Pretty much any time in the bush.
A bull moose spent nearly an hour stomping and attacking a rookie racer and her team of sled dogs amid a training run for the Iditarod in the frigid wilderness of Alaska.
Bridgette Watkins said the massive animal paid her little mind when she first spotted it on her 52-mile trek along Salcha River trail system, near Fairbanks. She told Outdoor Life she paused for the moose several more times, trying to keep plenty of space between them, and then suddenly it was charging at her.
A bull moose spent nearly an hour stomping and attacking a rookie racer and her team of sled dogs during a training run for the Iditarod in the frigid wilderness of Alaska.
The rookie racer aimed her .380 firearm at the animal, which had recently shed its antler, and then fired off half of its six rounds before it jammed. But the moose didn’t stop, so she dashed for cover beneath her sled, cleared the jam and then checked on her team. The moose was milling about her dogs, so she quickly cut free six of them, who were attached to snowmobile being driven by her friend and dog handler, Jen Nelson.
The moose again charged in their direction, prompting Watkins to fire another few rounds.
“We’re standing there and I said, ‘I’m out of bullets, I’m out of bullets, I have no more bullets’ … and I’m like, ‘this is it,’” she recalled. “I can count the whiskers on his nose. He’s two feet from me.”
Instead of attacking the women, the moose turned his attention to the remaining four dogs.
“Any time a dog would move or bark, the moose would go into attack mode. Over and over and over,” Watkins told the magazine.
“And we would yell and hit things and scream and try to distract him. And when he would stop, we would talk to the dogs. Because they’re standing there looking at me, terrified, and I’d try to keep them calm.”
She also said this.
“Everybody wants to tell me what kind of gun I should have or shouldn’t have, or how I should have or shouldn’t have shot,” Watkins says of the social media backlash. “I’m prepared now, and I was prepared then. I’m a lifelong Alaskan—I have every gun I need to kill even an elephant. It’s not that I don’t have the weapon, I’m just not going to a gunfight” when I’m running trails in February.
I’ll be the next somebody to tell you what to do. When I went to the Weminuche Wilderness I was warned about Moose. Bears … eh … not so much a problem up there, but “a Moose will stomp you to death and there are plenty of them.”
I carried a big bore handgun. You should too. Get yourself a .44 Magnum so this doesn’t happen again.
