Urban Outcast Music #39 - Wagon Wheel - Old Crow Medicine Show (dual banjos!! be still my beating heart)
Just like the great hunters of old, I made sure the toddler was tucked in for his nap, jumped into the truck and hoped that traffic would cooperate so that I could be in the field for the opening afternoon of bear season. Even more than last year, I had been seeing a variety of bears on the cameras and if the service berries were still around there was a decent chance they would be out in the open.
The plan was to rendezvous with Jeremy at the front gate at 4pm but he was nowhere to be found. To kill some time I wandered to the closest overlook so I could pretend to be hunting. No sign of bears so I headed back down, still no Jeremy. Figured I might as well check a trail camera or two to help us formulate a plan for the evening. Along the way I stopped to take pictures of bear scat (just like Daniel Boone probably did).
While documenting that the bears were indeed present and enjoying berries, I heard the familiar brush crunching and branch snapping of a bear in the creek bed about 75 yards from me. It sounded like it was moving uphill and the wind was good so I started paralleling its track. Even though we stayed within 50 yards of each other, I wasn't able to see any fur. The hope was to stay in contact until the creek opened up enough but that's not how it worked out. Instead, a very large black bear popped out the other side of the brush and headed straight away from me to browse on more berries.
Standing in a steep clear cut I didn't have any good rest options and "bear fever" struck again. My offhand, single shot at about 110 yards kicked up dust right over his back. At the time I wasn't sure if it was a clean miss or a pass through shot. He bolted back into the cover of the brush and headed back downstream. Once I got the shaking under control I headed back to the truck to give him some time to lay down just in case he was hit. By then Jeremy had arrived, surviving an ordeal on a 4x4 road, and we decided he would hunt over the wetlands while I checked for blood and tried again to reach the trail camera since all the bears were surely out of the area.
No blood on the ground or along what I could follow of the bear's trail so I accepted that I'm done with offhand shots at any sort of range and more than a little grateful I continue to miss so badly the bears are getting away without a scratch. While making my way down to the camera a cinnamon bear jumped up into a tree (good possibility its the bear in the 7/26/20 picture above)! My first thought was this is getting a little ridiculous because I could still hear another bear moving nearby to my right. I ranged the treed bear at 75 yards and there were options for resting the rifle on a stump but while I was pretty sure this was not a cub, I didn't know if this was a momma bear in the tree for some reason. Also, even if I managed to figure that out, nobody discusses shot placement on the back of an animal... Within a couple minutes the cinnamon bear scampered down and I saw it strolling towards the same creek bed from earlier in the afternoon. The noise to my right kept moving up the draw so I decided to stay put.
The bear popped up briefly on the far side of the draw and I realized I was probably back on that same black bear. For the next hour I listened to him slurping up berries. This gave me time to realize this bear was big and bad enough to send that decent sized cinnamon bear running up a tree. For most of the hour we were less than 50 yards apart without any additional sighting. Thank goodness for a strong wind! I would try to get audio with the phone until he would close within 20 yards and I would be scared back into keeping the gun up.
That might have continued until dark but then my walkie talkie started squawking. Got it off pretty quickly but I was sure that bear had bolted so I started moving uphill faster to reach an opening I thought he might take. But nope, he was still feeding slowly my direction and I could hear every sniff and snort. Finally, I could see his head and big paws as he was pulling branches down. At 15 yards, I was comfortable with my marksmanship and aimed for the only part of the bear I could see. He dropped and Jeremy and I would spend until 1:30am getting the big boar processed. We wanted to drag him out of the berries to make the work easier but the two of us yarding on him were not making any headway. I don't have any stats to share but I think two things are true, he was very heavy and I'm pretty weak... Even after field dressing, we ended up flipping him end over end for the 15 yards to the trail so we only had to lift half of him at a time. Below is the outline of the bear interactions (bottom right is the 1st bear miss, gold is the cinnamon bear, upper blue is the bear in the freezer). Even further below are a couple trail camera shots of what I believe is this bear (I was hunting on August 1st) along with the bear itself.
PS - It was an 8 month wait but Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife requests a tooth from each harvested bear and the results are in - he was 6 years old.
