The parking lot of Waite General Store was so full I had to park on the side of the road. Janet Abrahamson and Charlie Bryant were there to register Janet’s moose. A crowd gathered around the Weight General scale, and I arrived just in time to see the big bull being lowered onto the trailer. Abrahamson, from Thorndike, stood off to the side with a big smile on her face, talking on the phone. “Eight hundred and eighty-eight pounds,” I heard her say.
Abrahamson and Bryant were on a logging road near Third Machias Lake early Thursday morning. They spotted a bull in the road and Abrahamson got ready. She raised the gun, a .44 mag, and found her target and pulled the trigger, hitting the bull. Her subpermittee left on Thursday so she was the only person able to shoot when the bull charged her. “I was shaking when he charged me,” she said. Just shaking? You did well, Janet. Wow!
She fired a second shot that doesn’t appear to have hit the moose. It veered off the road and into the woods, and then the work began.
Janet Abrahamson’s Bull Moose
The bull went into the woods, through a swamp, and kept going. Bryant whooped and hollered when he found the moose.
It was busy at the store and they needed to get the moose to Clayton Blake, the butcher who is 30 minutes from Waite. I don’t have all the details of bringing the moose out of the woods. They had a huge ATV and winch, and a pickup truck that were involved. Bryant called for help. Getting it over a brush pile left by a logging operation was rough. It took seven hours to get the moose out of the woods and onto the trailer. A second bull stayed in the area while they worked to get this one out of the woods.
The bull weighed 888 pounds field dressed. The spread is 47.75″ and the beam was 29″. It has 13 legal points plus three that didn’t quite measure an inch. This is Janet Abrahamson’s first moose hunt. Well done, Janet!
Fifteen moose had been tagged as of 5 pm Friday. Today is the last day of this hunt. I’ll be stopping in again today to see if anyone else has tagged out.
