Oli, I'm not always 100% sure what you're telling me, but I find no malice in you.
I also know that nobody tells tall tales like hunters and fishermen & maybe truckers.
So it's natural that when one tells some odd tale that it's not always believed. Lots of them should start with, "You ain't going to believe this but..."
Oli, one of the reasons that I don't go hunting is that I
did go moose hunting once. Except it really wasn't exactly moose hunting at all.
I graduated high school on the edge of the Canadian wilderness. This "hunt" was mostly an excuse for five recent high school graduates to take off in a boat with guns and Molson Canadian beer and go poaching across the border. These guys were locals and had been hunting many times. I had only hunted small animals out in the Arizona desert.
We took an open 16' fishing boat across the Rainy River and out around Lake of the Woods to some large island. There's a Thousand Islands on that lake with no names.
One of the guys loaned me an old shotgun. We had three deer rifles and two shotguns.
We landed the boat and walked up the bank and over a small hill. We came out of the trees at one edge of a little clearing maybe only a hundred fifty yards from the lake.
On the other side was a Bull moose smashing up branches and making a lot of noise. I'd never seen one except in a zoo. Maybe we smelled pretty bad like beer by then LOL and he turned and looked at us. Amazingly nobody spoke.
All five of us raised our guns and shot him at once. Nobody had ear plugs and we were all deaf for 5 minutes after that. That moose got hit by two shotgun slugs, two .30-30s and a 30-'06 all at once. We were so close that nobody missed.
Unfortunately nobody missed the intestines either.
It took us 15 minutes to find and shoot a moose.
It took over 3 hours to hang it, dress it, drag it back to the boat, and consume the remainder of the beer. Fortunately was almost all downhill. We had one rope from the boat and we literally drug that moose whole, over the mud and leaves.
We put five guys and a gutted moose which still probably weighed over 400 pounds in a 16 foot aluminum boat with the head hanging over the bow, and snuck it back across the border in the dark, everybody totally drunk by then on Canadian beer. We had about 4 inches of freeboard with all that weight and when the waves started to come up we were talking about who was going to go in the water so we could save the moose. Nobody did, and we made it back okay, and hung the moose in my friend's dad's boat house.
Moose are stinky creatures but I think a moose actually smells worse when you're drunk. What's worse is the 400 pounds of moose poop which you discover when you shoot one through the intestines with shotguns.
Field dressing that moose was one of the worst jobs I ever did. There was a pile of guts and moose poop the size of a pony when we got done.
I never did eat any of that moose. In fact I have never to this day eaten moose. Also I've never had a desire to go big-game hunting again. I was just so repulsed buy all that moose poop, that I just never got over it.
I still go fishing and I have no problem cleaning a fish. I buy large cuts of meat and butcher them myself. I'm not really a squeamish guy at all.
But I have absolutely no desire to butcher a large animal, ever again, and it won't bother me if I never get close enough to smell another moose.
