A Reddit user said the story happened during elk season in Montana while she was out hunting with her boyfriend. According to her comment in the thread, the two of them were on a narrow trail cut along a very steep hillside, steep enough that she described it as borderline cliff-like. They were moving along normally, focused on the hunt, when her boyfriend suddenly turned around. For a split second she thought he might be about to kiss her. Then she saw his face.
He was not looking at her.
He had gone wide-eyed, and in a low urgent voice he told her, “Get the f*** down right now.”
She wrote that she immediately dropped. Then she looked back over her shoulder and saw what had made him say it. A bull moose was standing there less than 10 yards behind them. Not out in a meadow where they could watch it from a safe distance. Not crashing in through brush where there was time to react. Just right there, on the same narrow trail, close enough that the whole thing instantly became about not making the wrong move.
She said what got to her most was that neither of them had heard it coming. That detail makes the whole thing feel worse. A bull moose is not some tiny animal you expect to materialize without warning on a mountain trail. But from the way she told it, that is exactly what happened. One moment they were walking the trail. The next, her boyfriend had eyes on a bull less than 10 yards behind them and was telling her to hit the ground.
The terrain made it even uglier. They were not on a broad open road where they could just step off and give the animal room. They were on a narrow trail with a very steep drop. So once the moose was that close, there was not much to do except freeze, get low, and hope the animal chose not to come through them. She did not describe firing, shouting, or trying to force the situation. The story, as she told it, was all about that sudden awful moment of realizing how close the bull was and how little space there was to work with.
That was the whole story she shared. She and her boyfriend were elk hunting in Montana on a narrow trail off a very steep hillside when he suddenly saw a bull moose less than 10 yards behind them. He told her to get down immediately, she dropped, and the two of them were left dealing with a huge animal at almost no distance on a trail where there was nowhere easy to go.
What do you think — if you were on a narrow mountain trail and your hunting partner suddenly told you to hit the ground because a bull moose was less than 10 yards behind you, would you even be able to stay calm enough to look back?
Original Reddit post: What’s the scariest or strangest thing you’ve experienced while hunting?
