In more than 30 years of hunting together, John Durkee and Alan Stender had never had a trip quite like their expedition in western Maine last month.

Durkee, an accountant and former volunteer fire chief in Tunbridge, received a permit to hunt bull moose in Maine’s Wildlife Management Zone 7 for a week in mid-October after more than 25 years of applying. He and Stender, his longtime hunting partner who also lives in Tunbridge, returned having shot a moose with a dressed weight of 906 pounds, which Durkee described on Facebook as the “moose of a lifetime.”

“You get an animal up there, you know you’ve accomplished something,” Durkee said. “It’s hard hunting. You’re going up over one mountain range or another, putting miles on your feet every day. It’s incredibly challenging, and the success rate isn’t very high.”

Zone 7, which runs south from Canada along the New Hampshire border to Umbagog Lake, is known for being home to some of the largest moose in the area, so when Durkee’s tag was approved, it was well worth the wait. And he knew immediately that he wanted to bring Stender with him (the Maine system allows hunters to bring along a “sub-permittee” for the hunt).

Durkee and Stender scouted the zone ahead of time to get a sense for the best places to hunt. And if they’d so chosen, they could have shot what they came for on the first morning.

“It was only a half-hour into the hunt,” Stender said. “It was a nice bull, but we’d done our homework scouting and knew there were a couple other better ones there. We opted to hold out.”

The hunters dealt with unseasonably warm weather conditions throughout the week — temperatures were in the upper 60s and 70s, and Durkee and Stender were in short sleeves even in the early morning. The temperatures were not ideal for hunting, as moose tend to stay sedentary in warm weather once their thick fur coats grow in.

As the week dragged on, Durkee and Stender began to wonder if they’d made a mistake passing up the moose they’d spotted Monday morning. They did not see much on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, even after shifting their strategy and looking deeper into the woods.

They finally found what they were seeking on Friday.

“We got in before daylight and sat for a while that morning, and didn’t have anything going,” Stender said. “We knew they were there somewhere. We just kept moving to areas we thought were prime spots — shaded, near water. We finally came into it.”

Stender shot the moose with a .30-06 rifle.

“He had a shot, I did not, from the angle I was at,” Durkee said.

But their work was still far from finished. Durkee and Stender did not have the equipment to drag the large animal out of the woods on their own, so they contacted a local logger they’d met during the week, who had offered to come get a moose for them if they killed one. The man came into the woods with his logging equipment to pick up the moose and load it into his truck.

It was too warm for Durkee to bring the moose back to Tunbridge, so he took it to a butcher in the area to have it cut up and frozen. He returned to Maine to pick it up and bring it back to his freezer two weeks later.

Durkee also dropped the head and antlers off at a taxidermist to have them mounted on his wall.

“It was the hunt of a lifetime,” Durkee said. “There’s very few people who get the opportunity to hunt moose in Maine. We did what we always do, just keep plugging away and sometimes it works out. It’s a gratifying feeling — a sense of accomplishment when you’ve done something like that.”

Benjamin Rosenberg can be reached at brosenberg@vnews.com or 603-727-3302.

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