One Heck Of A Ride

182 Kamchatka Brown Bear fifth day in that camp after spotting it while we were heading north in the helicopter to a reindeer Author’s Kamchatka brown bear five days into the hunt was mounted lifesize to match the Alaska brown bear he took years earlier in the Aleutian Islands area. My guide and I went back for it, and found the bear feeding in the middle of a meadow. It immediately spotted us and was running by the time I dropped to the kneeling position and got off a quick shot that sent the bear rolling. It was dead when we reached it. It was an exciting bonus because I really didn’t expect to find a bear on this leg of the hunt. As it turned out, I was the only hunter in our camp to take one. After we loaded the bear in the chopper, we went looking for our main quarry, a Kamchatka moose. After approximately 2½ hours, we reached an area where the guides had been seeing moose. When my guide spotted a big bull, we had the chopper double back and drop the guide and me off while Galen and his guide flew off to look for another bull. When we finally found the bull we’d seen, my Russian guide and I stalked to within about eighty yards of him. I went down to one knee again and shot the bull with my .30-.378 Weatherby. It hit that moose so hard that it literally knocked him off his feet and turned him upside down. It was amazing to see such a large animal as a moose be so affected by a .30-caliber bullet. However, this bullet was a 180-grain Nosler Partition traveling 3,400 feet per second. Such velocity gave it Kamchatka moose pictured with Author tremendous shocking power. In case you’ve wondered, the moose in Siberia taste just as good as the North American variety As the trip progressed, I took every animal on my bucket list. Next up was a reindeer. We flew to an area where the Russians knew there was a herd, found the animals, and my guide and I were dropped off about a mile away so as not to spook them. After trudging through thick brush and undergrowth, we finally got within range. It was hard to pick out the best bulls because they were moving in and out of the herd and mixing with the cows, calves and lesser bulls. After at least an hour of watching them, my chance came when a big bull presented a clear shot and it dropped where it had been standing. The rest of the herd seemed confused and milled around for fifteen minutes or so before trotting off to the north. Author and his guide spent at least an hour watching a herd of Kamchatka reindeer before this bull presented a shot