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Lindsey Beto and her bull moose shot in October

On opening morning of North Dakota’s moose season I was glassing public land in Wells County before sunrise looking for something so big, so obvious. Many of the dark shapes and patches of brush spotted through binoculars at several hundred yards looked like moose in the low light but were really just dark shapes and patches of brush.

Until they weren’t.

After a month of scouting, hours of doubt and wondering if I was looking in the right places, I finally spotted my first moose. The slow-moving pale legs of a bull and cow gave them away in the day’s first light as they headed north along a shelterbelt.

A half-hour later, after crawling under the wildlife management area boundary fence, and hiking with what little wind there was in my face, I slipped through one of many tree rows that checkerboard the landscape and saw the bull at 50 yards.

Thinking I couldn’t get this lucky, and wondering when my kids would get here later in the day from college and home to help in the aftermath of what was certainly going to happen next, I knew the cow, the animal I was legally allowed to shoot, would step out at any moment. But she didn’t.

With the bull not going anywhere, I hung around long enough to watch two more bulls wander in from the west and join him. I’m guessing they knew I was there, hiding behind a tree with my rifle over a shoulder, but gave me a pass to stand and watch. Maybe we were all waiting for the cow, killing time on one of those made-to-order October mornings that makes standing around and doing little to nothing in good looking country pretty tolerable.

Back to the hamburgers in Harvey.

Now joined by my kids, sitting on high-back chairs and scanning the menu after a full day in the field and still dressed in our hunter orange, Jacob and Lindsey Beto asked what we were hunting. It turned out that Lindsey had an any moose license, had spent the day hunting near us on the opener as they looked for a bull. Stories were swapped, as well as cellphone numbers, with promises to text if we saw a bull and they saw a cow.

I got a text from Jacob Saturday morning at 8:06 a.m. about a cow they spotted heading to the piece of public land we were hunting. Maybe an hour later, after I had pulled the trigger and was standing over an animal that was so big and so obvious for that mostly open country, up walked the Horace couple, who had watched the hunt unfold from a prairie hilltop, ready to help.

While I’ve heard many North Dakota nice stories when it comes to landowners with farm equipment at the ready to help once-in-a-lifetime moose hunters after the harvest, this was something different. This was a mile hike in on public land, with the promise of a tougher, weighted hike out after doing much of the skinning and quartering.

This was North Dakota nice on another level.