Field & ForestSep – Oct
Elk Stalking
Elk or moose, the same animal
The animal is an elk in British English and a moose in American, and it is the same animal: Alces alces, the largest deer on earth, and there are something like a quarter of a million of them in Sweden. You are still unlikely to see one on demand.
This is stalking rather than shooting, and it is mostly sitting still. You are out before first light with someone who knows a few hundred hectares intimately, moving into the wind, stopping for long periods in places that have produced sightings before.
What makes it work is that they are more audible than visible. A bull moving through birch scrub at fifty metres is a series of cracks and a silence, and the guide will have stopped you before you heard it.