The day started early, I drove up to the happy bear hunting grounds in the dark and arrived at the spot I wanted to hunt as the sun came up. Unfortunately, someone was already there. At this point I was feeling a little bummed but had a second area in mind not too far away. On the way there, I drove by 50Cal’s “honey hole” and watched the bee keeper load the remnants of his boxes on a flatbed truck using a cool little forklift.
After the show I continued on to my secondary destination. As I approached, I spotted a bear loping across a recently logged area. I put the binocs on him and noticed he was decent in size and had some brown coloring to him. I wanted that bear so the hunt was on. He was heading for some timber so I drove up the road just past the timber and set out on foot to cut him off. I stopped at a good spot for an ambush and within 60 seconds there he was out about 100 yards still loping along. I whistled but he wouldn’t stop. I only had a few seconds so I let go with a round. The bear did a 1080 (three spins) and “bam” hit the ground. I could hear him snorting but could not see him. After about 30 seconds he popped up and disappeared into the brush/timber. I could her him slowly crashing through the brush for about 20 seconds then it abruptly ended. I waited for about 5 minutes but heard nothing else.
Not wanting to go into the brush alone, I walked back to the rig and drove to where I had cell coverage. After the 8th ring 50Cal finally answered. I explained my situation and how I had a bear down close to the road and it would only take us 5 minutes to get it out whole. So I thought!!!
He said he would be there in an hour. Sure enough, one hour later he shows and we go to the point of impact. It looked good, blood everywhere and a nice trail leading into the bushes. We head off on the trail guns pointed forward ready to hip shoot if necessary. For all of you who have been through this before, you know what I’m talking about when I say this is the scariest part of hunting.
We continue on the blood trail, everything looks good, he is heading downhill like a severely wounded bear should, and it’s great for us too because there is a road below us. This is where things start going south. The blood trail becomes less and less and we start losing the trail and have to go back to the last blood spot, on our hands and knees at times looking for slight drops of blood. This goes on for about and hour and a half, then the bear starts heading uphill. I start to get real concerned now; maybe the bear was not hit as good as I thought? It turns out the uphill travel was a good thing because the blood flow starts increasing again and we can now follow the trail as fast as we can walk. The bear went all the way to the top of the mountain and about 400 yards straight down into a black hole before we found him wrapped around a log. Total tracking time was 3-1/2 hours. Here are a couple of pics of him as found.
Here his one of the bear and the hunter.
The only thing on the hunters mind is the monumental effort that will be needed to get out of this hole.
And no the light does not represent the top of the ridge; it is really about 3 times that distance straight up.
Here is a pic of 50Cal checking the bears dental condition. Note that 50Cal is a large man and 6’4” and about 290 lbs.
As 50Cal goes for the pack frames, I proceed to field process the bear.
Some stats on the bear, it was a male, about 200lbs, had a brown back, was black everywhere else except for a white patch on his chest. I have no idea of the age. He must have been an athletic bear because he had very little fat.
On the way down the mountain we ran into a game warden who started all of his license and tags checks of me but ended it quickly when it started pouring rain.
