FAIRBANKS -- There's only been one year of the 23 years Darvil West has been hunting moose on the Tanana Flats that he hasn't come home with a moose.

"It was 1997, I think," he said.

Asked what happened that year, the 67-year-old supervisor at Flint Hills Refinery in North Pole grinned and replied, "I just didn't run into one."

Standing next to his airboat Friday at the Chena Pump wayside as he prepared to head down the Tanana River to his moose hunting camp for Saturday's opening of the 2007 moose season, West was hoping that wouldn't be the case this year. He sounded confident.

"I went out the other day to drop some stuff off (at camp) and I could have shot two cows, but I didn't," said West, referring to the antlerless hunt already under way in Game Management Unit 20A south of Fairbanks. "I'd rather have a bull than a cow.

"I don't agree with shooting all these cows; that's how we beget more moose," he added, offering his unsolicited biological perspective on the large-scale antlerless hunts the Department of Fish and Game has held the last four years in Unit 20A.

Nonetheless, West confessed that he was armed with a permit to shoot a cow if he had to.

"If I have to shoot a cow, it will be at the end of the bull season," he said.

His hunting partner, Andre Sanders, however, was just looking for some meat to put in the freezer.

"I eat nothing but moose in the wintertime; I don't buy beef," said Sanders, who was also driving an airboat. "I'm strictly a meat hunter."

When it comes to meat hunting, moose is where it's at for most Alaskans.

"You get a bigger chunk of meat off a moose than you do a caribou," said Hatton Franciol, who took off down the Tanana River in an airboat shortly before West and Co. pulled into the parking lot.

The Interior is the moose basket of Alaska and nowhere is that more true than the Tanana Flats, the most productive moose-hunting area in the state.

Hunters kill in the neighborhood of 6,500 moose in Alaska each year. About one-third of that total comes from Game Management Unit 20 surrounding Fairbanks.

This year, state game managers are hoping for a harvest of about 1,000 antlerless moose and 1,500 bulls in Unit 20. The majority of those moose will come from Unit 20A, which covers the Tanana Flats and Alaska Range foothills south of Fairbanks, and Unit 20B, which encompasses most of the road system north and east of town.

The moose-rich Interior is one of the reasons Jim Hazlett and his wife, Teresa, of Wasilla drive north each year to hunt. Hazlett, a former Fairbanks resident who still has a recreational cabin about 85 miles north of town, has been hunting in Unit 20B for 22 years.

On Friday, the 45-year-old Hazlett was at the Holiday gas station on Geist Road fueling up two four-wheelers he was towing on a trailer behind his truck before heading north to his cabin. While his wife will head home to Wasilla on Sept. 9, Hazlett plans to spend the entire 15-day season in the field.

The Hazletts, who have been together for 30 years, hunt together "every chance we get," he said.

"We don't care who pulls the trigger," said Jim Hazlett. "We're only interested in the little white packages (of meat) you get at the end of it."

Moose hunters won't be the only ones prowling around in the woods this weekend.

Fish and wildlife troopers with the Alaska Bureau of Wildlife Enforcement will be out in force looking for illegal hunters, said Lt. Lantz Dahlke, head of the Fairbanks wildlife trooper detachment.

"We're going to have guys in boats, we're going to have guys in planes, we're going to have guys on four-wheelers and we're also going to have guys on the road," Dahlke said. "There's a lot of road hunters and some of biggest violations we see is shooting on, from or across roads."

The most common violations troopers encounter are hunters failing to salvage all the meat of an animal (wanton waste) and hunters who fail to validate harvest tickets after killing an animal, said Dahlke.

Troopers have been busy for much of August monitoring caribou and sheep hunters, but the Sept. 1 opening of the moose and waterfowl seasons marks the busiest time of year for troopers.

"This is our big month," Dahlke said.