Moose Kill

I took a walk yesterday and on the way home I cut across the field in back of Ed & Melissa's camp and took the old trail through to the upper camp road ...
...not long after I left the field and entered the woods, something off to the right, down over the embankment caught my eye - 'Hey - That looks like a dead moose down there!'..... I left the trail and walked down to the carcass when it occured to me that this was a fresh kill and I was in unfriendly territory, unarmed!

I hoofed it back to the house via the trail from Dean & Heidi's camp and found tracks and evidence that the attack had begun at least a tenth of a mile from where the moose had collapsed.
Back into the house I started assembling equipment for lifting tracks, taking photos of the area and collecting feces samples... grabbed my .38 special for safety measures and headed back out.
I set my frame around the clearest track then poured out my plaster-of-paris concoction -left that to set up and went down to the kill zone.

After several photos from all different angles, I spread the search out to determine what and how many were involved in this kill. The large set of tracks came down off from the mountain but smaller tracks wove out through the thick spruces nearby. Other than the tell-tale turkey tracks, all were clearly canine!

I retraced my steps back to the carcass and was amazed to see that one of my prior boot tracks had filled up with a pool of blood indicating that this was an extremely fresh kill, maybe that morning.
I rigged up my game cam on a tree 4-5 feet from the carcass dummying it up with sticks for props so that the infrared light would be on the carcass and not up into the Milky Way - collected some feces into a sterilized jar - then went back to the track mold which had set pretty much by this time.

Now I have to wait a few days before checking the game cam and finding out what killed the bull moose...

Note: I had never done a snow mold before and wasn't sure whether it would work or not - about the only real difference is I added more plaster-of-paris to make the paste thicker. Even though mine didn't fall apart, I had a lot of plaster on my hands from where 30 minutes just wasn't long enough to set for the wet and 35 degree conditions...It finished drying in the house and has joined my moose, fisher and raccoon track collection.