PART 2 of Spring Black Bear Season 2016: Three Weekends, Two Bears, One 1995 Chrysler Intrepid

The first part from this series of hunts is one post down the page, so scroll down and check that out first for the beginning of the story, if you're so inclined.  After shooting a younger adult bear in the low-200lbs. range on the second day of our first hunt of the season, Sandra and I took the next weekend off and did whatever it is people do when they're not hunting.  This was mostly due to the fact that after exhausting all our babysitting resources the weekend before, we had nowhere to stash our kids and go back up-island.  There were only two weekends left in the spring bear season after that, though, and we'd have to figure something out if we were going to get a second bear and completely cross store-bought ground meat off the grocery list for the year.  Unfortunately, for whatever reason, we decided the solution was to try taking the kids with us, and just take turns with one of us watching them, and one of us hunting.  That worked out about as well as could be expected.

The four of us left around mid-morning Saturday, June 4th, and arrived at my favorite black bear hunting grounds in the afternoon.  With only this weekend and one more to go before the season closed on the 15th, I was definitely not into trying to experiment with new territories.  We drove straight out to the secondary logging road where I wanted to start hunting, and as soon as we got there, Sandra got her gear together and started up the first spur.  It was a narrow track, completely overgrown in spots, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.5-2 kilometres long, winding up and around a mountain.  While I waited at the bottom, hoping to hear a gunshot at some point in the near future, I tried to figure out the best way to entertain the two kids.  We couldn't stay in the car, or there would be a mutiny very quickly.  The problem was, we couldn't wander very far, because the density of bears in the area was so high that the possibility of running into one was very real.  Black bears in the wild that have not been acclimated to the presence of humans are generally shy and reclusive, and sprint away at the sight or smell of people.  This can be dependent on the size, age, condition, and circumstances of each particular bear, though.  Large, older boars are accustomed to being the biggest badasses around, and are somewhat less inclined to turn tail and run at the sight of people.  While that can be advantageous in a hunting context, it's less so in a family-hike-with-small-children context.  It wouldn't exactly feel wholesome taking kids on a berry-picking expedition while watching over them with a rifle to make sure they're not eaten by large carnivores.  So we stuck to the salmonberry bushes closest to the car while we waited for Sandra to finish her survey of the first spur of the day.  It turned out to produce nothing of note.

As I was driving to the next trail she was going to try, Sandra spotted a bear on the side of the secondary logging road itself.  Bears that travel that road are usually of the aforementioned large, badass variety, and don't think much of walking straight down the middle of logging roads that occasionally see vehicles.  This bear was apparently no exception, though I never actually saw it myself.  It was around a curve in the road, and only visible from the passenger side of the car.  Sandra later told me that the bear just stood there and continued eating his berries from a bush at the side of the road as we pulled over.  It gave her a sideways glance as she exited the car and loaded her .308, but came to the conclusion that she wasn't too scary looking, and declined to spook off into the brush like 95% of bears do.  Sandra lined the bear up and took the shot, firing freehand from a few yards to the side, and in front of, the car.  I was beyond excited at the proposition of dressing the bear on the nice, flat, clear road, and loading it directly into the coolers in the vehicle, with no pack-out involved.  It didn't turn out that way, though.  When I got out to check out the situation, I looked down the road to where I was hoping to see a dead bear, and there was none.  Hoping for a quick and short tracking job, I walked to the spot where I could see from the prints in the dust and gravel that the bear had spun around and dove into the brush off the side of the road.  After conferring with Sandra that she was reasonably confident she had got a hit on it, I started doing some preliminary checking on the direction of travel the bear had likely taken after going out of sight.  I didn't want to go after it full-on yet, in case it was still alive and capable of travel.  When you go crashing through the forest after wounded animals straight-away after a shot, the sound of your pursuit just makes them run further and hide deeper in the woods than they would have, had you not pressured them.  It's better to take your time, let them lie down and (hopefully) die close by.  After taking some time, and getting a few gulps of water (it was blazing hot that day) I crawled into the thick underbrush after the boar.  Thus began roughly an hour and a half of tracking, through the thickest bush, and wading through cold rivers, all amounting to nothing in the end.

The bear had not been hit in a vital region, most likely taking a flesh wound in a meaty area, judging by the colour and quantity of blood found on its trail.  The first sign of blood was about fifty yards along the path the bear had taken, at a spot where it had had to crouch down and crawl underneath some large branches and slide down a bank to get to a river.  The blood wasn't bright red, which would indicate a heart or artery hit, and it wasn't frothy, which would suggest a lung shot.  Neither was it dark, or discoloured with any other fluids, which might indicate a gut shot.  It was flesh or muscle tissue blood, and only a small smearing of it at that.  There wasn't even enough for it to be dripping from the bear, it had needed to directly physically transfer the blood to the ground for there to be any evidence at all.  The bear had then traveled along the river, sometimes wading through the middle of it, sometimes walking along logs that were laying across it.  I was able to track it based only on the wet prints left behind on the logs it crossed.  Occasionally I checked side trails leading away from the river, to see where the bear might have strayed from following the water.  I finally found where it had done just that, and it appeared that once he had gotten back onto dry land and felt safe again, the bear had just gotten right back to eating berries.  There were wet footprints and snapped green twigs leading right up to salmonberry patches, with freshly squashed berries underneath.  After trailing the bear for about a kilometre through worse and worse game trails on my hands and knees, and finding no evidence that it was slowing down, I pulled the plug on the recovery mission.  After the first blood smear, I only ever found one more droplet of blood; on a leaf underneath a salmonberry bush that had been recently pillaged.

Once I got back to the road and gave Sandra the bad news, we headed off in the car to the next trail with decidedly more solemn and dejected attitudes.  We later found that a screw holding her rifle's action to its stock had come loose, allowing the barrel to move a fraction of an inch upward when being fired.  This effect would be magnified considerably down-range, easily causing an altered shot.  We still have no idea how it happened; the rifle had been sighted-in, test-fired, was fine, and then remained in its case until this time.  There's nothing worse in hunting than wounding animals and not being able to recover them.  If someone hunts for any significant length of time, it's going to happen sooner or later, and it's an indescribably terrible feeling.  You think about it for a long time, and it's hard to concentrate on anything else for awhile immediately after.  Depending on the evidence in the aftermath, either you're thinking that the animal died and you can't find it, and it's going to rot somewhere and go to waste; or you're hoping that it wasn't hit badly enough to cripple it, and praying that it recovers.  When I wounded a bear once, and couldn't locate it or find any evidence of a blood trail in the steep ravine where it had run, I just called off the hunting trip and drove the four-and-a-half hours back home.  If you can't concentrate on what you're doing, you can't be out hunting.  Sandra and I continued on for a small time, with me checking out a couple more spurs; but ultimately we decided to camp early for the night, and left for home first thing in the morning without hunting any more.  I had spotted a small bear up one of the spurs that I checked before we camped, but hemmed and hawed on whether it was a worthwhile bear.  It was in thick cover, and I couldn't get a good enough sense of its size or whether it could possibly have cubs.  Without me realizing, because it was moving in and out of sight, it started moving too close to where I was standing, and I didn't realize this until it was too late to do much about it.  I tried to inch away up or down the trail, away from where the bear looked like it was about to emerge from the brush, but it ended up crashing out of the bushes basically right in front of me, scaring both of us about equally.  The bear just about spun around so fast that it twisted backwards in its own skin, while doing a sort of half-backflip and running away through the undergrowth.  It turned out to be a decent-sized bear, and if I had been more on my game, we might have had a chance at it.  It just shows that you need to keep the right frame of mind, or you might as well just be out there on a nature hike.  When crappy things happen on a hunt, you need to be able to maintain focus.  And sometimes, like in this circumstance, there are more things conspiring against you than it's worth, and it's better to just call it off and go home, if you can.

After a week back in civilization, working and performing all the usual duties of a responsible citizen, I would have given anything to be back out in the woods with those hunting problems again.  There's nothing like real life (and it's debatable how real it is) to refocus and renew your hunting or fishing resolve.  With the last weekend of the season upcoming, I got the greenlight from Sandra to go it alone; back up to the bear-hunting woods immediately after work Friday night, and I was camped out in a random clearing in the early hours of Saturday morning.  It was June 11th, four days to the close of the season.  I woke up in my tent at 9am in the middle of a cold, morning fog bank.  Despite the visibility being approximately zero, I could not have been happier to be back, and ready to get going.  I fired up my one-burner stove, enjoyed a dehydrated meal-in-a-bag (which I like so much I would eat them at home if they weren't so expensive) and drove toward the first spur of the day.  Ten minutes later, still in the car, before I even got within 15km of the first spur I had planned to hike, I spotted a bear far down on the side of not the secondary, but the primary, logging road.  That's a ballsy bear.  In my excitement to get parked quickly, get my rifle out of the trunk, put the bolt in it, and load it without spooking the bear off into the forest, I momentarily lost the calm I needed to make a proper shot.  I couldn't believe my luck at finding a bear before I had even really started hunting.  In my mind, I was already eating lunch in the car on my way home, with the bear stowed away in my cooler in the backseat.  That is not the proper state of mind to be in when trying to make a clear, but still relatively long shot freehand, with no available rests.  The wind was blowing straight in the wrong direction, and I was afraid the bear would scent me at any second and blow this opportunity.  So I rushed the shot, and instead, I blew the opportunity for myself, missing the bear completely.  The shot hit the dirt between the bear's front and hind legs, and it did a hop, skip and a jump, before calmly striding off the gravel road into the woods while I tried in vain to jack another cartridge into the chamber to get another shot.  All of a sudden, the frustration and dejectedness of the weekend before tried creeping back in.  Experience helps in that kind of situation, though, and I knew that the only way to confront a stupid mistake like that was to snap out of it, and get grinding.  I tried to go after the bear through the underbrush under the tree canopy, but that never works.  I could hear the bear woofing at me through the dense cover, which was more than I had expected to get, but never ended up sighting it again.  I got back to the car and drove to where I had originally intended to hunt, and spent the next 10 hours hiking half a dozen spurs from bottom to top and back again.

I had a sighting of a huge boar standing on its hind legs, peering over at me while I was taking a pee break, and then running away as I tried to get my pants up and grab my rifle.  That was disheartening.  This was about two hours after the missed shot I had taken in the morning.  After that, the only game animals I would see for the next eight hours would be several ruffed grouse hens, tending to their chicks.  Every time I passed a nest, I would be attacked and scolded by the grouse.  This not being grouse season, I had no recourse but to shake my fist and retreat, a grown man with a rifle beaten by what is essentially a wild chicken.  It's hard not to think, when you're walking up and down mountains all day long, especially when it starts raining, "I had a nice bear in my scope at 9:30 this morning.  How far ahead of the game would I be right now if I hadn't screwed that up?  What if it rains the rest of the weekend and I don't get another chance?  How's that going to feel tomorrow after another 12 hours of hiking?"  That's when you remind yourself, "Hey, dude, you're out in the middle of nowhere, hiking around, looking for bears, and getting attacked by crazy birds!  How cool is that?!"  And the answer, of course, is that it is very cool.  I made a plan to hike back down from the spur I was on, and instead of driving to the next one, I would walk the four kilometres there, walk up it, and then walk back to the car.  That would take about three-and-a-half hours, and it'd probably be dark when I finally got back to where the car was parked.  In the end though, I didn't have to go nearly that far.  In planning that last hike, I thought that since I had seen a few bears on the logging road while driving from spur to spur in the last two weekends, I should probably try walking it, and see if I could sneak up on one without the car.  I did just that.

After walking on the logging road for half an hour, at about 7:30pm, I heard a large rock flip over down a bank by a riverside.  I quietly stalked closer to the sound, and came upon a bear walking up a steep hillside away from the river, and toward a salmonberry patch.  When it reached the berry bushes, it started crashing around in there, eating every berry it could reach.  While the bear was distracted, I sneaked to within 20 yards of it.  The problem that remained, however, was that the bear was in no hurry to leave the berry patch, and while it was in there, I had no shot.  I got an unexpected break, however, when the bear suddenly got wind of me, and instead of taking off through the undergrowth and getting away, it bolted straight up a tree.  This put it five feet above the berry bushes, and almost clear for a shot.  I had to find a window through the branches of the tree to get sight of the vital regions on the bear.  Once I was in position, I made sure to take extra care and time, and get the shot right.  Because of the proximity of the bear, and the upward angle of the shot, it was a little tricky.  I fired between the branches, and hit the bear straight through both lungs and out the other side.  Perfect placement!  I didn't know that at the time, though; I just knew I'd hit it pretty good.  It fell out of the tree and I could hear it take off down the embankment below and toward the river.  The last thing I wanted at that time was another gnarly tracking job, on my hands and knees, crawling through the rainforest collecting ticks.  Luckily, after only a short clamber through the brush, I located the blood trail, and then the bear shortly thereafter.  I could not have been more elated in that moment when I spotted where the bear had curled up and expired.  I went to retrieve the car; and 45 minutes later, I was as happy as could be; trying to drag a 250 lb. black bear up a steep bank back to the road, failing, and instead field dressing and quartering it where it lay, on a 30 degree angle in blackfly- and mosquito-filled underbrush.  I finished the job and walked the meat the short distance to the car in two trips.

I managed to find a gas station that was still open along the way back to the highway, and with my black bear meat safe and cooling out, I was as pleased as a pig in s%*t; smiling like a goof the whole way home.  I walked in the house at around 2am Sunday morning, tagged out with my limit of black bears for the year.  I had the whole day ahead of me to process the meat and get it in the freezer.  It's great to have a free day to process a big game animal, and not have to rush through it after work on a Monday, or to try to stay up all night and do it.  Hunters who use a butcher, in my opinion, are missing out on a big part of the satisfaction of procuring one's own food.  Taking the animal from the woods, to your freezer, and then to your plate, and performing every step along the way yourself, gives such a complete sense of fulfillment, it's indescribable.  Especially after going through all the setbacks and frustrations, and overcoming the challenges that pop up, like leading up to this bear.  I couldn't imagine then just dropping the carcass off with someone else, and not finishing the job myself.  I know we'll be enjoying every bit of the meat from these two bears this year, and I'll think of how they were acquired each time I eat something made from them.  I'm already thinking of making some black bear meatloaf with the first pack I take out of the freezer.  Now, I can relax and enjoy hunting Eastern Cottontail rabbits in the woods near the house, and bass fishing for two months.  Then the next big challenge; the archery season for black-tailed deer starts August 25th!  Can't wait!