Across the vast Northern Hemisphere range of the moose, this biggest member of the deer family is just past the rigours of the rut, aka the breeding season. That autumnal stretch of the calendar sees bull moose transform into swaggering, hot-blooded hormone monsters, and sometimes a human being gets caught in the crosshairs of the action.

Such was the case in late September with Caleb Lewis, up in Arostook County, the biggest and northernmost county in the US state of Maine. Lewis was out and about in swampy woods, setting trail cameras and searching for “sheds”: dropped moose antlers, which Lewis turns into dog chews through the company Allagash Antlers.

As relayed to Katie Hill for Outdoor Life, Lewis heard the increasingly louder bellows of a cow moose and the grunts of at least three interested bulls. Before he knew it, he found himself way too close for comfort to one of the latter, as footage he took with his phone and posted to the Allagash Antlers social accounts shows:

Lewis told Outdoor Life he’d hoped talking calmly but firmly to the bull – “Close enough, buddy” – would dissuade it from approaching further: a sound strategy in such a situation. “But I was overconfident in the idea that me talking would spook him,” he said. “This guy was so fired up, he just wasn’t even phased. His eyes bulged when I told him he was close enough. After I say that three times, he starts swaying his head back and forth again like he doesn’t care, he just thinks I’m another bull. Then I took three steps backward and that’s when he charged me.”

The moose knocked Lewis to the ground and then ran off; Lewis told Outdoor Life he reckoned he skidded some six feet on the forest floor from the blow. “Extremely lucky to escape with only a few bumps & bruises,” he wrote in his Instagram post.

That’s for sure: Watching two rutting bull moose go at each other, it’s rather unpleasant to imagine how a human body might come out subjected to the full force of that sort of “attention.” Bull moose in Maine average about 1,100 pounds (according to the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife, the heftiest moose harvested in the state had an estimated live weight of nearly 1,800 pounds), and during the rut they sport notably thickened neck muscles to help them better wield their massive antlers – in both ritualised display and, more rarely, clattering combat.

Two rutting bull moose having a go at each other.

The slow, stiff-legged stamping, the lolling “side-eye,” and the tilting rack the bull exhibits in the leadup to his charge is a typical rut display male North American moose use to intimidate rivals and woo cows. “In dominance displays and in courtship,” the late ungulate expert Valerius Geist wrote in Deer of the World, “the antlers are noticeably dipped and lifted with every step. Large antlers can be seen for great distances in dim light; they may serve as signals to other moose.”

The moose rut typically extends from late September into early October, and now the giant deer are facing down the approach of northern Maine’s long winter, when lean woody browse and conifer needles will help sustain them. Maine supports the largest moose population in America’s Lower 48 states, reckoned at roughly 60,000 to 70,000 animals, but it’s one increasingly beleaguered by the insidious threats of brain worm – a potentially-fatal parasitic nematode spread to moose by white-tailed deer, which themselves are unaffected by the parasite – and winter ticks, which appear to be proliferating in the warmer winters associated with climate change.

Wintertime, just around the corner, also often sees Maine’s moose taking to ski trails, snowmobile tracks, and roads to avoid deep snow, which can increase the odds of run-ins with people. Arostook County leads the state in moose/vehicle collisions. While peak season for that year-round phenomenon – bad for moose, bad for cars – is May and June, the Maine Department of Transportation does caution motorists about autumn encounters with roadway moose: Rut-riled bulls aren’t above directing their amped-up energy at vehicles.

Top header image: Nate Hughes Flickr