Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game Alberta Spring Black Bear Hunt

And here's a pic of my guide, Barry, with his four-wheeler (they call them quads up there), having just hung a beaver bait and stuffed a barrel full of pastry leavin's.



As you might guess, there wasn't a whole lot of time for me to quiz Barry about what kind of guidelines I should be looking for in judging a bear's shootability. He told me, "A good bear will stand as tall as the barrel. If you see a bear that tall, shoot him, he'll be a 7-foot bear. If he's not that tall, but he looks fatter than the barrel, he's probably a shooter, too."

"What about sows?" I asked.

"Oh, well, sows with cubs are a bad deal," he opined. Don't get down out of the tree stand if there's a sow with cubs. We had a guy a couple years ago do that and he got mauled pretty bad."

I mulled that over. "I think I'll stay in the tree stand til you get back, ol' buddy," I said.

"Yeah, that's probably best," he agreed, in his usual quiet deadpan voice. "But if the sow gets your wind, be careful she doesn't sent her cubs up your treestand tree. That can get pretty sporty."

"Right," I agreed, wondering exactly how I would stop a bear cub that was climbing up my tree.

"If you have to, shoot the sow," he suggested. "They're legal, either sex. But if you shoot a sow her cubs are gonna die, so..." He looked kind of sad at that. "Oh, and keep your eyes open right after I leave. The bears associate the sound of the bike engine [they call 4-wheelers bikes, sometimes] with fresh food, so don't be surprised if a shooter comes in right away."

That was about the sum total of my instruction on dealing with bears in the North woods before Barry gunned the quad and took off, leaving me to swat mosquitos and try not to smell like a man who'd been eating Cheeto's and drinking Doctor Peppers in a rental car for the past 6 hours. I fed 4 rounds of 250 grain 0.358 caliber bear medicine into my vintage Savage, and settled back to wait.

And sonofabitch if a bear didn't show up. He was skinny, but nearly as tall as the barrel. But I was bound and determined not to shoot a piddlin' bear, so I just watched him.

Here's a pic of him trying to get at the beaver bait.



Knowing what I know now, I would say he's probably a 6-and-a-half-foot bear. Pretty respectable for the Lower 48, but not a shooter in the North woods of Alberta.

A little while later a second bear came in, and he was MUCH bigger. I don't have a pic of him because my heart was pounding so hard at the sight of him, waddling in in that rolling, toe-in, fat-bear gait, silent as a ghost, that I thought I'd drop my phone if I tried to take a pic of him while still holding my rifle, which I by God was NOT going lean against the tree in my stand! But as I watched the big bear, I saw that he wasn't as tall as the barrel, so I guessed I'd get scoffed at by the guides if he shot him, so I held my fire. After a while he buggered off with the beaver bait, but then the "little" bear came back and fed some more.

Then the little bear decided that something up my tree smelled interesting, so he wandered over and started to climb up to my stand.



I didn't take a pic of him when he got higher up the tree, because I was busy throwing a water bottle at him. He seemed to think that was bad manners on my part, but otherwise wasn't too perturbed. He bit the water bottle a bit, licked up some of the water, then went back to the bait barrel and ate some more. Then the big bear came back, and the litle bear started making little moaning grunts that clearly said he was feeling sorry for himself for getting pushed off the feed pile by the big bear, but that he knew if he didn't he was gonna be in for an ass-kickin', so he vamoosed. I did get one pic of the bigger bear, but it seems I deleted it from my phone a few days ago so I can't show you here.

Eventually Barry came back and we rode home. Shooting light ends at about 10:40 pm up there. When we got back to the lodge, there was a big pot of delicious stew waiting, and home-baked bread, and all sorts of beverages. We ate a midnight supper. I told them about the bears I'd seen, and they laughed at my story of the little guy trying to climb up to see what the hell I was, stinkin' up his woods like that, but when I showed them the pic of the bigger bear, their eyes bugged out.

"You mean you didn't shoot him?" Cody asked, incredulous.

"Well, no," I explained. "Barry said they had to be taller than the barrel to be big enough to shoot."

"No," Barry laughed. "I said if you saw a bear as tall as the barrel, that would be a real shooter. Anything that comes more than halfway above the second line and the top of the barrel is probably shootable, if he's big enough around."

Well, we decided we'd keep this bear in our back pocket in case the bear they really had in mind for my first shooter didn't pan out. We'll get to that in the next isntallment of this here story.

TO BE CONTINUED