An Alaskan Adventure Part II
Rifle at port arms. Heavy, long barreled beast of a rifle. Wish I had more power in a shorter, handier rifle. Scan everything twice, peer into ever shadow, look everywhere. LOOK. Wished for better hearing. Too many hours without hearing protection on a tractor as a youth. Too many shots fired the same way.
More silence. No bird sounds. That probably means there is a bear, and he’s keeping them away from his food.
Thick timber made it impossible to see exactly where the base of the mountain was. It could be as close as several hundred yards. Off to my left, I saw a camp robber fly up into the top of a spruce tree with something in its beak. It disappeared into the branches and emerged shortly without the tidbit. Quickly taking off, it planed downwards out of sight somewhere to our front. At that angle, it would be landing within a hundred yards. We were close. A grizzly’s personal space varies with each individual bear and each situation. With a grizzly on its food….we already might be inside it.
From crawling speed to glacial – we hardly moved. Hopefully, if something began to happen, the dog’s senses would alert him and he, in turn, us. I added glancing down at the dog and judging his reactions to my scanning routine.
Suddenly, the kill site materielized right in front of us, only a few yards away. How could we have got that close without seeing it?!! We stayed on guard in case we’d somehow managed to arrive at the site and not alerted the bear. Still feeling like we were threading our way through a nest of rattlesnakes, we moved forward. It appeared there had been no bear at the offal. HUGE tension release. Quickly, each of us grabbed an antler and carried the skull about thirty yards away into a clearing.
While Steve stood guard with the rifle, I used a pack saw I’d borrowed from Lee to separate the antlers from the skull. We then lashed them to a pack for transport. Fast we were to leave the area!
t’s true that nothing happened, but it certainly could have. We had all the tension and adventure of a potentially dangerous situation without getting hurt. Best case scenario.
Not long afterwards while deer hunting on Kodiak Island, my hunting partner and I were packing meat from a deer I’d killed that morning. Our route took us past where he’d killed a buck the day before. Just that morning we’d walked right by the bones and offal. Some sixth sense made my partner approach the site with great care (he had spent a number of years guiding bear hunters on Kodiak). We then skirted a wide arc around it. We almost bumped in to a smaller bear. He had dragged the remains a distance from where they were earlier and into our new path. After moving completely around him and several hundred yards away, we dropped our packs. With only our rifles and my movie camera, we stole back to film him. He was funny to watch. He was obviously terribly nervous that a larger bear would arrive to claim his meal. He’d tear at the carcass for a moment, then snap his head up to look around in all directions. I have a feeling if we’d snuck up and yelled “BOO!” he would have bolted as fast as he could go. We’d seen a good sized 9.5’ boar in the area from a higher observation point. This little fellow, I’m sure, was not particularly dangerous. The bigger bear would have posed a completely different set of circumstances (and did later in the hunt – a story to be related at a later time).