A couple headed out for a day of fishing in Maine got far more excitement than they bargained for when they stumbled onto a wild scene straight out of a nature documentary — a moose calf sprinting for its life with a large black bear hot on its heels.
Elvia and Todd Malcolm were in Telos Township, Maine, roughly an hour from their home in Lincoln, when they first noticed a female moose near the edge of a wooded area. The moose then turned down a side road, and Todd Malcolm saw an opportunity.
“I said to Elvia, I said, ‘Grab your phone because you’re going to get a chance to get a picture of a moose,’” Todd Malcolm told The Associated Press.
The couple pulled over to watch the moose and quickly realized something was wrong. She appeared agitated and was making grunting sounds, as though she was calling out to a calf.
Moments later, both the calf and the bear burst out of the tree line, charging directly toward them. Todd Malcolm said he immediately knew the bear would catch the calf if nothing was done — and he wasn’t about to let that happen.
“I put the truck in drive and I just stepped on the gas,” he said. He made clear he wasn’t trying to injure the bear, only to place the truck between the predator and the calf. “I knew what I had to do and I just did it.”
The bear veered off sharply and vanished into the woods. As Todd Malcolm described it, “Boom, gone, right in the woods.”
His wife was flooded with relief once the danger had passed.
“My heart was racing because I did not want to witness the bear catching the calf,” Elvia Malcolm said. “As soon as the calf got past the truck and we were able to get the bear to give up the chase, I looked up the road and saw that they were together, the mom and the calf.”
Once things calmed down, Elvia Malcolm scrolled through the photos she had snapped during the chaos and was stunned to find she had actually captured clear images of the chase in action.
“I really thought I probably got like a bug on the windshield when I started to look at them,” she said. “I took them through the front windshield of the truck. I wasn’t outside the truck. No way was I getting outside the truck.”
After confirming the mother moose and her calf were safely back together, the Malcolms carried on to their fishing destination, where they ended the day by catching brook trout.
