**As I see the video, the guy stopped, made some noise — and waited a WHOPPING 15 seconds — then decided he didn’t have time for that sort of delay and he just had to bring it to a full confrontation, so he moved up close to the moose.**
The video starts with the moose in plain sight, and the valley clearing not far beyond him. In the first few secs he’s seen completing a tight right aboutface to observe the noise he had probably heard coming for a while. So he certainly wasn’t caught by surprise. It’s possible that the sled driver actually saw him a several seconds before the clip starts.
After watching again, I noticed two left turns previously made into the woods, that maybe had a couple inches of fresh snow in the tracks. So, the can’t turnaround theory doesn’t fly.
The driver stops RIGHT beside one, makes noise immediately (as though the moose hadn’t heard him coming. duh), waited the horribly long 15 seconds, then advanced downhill to the next left turnout, but doesn’t choose to use it either.
My wife (a gun owning constitutionalist, like me) would have said, ‘stop’ at first sight, just for the thrill watching the beast from a distance for a while. With a minute or two of ‘sitting tight’, the big guy possibly would have turned back around and headed down into the clearing. If not, we would have used one of the turnouts.
“The video starts with the moose in plain sight, and the valley clearing not far beyond him. In the first few secs he’s seen completing a tight right aboutface to observe the noise he had probably heard coming for a while. So he certainly wasn’t caught by surprise. It’s possible that the sled driver actually saw him a several seconds before the clip starts.”
We certainly do not know how many minutes of watching the moose was cut out before the video starts.