There he stood, as large as life, head swaying, antlers brushing off the alders on each side of the trail, steam shooting from his nostrils, ready and willing to challenge any creature on the planet - especially me.

I’d seen large bull moose before, but not this big. And not as mad.

I’ve been startled by animals in the woods before, but never like this.

I’ve “gone pottie” in the outdoors many times before, but not without warning.

Looking back now as I put this story to paper three years later, I can chuckle. Friends and family bust a gut. But it wasn’t the least bit amusing when, on this early-October morning, I came face-to-face with the bull I had been tracking for three days.

“Judging by the size of those prints, he’s a big, big animal,” my buddy Dan said on the first morning we picked up his tracks along the side of a bank in Area 7, South Brook, here on Newfoundland’s west coast. “It’s certainly no young bull,” he added. “Could be that monster bull you’ve always wanted to shoot.”

Little did I know at the time that I would soon be coming face-to-face - 25-30 metres apart - with such an imposing creature.

Now, I’m no novice when it comes to the outdoors. I grew up in the woods and I’ve seen more than a few big animals in my day. In fact, a friend of mine downed a bull almost 100 pounds heavier with six more points and a larger antler spread a couple of years earlier on the Great Northern Peninsula. But in my mind, right then and there, this was as huge as a bull could get.

“I say we move our truck (carrying a small pickup camper) a bit closer to this area,” Dan suggested after making a few cow calls. “This is his turf and he’s hanging around here somewhere. We don’t want to walk three or four kilometres in here every morning, right?”

“Well, I don’t want to move right into this spot and have our chatting and clanging dishes and stuff drive him away,” I said.

“No, no, not right here; a kilometre or so back the road. I noticed a small pit there this morning just off the road, big enough to haul the truck into.”

We did just that mid-afternoon in an effort to keep the noise at a minimum when the animals would be most active - early mornings and evenings.

With my “male or calf only” licence in the packsack, we continued our hunt well into that first afternoon, calling every so often in likely-looking areas, but spotting only a lone cow crossing a marsh as we were heading back towards camp for supper.

Next morning at daybreak, we set off on foot once again along the gravel road and onto a quad trail which offered a number of more narrow paths branching off to cutovers and marshes. At each one, we’d call - Dan with a long cow moan and me, 15-20 metres away, with the short grunt of a bull. We’d wait an hour in hopes of some sort of response, then move on to the next cutover.

When we stopped and called near the end of the fourth path, we heard the unmistakable grunt of a male inside the trees 100 metres or so to the left of us. We turned to one another with identical “did you hear that?” looks on our faces.

Dan waited five minutes and called again - “aurrouugh... aurrouugh.”

“Wuugh,” came the response, this time a little closer.

“Aurrouugh... aurrouugh.”

“Wuugh.”

“He’s coming, he’s coming,” I whispered excitedly while pushing the magazine into my 30-06 bolt-action Browning.

“Listen, listen; did you heard that?” Dan asked a minute later.

“Hear what?” I whispered.

“Branches cracking. He’s not too far inside those woods; probably 50 metres... got a bullet in the chamber.”

Click, click.

“I do now.” We heard nothing for about 10 minutes, so Dan issued another few calls without a response.”

“Let’s just stick around and not make a sound,” he said. “Don’t even move your feet because you could snap a twig or something.”

We remained as patient as the average hunter could possibly be, but it was becoming obvious that the animal either picked up our scent - the wind wasn’t in our favour, but we had nowhere to move without making noise or coming out into the open - or else something else distracted him; perhaps another cow along the way.

Thirty minutes later, after hearing several quads racing along the trail a few hundred metres behind us, we decided to head back to the truck and prepare for an early rise.

We retraced our steps before sunrise the next morning, basically tip-toeing almost two kilometres along the road and quad trail, before heading back in what we referred to as “Path Four.”

Dan’s calls failed to garner a response for 30 minutes, until our ears were suddenly perked by a double “Wuugh.”

“He’s on the other side of the trail behind us,” I observed. “He’ll be crossing soon. We should...”

“No, don’t even think about going back out the path,” Dan said. “He’s coming for the call, so he’ll come out in the open not too far from us soon enough. Have patience. It’s just starting to get bright enough to shoot now, anyway.”

Reluctantly, I agreed... for half an hour.

“I’m going to take my time and quietly head back out the path,” I whispered.

“Alright then, b’y,” Dan said. “I’ll stay here, just in case. Turn on your radio but turn down the volume.”

“Channel 3?” I asked.

“Channel 3; lock ‘er in.”

So slowly and quietly did I travel, that it took me almost five minutes to get back to the trail. I glanced up, then down. Nothing. I waited for a minute or so, then decided to creep a few hundred metres further along.

I didn’t reach the 100-metre mark.

As I came to a turn in the trail, there was the rutting, muscular Mr. Big. The first thing I noticed was the steam, followed by a snort. He obviously heard me creeping along and was already facing me, head down slightly like a bull about to charge a matador; my orange vest apparently being his red blanket.

That’s about when I... well, you know... no need to embarrass myself by repeating it.

I can’t recall loading the gun, but I do remember raising it, ever so slowly, and trying to steady the sights on his neck as his head swung slowly from side to side.

I thumbed off the safety and, without taking a breath - probably because I was having enough trouble breathing as it was - squeezed the trigger.

I heard the bullet strike his antlers, but he just continued to stare me down. I ejected the spent cartridge, held the sights half-steady on his neck and fired again. I knew this one hit him - somewhere - because he shuddered for a second and then started to run towards me.

Panic time!

“Oh good God,” I said to myself while stumbling back towards the path, “I’m dead now!”

Dan had just made his way to the trail and I almost bowled him over, trying to get on the path where there were some trees with branches heavy enough for me to grab and climb.

Probably more because of a state of fright than natural bravery, Dan stood on the trail and started to shout and curse like I’ve never heard him. The animal brushed by him at full trot and quickly disappeared into woods so thick that a rabbit would have had trouble getting through.

We were both gasping and never spoke a word for more than a minute. Finally, bent over with his hands on his knees, Dan turned to me and asked, “What the hell just happened?”

“I was walking up the trail and when I came to the turn, there he stood, waiting for me; snorting, swinging his head around... what a friggin’ fright!”

Once we regained a little of our composure, Dan asked if I hit him.

“Oh yeah, in the neck, I think. That’s why he was so pissed off.”

It didn’t take long to find blood where the animal entered the woods, so we put on our tracking hats and fought our way inside. We broke into a small clearing 300 metres along and noticed a pool of blood where the animal had stopped for a while, trying to prolong the inevitable.

“We’ll find him down, not too far from here,” Dan said.

Yeah, sure.

Although distance-wise he didn’t travel much further - maybe 400 metres - it would be another 2-1/2 painstaking hours before we discovered the bull laying among a patch of thick brush.

We estimated him to weigh between 1,100 and 1,200 pounds on the hoof. He had a wide (we didn’t measure it) 18-point rack, which, on his massive frame, could have tossed me probably 20 metres into the woods.

Hey, now you know why I was so scared.