe gut buster but then we had more guys then too.

       I’d purchased a couple of those Cabela’s plastic sleds just for this occasion some years ago and they worked great.  First we cut off the head, then neck, rib cage (2 pieces), front quarters (2) back (we leave it whole), then lastly the two hindquarters.  The fewer the pieces, the less hassle when you go to hang it.   But, is does make lifting it a beastly task.  The hind quarters weighed in at 139 lb. each and I’d guess the bull was 10-12 years old, but we didn’t age it.  The meat on the bone weighed in here at Juneau at 790 lbs. and we split it equally - taking it to a commercial butcher to cut and wrap at $0.75 / lb.  We don’t ice it down - just hang it and try to keep the flies, birds and other critters away from it. 

       The antler spread was 61”- not close to a record, but it was our biggest bull we’ve shot.  This rack was greatly palmated and there were not that many outstanding points but it did have 4 brow tines on each side, I think.  The guy that shot the moose gets the rack although most wives only let it be hung in the garage, ha!  If I shoot one I plan to give the rack to this other guy I know since I don’t want to hassle with that darn ungainly thing.

       We set up four tents and a dining fly and even had a wood stove in our big storage tent this year.  The weather was pretty good, too, with only a smattering of rain a couple days; mostly it was overcast and we only had frost a couple days."