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Moose hunting in Finland

by John Dunn
Hunter 12

The 'cold hut' in the forest - somewhere for hunters to have lunch out of the cold.

Moose hunting in Finland.

The bulk of moose hunting in Finland is from towers such as this, although many are higher.
In the almost dark of early morning we followed the guide down a muddy track, striding out in a race against the light, the spongy ground literally shaking under our feet.

About 300 metres from the road the track crossed a drainage ditch and dog-legged away to the north. Beyond the elbow, a low wooden stand loomed and the guide indicated that was where I had to go, a single finger pressed against his lips to emphasise the need for silence. I nodded my understanding and turned off the track, already shuffling out of my daypack.

It only took a few moments to clamber into the stand, organise my seat and wedge the borrowed Sako 75 rifle into a corner against the front rail. From there it was simply a matter of waiting for shooting light to arrive; jacket zipped, the collar turned up against the encroaching cold, my hands pushed deep into the pockets. All old hat for a sit and wait sambar hunter like me - even if I was physically half a world away from the familiar hills of home.

I’d been in Finland just more than 48 hours - one of seven hunting writers from around the world, who were guests of Sako at their 2004, five-day annual moose hunt. The first day we’d toured the Sako factory at Riihimaki, undertaken a shooting test at Loppi to qualify for our hunting licences and then visited the hunting museum back at Riihimaki.

The morning of day two had been spent as walking tourists in Helsinki before catching an afternoon flight to Kemi in Finnish Lapland, some 800 kilometres north of Helsinki and just below the Arctic Circle. From there we’d been bussed 55 kilometres to the banks of the Simo River and the Simojoki Hunting Lodge with its 5000 hectares of privately controlled hunting land.

That there were moose in the area wasn’t in doubt. On the way to the lodge we’d twice stopped to look at cows and calves on the edge of the road. Huge animals that mooched off into the forest in their own good time, almost as if they knew that a bunch of hunters in a bus on the bitumen presented no real threat and that undignified haste was therefore unnecessary.

But that had been yesterday and this morning we were hunting, not just looking. The dawn chorus of unseen and unknown birds peaked and faded. Daylight strengthened and I could finally see the country around my stand. Generally flat, most of it was covered by a stunted forest of spruce, pine, birch, larch and a variety of shrub species that I couldn’t begin to recognise. Directly in front was an open area covered by mosses, grass and low scrub - a moose feeding area I’d been told, a good place to sit and wait. Some 40 metres away a small, rubbed spruce tree mutely indicated that might just be the case.

The running water in the drainage ditch behind me gurgled and swirled, giving credence to the reality that Finland is a country of lakes and quaking bogs, where wet ground and muddy feet are the norm and rubber knee boots are a practical necessity. A pair of large black birds flew high over the stand, calling softly to each other and despite the Finnish accents, I knew they had to be crows.

An hour or so after daylight the sound of a single rifle shot echoed up from the south, but no moose came to feed in my little clearing. When the day was a couple of hours old, the guide returned and we trudged back out to the road. In the bright light of day we saw the track we walked along was pocked with marks and cobbled with the recent droppings of moose that must have known we were coming.

The others had been gone about ten minutes when Maarki the dog man opened the hatch of the car and let his Norwegian elk hound out. Also known as a barking moose hound, the dog had been bred and trained to find and flush moose, then hold them at bay by barking until the hunter arrived. In the way of all dogs, it had a quick sniff around, cocked its leg against a stick on the roadside then sat in shivering anticipation as Maarki fitted a tracking collar.

We stepped off the road into a mature open forest of spruce - the ‘green-gold’ of the Finnish economy. There was moose and reindeer sign everywhere, though most of it looked old to me. The dog ranged ahead and before long had disappeared altogether. Maarki kept track of his progress with a small, fold-down direction finder. Our secondary job was to work through the block, acting as beaters to push any moose that might be present towards the shooters posted at selected points along the forest road that bounded the block. When we finally broached the road we were told the dog had chased a moose across the break into another block.

The hunt manager arrived and drove us around to the edge of the new block, dropping us off at vantage points. For the second time that morning I stood and waited in the cold in case the moose came my way. Another hunter walked in with Maarki and though they managed to approach within 50 metres of the barking dog, the moose broke the bail and trotted off before a shot could be fired. The dog followed and the hunt went away again.

A temporary halt was called while we went to a ‘cold hut’ for lunch, an enclosed, gazebo-like structure with a warming fire where we had hot soup, sausages and strong black tea. There the morning hunt was dissected and some hard decisions made about how the afternoon would run. Given that I’d started out behind the dog, I was invited to go and find it with Maarki. The others went off to sit in towers while a drive was arranged.

The dog was barely audible when we started, but with the help of the direction finder we set off to track him down. The bail-up moved several times as we closed the gap and it was more than an hour before we knew we were getting close. By then the sign had told Maarki the moose was a cow. That meant there’d be no shot to end the hunt - just a dog to be retrieved and a long walk out.

We were within 100 metres of the barking dog when we stopped and Maarki used an interesting piece of Finnish hunting technology. He called the dog on a mobile phone and the collar sent him back a GPS reading that told us where we were on the map. Our location established, we sat and waited on a logging track until there was a lull in the barking. Maarki whistled to let the dog know we were nearby. The barking resumed and when it stopped he whistled again. Everything went quiet and a few minutes later the dog came trotting out of the forest to sit down beside him. That’s what I call well-trained!

It was three long kilometres back to the car, the dog straining at the lead all the way. His nose told him there were moose out there and he still wanted to hunt them.

When we finally joined up with the others we learned that Paavo Taamisto, the Sako marketing director, had shot a bull moose that came past his tower. The hunting crew was recovering the carcass with a quad bike and sheet rubber skid, but for us the day was finished. A sauna at the lodge sounded like a pretty good idea.

Somewhere on the rise above us, Burt Myer, editor of the Ontario Out Of Door magazine, blew a mournful cow moose call through his birch bark horn.

On the tail end of the rut there was a slim chance that some hopeful bull might still be out there wandering about in search of a receptive cow.

The sound had a primeval quality about it, the feeling accentuated by the bitter cold of another grey morning, skeletal spruce stags standing forlornly in the logged clearings, the fog lying in the gully lines and low clouds dragging their tails through the tops of the trees. At vantage points around the rise, waiting hunters involuntarily gripped rifle stocks a little tighter, wanting to believe the lonely cow call would produce some kind of response.

A typical clear cut through the forest, viewed from a three-metre tower.

A Finnish moose is a large animal, none of this animal was wasted.
By midmorning we were hunting another block - perched in wooden towers while a group of local hunters and their dogs beat steadily towards us. The towers were placed about 200 metres apart along a clear-cut line through the forest, the occupants clearly visible to each other with their orange vests and hunting caps, which are mandatory under Finnish moose hunting regulation.

Apart from hunter safety aspects, the towers offer a number of advantages that aren’t really obvious until you climb up onto the platform.

The extra two to three metres of elevation literally places you above the canopy of the stunted trees. This change of perspective allows a view into the bowels of the forest that simply isn’t available on the ground. It provides a better opportunity to see and identify any animal approaching the edge of clear cut - an important consideration given that any cow with a calf at foot cannot be shot.

From the tower there’s a safe lane of fire along the clear cut, the downhill shooting angle providing an additional margin of safety for the hunter in the next tower - the chances of a shot ricocheting off the soggy ground would have to be close to zero. And finally, the towers and the clear cut make the need for a shooting test perfectly obvious.

On the first day of our tour we’d all been required to pass a shooting test on the rifle range at Loppi to qualify for a hunting licence. The first three shots were fired offhand at a life-size moose target standing at 75 metres. All had to strike within scoring rings placed over the heart/lung area of the target. The second three shots were at a running moose target moving right to left (twice) and left to right across a 25-metre gap in about five seconds. One shot on each pass, each, and all to be placed in a scored vital zone.

In the tower you realise that the distance across the range roughly equals the width of a clear-cut strip in the forest.

Though I saw a good bull that afternoon, no shots were fired. With French writer Gerard Pacella a couple of hundred off to my left, I spent the last hour of daylight posted on the edge of a peatland clearing, where moose had obviously been feeding. To say it was cold would be something of an understatement. Standing beside a skinny spruce tree on a small mound of sphagnum moss, I watched the feeding area until dark, marvelling at the ice forming on the wet ground around my feet. Warm clothing and waterproof footwear are essential for hunting in Finland and I was glad to have both.

On the morning of our final day, four of us were bundled into a station wagon and sent off to hunt capercaillie in a section of old growth forest. Capercaillie are one of the largest members of the grouse family, individual birds weighing up to five kilograms. They can be shotgun hunted over dogs or stalked with a rifle or bow.

We hunted with Beretta shotguns, working behind an eager and energetic German wire-haired pointer. Our dog man carried a rifle slung over one shoulder, back-up in case a long shot was needed, or we accidentally bumped into a moose.

The dog was fitted with a talking collar that emitted two distinct signals, both of them audible for quite a distance. The first was a hunting call, a single monotone beep that served as an indicator of where the dog was at any given time. When he went onto point the tone changed to dual beeps and the hunter was expected to move in behind the dog as quickly as possible. Given the area a hunting dog can cover and the type of country we were working through, the collar was a sensible and practical means of keeping in touch with the dog. It certainly did nothing to detract from the quality of the hunting experience. Even with a talking collar, capercaillie hunting is still hard work.

There were several false alarms, the dog pointing where running birds had been - at one stage he also pointed a small group of reindeer - before we finally hit the real thing on the edge of a forest track. As we moved in, three birds flushed wild and corkscrewed away into the safety of the trees in considerably less time than it has taken to write it down. Big, dark, heavy birds with whirring pinions and a knack for evasive aerobatics that only a fighter pilot could envy.

We saw high-flying black grouse and flushed half a dozen sage grouse. There was moose sign everywhere - but no moose - and when we turned back towards the cold hut for lunch there was a capercaillie feeding on a rise in the road about 80 metres ahead. He knew we were there. He was watching us carefully with one dark eye to make sure we didn’t get too close. We watched him through the scope on the rifle but nobody made a move to shoot. There was no need to. We’d had a good hunt anyway.

It would be easy to read what’s written above and judge my hunting time in Finland as just so much wasted effort - a long way to go with nothing to show. I don’t see it that way.

For me, it was an opportunity too good to be missed. A chance to see another country, meet new people and broaden my experience base. A moose on the ground would have been nice, but it didn’t happen.

Sometimes, despite the best efforts of everyone involved, that’s just the way it is. And hunting will always be about much, much more than a trophy for the wall.