With blood up to his elbows, Jerod Lavers of New Gloucester dropped to one knee in the North Maine Woods beside his dead moose and asked his girlfriend of six years for her hand in marriage.
It wasn’t exactly Prince Charming on a white horse, but Christine Messer thought it was perfect. She didn’t want fancy, she said, just something special.
Lavers, 34, and Messer, 37, both love to hunt, which is why Messer said it meant a lot to her that he planned his proposal out the way he did. Lavers started hunting when he was 10 years old, although he began tagging along on his father’s hunts when he was 6 or 7. Messer had hunted some before the two became a couple.
The couple’s first date was on July 18, 2018, and Lavers proposed on September 24, 2024.
“It wasn’t long into our relationship that I knew she was the one,” Lavers said. “I’m just a procrastinator.”
He thought about proposing on the anniversary of their first date in 2024, but then he was drawn in the moose lottery mid-June for the September week of bull season. It was his first moose permit. He didn’t have a subpermittee. His plan called for him to be the one to kill the animal.
“Why not put two extremely special moments together into the best moment of my life?, he said.
Lavers had scouted Zone 4 a few days before his hunt in September. During hunting week, he didn’t find any moose on Monday where he had seen them before, so he went to a different spot on Tuesday. There he ran into a friend who said he had heard a bull in the area.
Lavers used his cow call and the bull grunted in response a couple of times. Then a real cow moose called and the bull went toward that one and away from the hunter.
Lavers and his cousin Cole Harrison headed into the woods to try hunting in some choppings. Lavers discouraged Messer from going with them, citing really rough terrain, which proved to test even his persistence, he said. Christine stayed on the road with Lavers’ father.
The cousins raked brush trying to sound like a bull. They walked onto a cow and a calf, which took off. The men followed the trail and found themselves between two choppings. Then they heard a grunt. It was within 150 yards.
They moved to a better shooting spot, and Harrison spotted the moose first. “Jerod, he’s huge,” Harrison told him, Lavers said.
Lavers was hoping the big bull was close to them because he was hunting with a Marlin 336 .35-caliber Remington with a peep sight, which is an open sight and no scope. It does not have a particularly long shooting range. The gun had belonged to Messer’s grandfather, who died eight years ago.
The wind was blowing behind the hunters toward the bull, then it shifted and stayed that way long enough for the moose to step out from the brush. He was 70 yards away.
Lavers shot the moose, hitting it a little high behind the shoulder. He jacked in another shell and missed with the second shot and the moose moved away about 15 yards. He jammed his gun on the third shot. It took him about 15 seconds to unjam it — it was his most pressured moment, he said.
He got the third round chambered, aimed behind the moose’s shoulder and squeezed the trigger. His mark was true. The moose reared up and flipped over on its back dead.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Lavers said.
About 36 hours later, he had an 898-pound dressed out bull, with a rack spread of 45 ½ inches, he said.
The moose dropped about 500 yards away from where Messer and Lavers’ father were waiting. Messer said she heard a loud “yahoo” from Harrison without using the two-way radios they all carried.
Lavers left his cousin with the moose, then fetched Messer. They took the standard photos with the moose, then Lavers knew what was next. He said he didn’t expect to be as nervous as he was. He had carried the engagement ring into the woods in his binoculars chestpack.
Lavers started cutting the moose to dress it out. He was bloody up to his elbows when he said out loud that he had to grab something out of his pack. Harrison and Messer were talking so she didn’t really notice.
He retrieved the ring, walked back toward the moose, dropped on one knee in front of Messer and asked her to marry him.
Messer said she couldn’t believe it and wondered if it was real, but she said yes. There was even a little blood on the ring, she said.
“I hadn’t showered for two or three days. I wasn’t glammed up, but it was perfect. We were in the woods, we both love hunting and it was like two special moments rolled into one.”
She thought Lavers shooting the moose was the highlight of the day until he proposed and it certainly caught her by surprise. They had been on a cruise recently and she thought he might propose then.
“I didn’t have any idea he would do it on the moose hunt,” she said.
The happy couple are working on setting a date. They are planning a destination wedding, but are not getting married in the woods.
