Maine Outdoor Journal

By TRAVIS BARRET, Outdoors Writer

Things just seem bigger in real life, don't they?

You certainly don't have to tell Roy Norton that. The Fairfield man got all the confirmation he needed when he lugged his moose to a registration station in Solon last month.

"I knew it was big, but I didn't think it was that big," said Norton, 52. "But people kept walking up to us just to look at it. People were trying to buy (the antlers). I had to tell them, 'They're not for sale. Not yet, anyway.' "

What Norton was holding onto was a set of antlers of near-record proportions. Norton's bull moose, shot on the final day of Maine's 2008 moose hunt, clocked in at a rather pedestrian 790 pounds. Big, but certainly nothing to whip a crowd of onlookers into a frenzy.

But adorning the top of that bull was a set of antlers unlike virtually any seen before it. The large bone structures protruding from the head of the moose were extraordinarily large, with a spread measuring some 65 inches across.

The antlers, recorded by Al Wentworth, president of the local Boone and Crockett chapter -- the organization charged with recording such trophy-worthy accomplishments -- will likely end up as the third-largest set of moose antlers in Maine's history once they dry out.

A moose that is some 500 pounds shy of the state record, but with a rack for the ages.

"That is pretty rare, but not unheard of," said Lee Kantar, the state's leading moose biologist. "Post-rut, October bulls have lost up to 15 percent of their body weight."

Kantar went on to say that for moose killed during the 2007 moose hunt, bulls ages 41/2 and up averaged spreads of just 46 inches -- and the antlers on Norton's moose would have been in the top half-percent of that year's harvest.

But Norton started thinking he might never get that moose at all.

Hunting with permit-holder Craig Haywood in Brighton, day one of the week-long hunt turned into day two -- and day three and then day four -- without so much as the sign of a single moose. The hunting prospects were so slim, Norton said, that he later found out only three moose were taken from that entire area he hunted that week.

The last day of the week, Norton decided to try something different. He started calling moose in the dark, well before legal shooting time, just to try and locate one to focus the hunting efforts on. From that darkness came a call, but it was a cow.

So they headed off to find the cow, but Norton and Haywood were instantly confused. A cow moose, sure, but why was it making so much noise, banging against the trees like a mad canoeist in a fit of paddle-rage? As Norton found the cow and fixed his scope atop his rifle on her, he saw nothing to indicate they'd mistook a bull for this cow.

Haywood urged Norton on, tossing out the idea that it must be a bull. Norton replied that he saw no antlers at all.

"We just kept hearing the paddles hitting things, and we kept hearing the paddles banging," Norton said. "I stepped up on a bank to get a better look, and that's when I saw (the bull)."

That's also when he got his first look at the antlers. "It was just so big, he couldn't help making all that racket with them," Norton said. "Just walking around, he kept banging them into every tree there was."

At first sight of the hunter, though, the bull made a run for it. But Norton hadn't come this far -- spending all week with no hope of killing a moose and fearing falling into that small minority of moose hunters who don't come through -- to be denied.

"I said, 'All right, if you want to run, I'll run, too.' It's the last day of the season!" Norton said.

Finally, Norton let out a grunt as he ran uphill, desperately trying to keep pace. The bull stopped and turned. And Norton -- who said he was panting and out of breath, shaky and tired -- fired a perfect shot that pierced the moose's lungs.

"I couldn't believe it weighed just under 800 pounds," he said. "I thought maybe 850 or 900. Some people were saying it was 1,000 or 1,100, but I knew it wasn't that.

"He probably was up near 1,000 (before the rut), but he was probably running around so much as the big head of the woods that he lost a bunch of that before we found him."

What he didn't lose, however, was a pretty impressive set of antlers.

Travis Barrett -- 621-5648 - tbarrett@centralmaine.com