Moose down a well now has a tale to tell

Fifteen‑year‑old Cole Brown was up on a ladder building a shed when he heard a clamor coming from the alders behind him. He'd been hearing noises coming from the woods for hours, but this was a noise of a different magnitude.

It was the afternoon of September 17 and Brown was at his small business, Cole's Sheds, on Route 214 in Pembroke. He descended the ladder, and as he peered through the vegetation he finally spotted what he thought was an antler lying on the ground. "I started walking up to it thinking is was a shed and I could pick it up," Brown says.

But, suddenly, the antler moved. And what Brown thought was a shed turned into one of two very large antlers still attached to a very alive moose. The animal's front legs were scrambling on the rock sides of a deep well, its body out of sight in the hole's darkness.

"I was speechless," Brown says, adding that the ancient well was deeper than the animal was tall. "I was surprised it was alive down there."

Brown rushed back to fetch his cell phone and call his father, Jeremy Brown. Soon the two were standing side by side, watching the moose, which had by then tumbled fully back into the well. So began the Great Moose Rescue of Pembroke.

A quick call to Maine game wardens brought people from across the area. It was at that point that plans were made, according to Cole's sister, Delaney Gardner, who admitted having a secret feeling that this rescue wasn't going to go well. "An animal that size -- well, it usually ends up with their meat being harvested," she explains.

The old well, about 10 feet deep and six feet across, was surrounded by rock sides. No one knew how long the moose, a young bull, had been down in the hole.

By this time others had arrived, and, as Gardner says, a plan to save the moose had been hatched. As Jeremy Cole brought his excavator to attempt to lift the moose from the well, Gardner talked softly to the animal. "I was trying to talk him through it, calm him down," she says. "This guy was desperate at that point."

Matt Cummings, a Passamaquoddy tribal game warden, stood watching the preparations along with Steve Dunham, a regional wildlife biologist, who started to prepare his tranquilizer gun. "The bull was visibly calm by this time, which was probably an indication that it was exhausted," Cummings says. "It wasn't thrashing around at all."

Dunham backed up and fired. Within minutes the bull was down, and Dunham climbed into the well to thread two yellow nylon straps around the animal's body. The straps were attached to the excavator, and after two tries the inert moose lay on the surface beside the well.

Dunham administered another shot to the moose to counteract the tranquilizer. Then the small group of people held their breath.

"I knew I shouldn't be too hopeful," Gardner says. "We just had to wait to see what he would do."

It took another 45 minutes before the group had its answer. The moose slowly lifted its head from the ground, then staggered to its feet. Dunham approached carefully to shoo it away from the well, and eventually the moose trotted into the woods to scattered applause from the group.

"After he crossed 214 into the woods, he was going full bore," Cummings says. "He looked like he wasn't injured at all."

All the gathered group had left to do was fill in the hole to make sure it wouldn't claim another moose. Gardner recommends that others look for similar traps on their property. "Check to see if there's any old houses that may have been on your property, and look for these old wells. Then cover then up to keep both you and animals safe."

For everyone involved in the Great Moose Rescue it was a moment they'll all remember. "It was really unbelievable," Cole Brown says. "I'll be telling my grandchildren about this one."