A Long Hard Night
By TJ "Pipedreams" Booth
Some
days..........things just don't go the way you want them to....and last Thursday
was one of those for sure....with a couple of "silver linings" in the
mix to I suppose.
It started out as a normal night down on
the tree stand with my partner, Monte. Cept there wasn't a moose of ANY kind in
sight...which has been par for the course this season. He was up in the stand, I
was down on the ground....cause that stand just doesn't hold up to two big guys
all that well!
With about one hour of light I see him pointing out to
the right in the alders...."Bear" he said quietly. I could see the
back of a pretty good size black bear, but that was about it........good size I
say because the cover out there is about 42" high......I could also see his
rifle trained on it, but I wasn't sure if he was just scoping it, or planned to
shoot it...The BOOOOOOM! from his .375 answered that fast enough!
I could hear the bullet hit and saw the
bear go flying out of sight....I figured it was toast, but I heard him chamber
another round and the .375 roared again. He roped down the rifle...and told me
that it was hit hard, but that his second shot missed....I wasn't to shocked to
hear that because those trees that support the stand were still whipping from
the recoil of the first round.
When we got over to where the bear was hit,
there was blood everywhere........and a very solid blood trail.......both our
hearts were pumping a mile a minute.....walking through knee high
"tussocks" tracking a wounded bear!!
...... Us Alaskan's have a more colorful local term for
these &@##&@^ swamp growing leg busting, ankle twisters.....!!
but I'll have to leave it out of this story........I'll
just call em "heads" from now on....part of the local term!
Anyhow....pretty soon we were 200 yards
from the impact point, out of the heads and moving up into the black spruce
forest...still with a solid blood trail........for another 100 yards....then it
stopped!! totally!!
We both got down on our hands and knees looking for a
sign of blood EVERYWHERE....in a big arc from the last sign......but nothing was
there to see and the light was fading fast! We spent the last 15 minutes using
headlamps, but that made no difference....there was simply no more blood
trail....a sign that both of figured indicated that he was probably out of blood
and laying dead SOMEWHERE 50-100 yards away...but where? He was heading deeper
into so REAL dense spruce....the kind of stuff where you can't see another man
standing 20 feet away.....he could be anywhere...
and he COULD still be alive too!
Well the light was all but gone...and we
had no clue which way to go.....after a LOT of deliberation I decided to go get
Luke and put him on the trail.......not really knowing if he WOULD trail a
bear...after all he's a bird dog.....not a bear dog. Trust me, I wouldn't have
even given this option a second thought if I hadn't seen him deal with bears a
time or two........he's as fast as a whip...and KNOWS that those critters want
to kill him too! This doesn't mean that nothing could happen to him.....a LOT
could happen to him or us........but it was dark now and he was our only chance
to find this bear tonight....
He was pretty bummed out when we grabbed
rifles and left him behind to go hunting, but totally STOKED when I came
throught the door.......his nose immediately went to the blood on my pants
leg....he KNEW what it was...he could smell bear on me too...and was ready to
roll!
Things were looking good...if he would pick up the trail
and run it.....that was the big question.
He seemed to know where I was heading even
though he had not been down to the tree stand at all for more than a
year.....led the fourwheeler all the way down the trail. When we got there Monte
was still trying to find a blood trail with his headlamp with no luck...it was
pitch black out now and getting cold too.......it was 29 when I left the house
with Luke. I watched Luke run back on the blood trail, all the way back to the
point of impact.....then come back down towards us hot on the trail! What a dog!
I grabbed his collar as we both added a
layer, checked batteries and got ready to go get this bear........we still felt
that the odds were 9:1 that we were going to find him dead a few yards up in the
trees......but we didn't know for sure of course. I decided to leave my scoped
rifle behind........way heavy cover and total darkness.......my .44 mag was a
much better choice of weapons in this situation I felt.......Monte had no choice
as he only had the .375 with him.......locked and loaded I "loosed the
hound" and he took off into the bush like a bat out of hell with both of us
not far behind.....
Monte is trying to flank Luke to the right,
I'm trying to flank left.......but we can't see the lil sucker......but we can
hear him and know that he's about 50 yards in front of us. Suddenly Luke starts
barking hard.........then GROWLING!...."OH SHIT"!!!! I say to
myself....cause he doesn't growl at dead stuff!
One second later, Monte who is both younger and stronger
than I came up on Luke..........then I heard him yell " HE'S NOT DEAD AND
THEY'RE COMING AT YOU!!
I had JUST broken clear of yet one more
spruce thicket......so QUICKLY!! pulled out the .44..........I could hear
branches breaking, the bear grunting as it ran and Luke barking.......but I
couldn't SEE anything in my headlamp......then I saw a BIG black blurr...then
Luke right behind it....No shot! Then the bear turned on Luke, who spun around
so fast it was unreal.......it was a bluff........the bear took off away from me
and Monte.........I called off Luke...and he actually CAME!
Both our hearts were going like a drum
roll....then I heard Monte calling for a location........it took us about 5
minutes to hook up...couldn't even see each others lights in that crap!
Time for a smoke and a new battle plan!
This bear was FAR from dead.....don't quite
know how that could be considering he was KNOCKED ON HIS ASS BY A .375
H&H!!!! and bleeding all over the place!!
But he was indeed alive........and we were a good half
mile deep in the bush from where we started...and let me tell ya, running a half
mile up hill through this stuff is close to running five miles on hard flat
ground.....we were ALL whipped.....but decided to let Luke have one more go at
it.....
That produced more or less the same
results, cept we never saw the bear this time......just heard the
confrontation...so I called him off again. We figured (it was 1AM now) that we
were probably just pushing him to hard and should back off, let him stove up and
die...and WE should GTF out of there, head back to the house and pick up the
trail in first light...too much risk running around in this stuff in the dark
with a wounded bear and quite honestly we were pretty much running on empty
ourselves...
That's when I realized that I should have
grabbed the GPS when I got Luke!!
No worries, We both THOUGHT we knew where the tree stand
was........but we didn't. We had been chasing a bear through a forest of spruce
where NOTHING stands out........and so thick that you can't keep track of the
sky most of the time. So we made a dead reckoning course and TRIED to walk
it.......but being that both of us are right handed...kept looping to the
left...
I knew that because we hit Allen Creek...Well, now that
we were at Allen Creek we took another bearing towards where the tree stand
"should be".......but never found it....and we were getting more and
more tired...cold, hungry, thirsty....you get the picture....
So we sat down on a couple of
"heads" in the swamp....had a smoke and tossed around our options.
Make a fire and wait till morning? Not good, plenty of wood to burn, but no
place to burn it without starting a tundra fire. I had left a GMRS radio up at
the house and hoped that Moonstruck would use it when she got home from
work.....then I could get her to fire a couple of rounds to give us a
bearing.......but the battery wasn't charged on her radio and she couldn't find
the charger......Things were looking grim.
Then I figured that if we could find Allen
creek again, and I was sure I could.......we should just bush wack along the
creek....however far we had to go upstream until it crossed the trail....then we
were out of there...........so I found the creek, Monte bushwacked in front of
me......and one LONG hour later we were home. Dead tired...walking through the
door to a not so happy wife!
Sadly, it froze hard that night and when
the frost melted off, so did the trail, we walked arcs (WITH the GPS this time!
) and covered the whole ridge back and forth four
times........NOTHING!
We figured he was dead for sure by now, but finding him
out there was going to be impossible.......So Monte called it in to
F&G......and we had to give it up.
The next day, when I was splitting wood I
kept seeing Ravens flying in towards Allen creek (the bear had crossed it the
first night) and late that night I heard the yotes going nuts out on the same
bearing..............the circle of life I suppose, nothing goes to waste up
here......but that's sure not how we wanted that hunt to end.....
Lessons learned? a few. If you HAVE a GPS,
BRING IT WITH YOU!
Sure would have saved us a LOT of time that
night.........and would have allowed us to waypoint the last point on the trail
too.......Despite getting turned around......I was pleased to KNOW my
woodsmanship is still good enough to get us out of there the old way!
And one more thing...........LUKE is one
HELL of a dog!
His actions, savy and heart impressed me to no end! He
may have been bred a bird dog, but he's a pure bred Alaskan bush dog at
heart.....and up to the task in every way!