The headline and first paragraph in the link below, at first glance is a bit misleading but the accompanying news story provides a more detailed narrative of a hunting couple who shot and wounded a moose then get lost trying to track the moose. Once they find it, the moose is skinned and the hide is used to keep the couple warm overnight at temperatures around the freezing point.

A married couple who spent a cold night lost in the woods of western Newfoundland shot a moose calf and used its freshly skinned hide as a life-saving blanket.
Steve and Sheila Joyce of Steady Brook, N.L., were hunting Tuesday afternoon when they wounded the animal and then became disoriented while tracking it through woods between Corner Brook and Bonne Bay.

As dusk fell and the temperature dropped to a few degrees above freezing, they realized they were hopelessly lost.

That's when they suddenly came upon the wounded calf and killed it, a recovering Sheila Joyce said Thursday from their home.
She recalled saying to her husband: "That's a godsend. We could skin it and use the skin to keep warm. And through the night we both kept speaking about how we were so thankful for it.v"We never would have made it through the night because we were both wet, shivery and cold."

Link to full news article.

I have never been to that province, so I googled it to see the landscape and found this video. I hunt remote northern forests with my wife too, and my concern about sheltering in a fresh moose skin is bears. Apparently Newfoundland is known for huge black bears. I don't understand how a couple can hunt the northwoods and not have at least a lighter between them to make a fire. They were lucky that they survived the cold and did not get attacked by a black bear in doing so.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mhg5sOsS_pg

Probably not a good idea to put aside your survival pack, either.

Since they were tracking the animal, why could they have not backtracked? With a wounded moose and two trackers, there should have been plenty of sign. Of course, i have never tracked in those woods.....

What? No map? No compass? No clue?

Hope I not being too hard on them (newspaper articles are famously inaccurate about anything connected to wildness), but it sounds like they went out without much in the way of the basics.

Good move on the Moose "blanket" (although the bear issue could have been very, very bad), but some basics like navigational gear might have prevented even one night in the bush.

HJ

Exactly! How can they even camp without preparation? It's just insane!


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This get's a Thumbs up from me,they did with what they had where they were.The bears are drowsy,if not hibernating.They learned a Good Lesson,& I'll bet they will be advocates for being prepared to their friends/relatives & that is a Goodthing!

Wow. Just wow. Kudos to them for being resourceful but being prepared would have been better. Apparently they traipse around the wilderness with less gear than I carry when going to class.

I read it as they had gear but left it behind to track, thinking that they'd come back to the gear once they found the animal. I'm not a hunter but many of my friends who are seem to do the same thing. They sacrifice preparedness for lightness and mobility, thinking of the tracking as a minor detour where nothing could possibly go wrong. Not being a hunter, maybe I just don't get it, but the post-shoot period seems to be the most dangerous part of the hunt to me - wounded animal, other predators, and an adreniline rush.

not only that, the woman apparently had no survival gear, making the mistake of assuming she and her husband will always be together and he would have the supplies.

This is why I went away from a survival "kit" and go with pocket carry. A kit gets left behind with the rest of the stuff you don't want to be burdened carrying. What's distributed in your pockets is on you, no real convenient way to leave it behind. Take DR's PSP apart and stow the parts in various pockets and you have a pretty darn good EDC.

I have kits, but they're much bigger than typical micro/mini survival kit where you compromise to make everything fit in a certain form factor like it's a game. GHB, Truck/96 hour kit yada yada yada, but if I'm out traipsing around in the backwoods, those small items of survival are in my pockets.

Lost??? Doh, compass/map/GPS (with truck waypoint) -- more stuff that was inconvenient? Haven't we had this conversation?