Derek Neary
Northern News Services

Fort Simpson (Oct 07/05) - Floyd Moses and Bob Amundson could hardly believe their eyes.

As they boated along the North Nahanni River in search of moose and sheep on Sept. 16, they thought they saw a grizzly bear about 1,000 yards away.

Bob Amundson, left, and Floyd Moses display the rack from an elk that Moses shot in the North Nahanni in mid-September. Elk are rarely encountered North of 60. - Derek Neary/NNSL photo

As they pulled closer they realized that the large animal with the golden brown coat actually had antlers. It was an elk standing right there between Battlement Creek and Carlson Corner.

"We got excited," Amundson said.

"Very excited," Moses added.

Calm shot

Moses maintained enough calm to make the shot with his rifle and he downed the male animal, one scarcely seen in the North.

He estimates that the elk weighed 500 to 600 pounds.

In all his years of hunting, he said he had never encountered one before.

"I don't think a lot of people have ever seen one," said Moses. "They don't even think they exist up here, but they do."

And he has parts of the carcass to prove it. He described the meat as fine grain, somewhere between beef and moose.

"It's very good," he said.

Nic Larter, the Deh Cho's regional biologist, examined the animal's rack and took a small sample of the meat for DNA purposes. He was in the process of doing the research late last week, but said it may have been the northern-most elk ever harvested in the NWT.

There was a lone male elk spotted in Nahanni National Park two years ago, but such a sighting is "a very rare occurrence," Larter said.

The presence of elk and the increasing number of white-tail deer in the NWT will likely necessitate their inclusion in the territory's Wildlife Act in the future, Larter noted.

"We are expecting species expansion here," he said. "Maybe we're going to have start addressing that."