One Heck Of A Ride

24 The Making of a Hunter yards and find a shooting rest without the bear scenting or hearing us. “Is he a boar?” I asked even though hunting with Bucky Stone had taught me enough about judging black bears to know it was a good-sized male with a thick, glossy black coat. I shot without waiting for Cliff’s answer. “He’s hit!” Cliff said. “Not very well, I’m afraid,” I said. I had seen the bear run into cover and out of sight while I was bolting another round into the chamber. He was running flat out without limping. We went straight to the spot where the bear had been feeding and followed infrequent drops of blood until we lost the trail about a mile from where we’d left the front half of my caribou. It was late in the day, with only a couple hours of daylight left, and the odds of our ever seeing that bear again were against us. “That bear turned just as I shot, so I may have only nicked him,” I told myself. “Maybe we should get the rest of the meat before that bear gets it. We need to get back to the canoe before it’s too dark,” I said to Cliff. Cliff agreed, and we abandoned our search and struck out toward where I’d shot the caribou. We had crossed a couple of canyons and were climbing the hill where we’d left the meat when Cliff came upon what was left of the caribou’s front quarters. A bear had eaten some of the meat before dragging it into the canyon. Although we found no fresh blood, I was convinced it was the same bear I’d shot a few hours earlier and started looking around and spotted him ambling toward the next mountain almost a mile away. He apparently had heard or scented us and was leaving the country. Leaving Cliff behind, I started running after the bear, hoping to get closer. He was about 750 yards off when I shot over him in hopes of turning him back toward us. He turned all right, but when I saw he was heading higher on the mountain, I shot and turned him again. This time he ran downhill on a path that would bring him closer to me. This was when I realized I had only one round left. I ran to the bottom of the canyon and hid behind a large rock, and when the bear ran past me at four hundred to five hundred yards, I held the crosshairs about four feet over him and at least the same distance in front of him and fired a Hail Mary shot. I was surprised to see him tumble down the steep hillside almost all the way to the lake’s edge. Unfortunately, that bear was far from dead and I had fired my last round. “Cliff, bring your ax!” I yelled. “You’ve got to be kidding,” he yelled back. “I’m serious. Bring your ax.” What happened next would have made an award-winning Mack Sennett Keystone Kops comedy film in an earlier time, but there was nothing comedic about it in the enlightened last quarter of the twentieth century. For the bear’s sake, we needed to end his pain as quickly as we could, but that proved tougher than it might seem. We chased him back and forth along the shore and in and out of the lake until he got into some brush and started clawing a tree. To hold his attention, I got as close to him as I dared while Cliff approached him from behind. When Cliff struck his head with the ax, the bear doubled over onto his back and I jumped on him with my knife and drove it into his heart. The sun already had set when we finished field dressing that bear. We would have to return for him in the morning but before we left I cut out the oosic, the Inuit name for a bear’s baculum (penis bone), and stuffed it into my jacket’s pocket. It was nearly dark when we reached the canoe, and very dark as we were motoring down the small stream that led to the main lake when our outboard motor’s shear pin broke just as we were entering the lake.