Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Bowhunting Black Bear

The area I hunt has acorns that grow on bushes low to the ground rather than trees and are ripe in September. Each year it's a big deal waiting for those suckers to get ripe, lots of trips up in the mountains just picking berries, watching sign, and waiting for September magic time. The bears do the same, stomping through every week or so as the time approaches, and if you spend enough time scouting you begin to pattern particular bears. All of a sudden it arrives and within two weeks there are tracks everywhere but the bears hide during most of the daylight hours.

It's still hot so hunting near water isn't a bad idea. If they're near water they move from 5pm to 6pm pretty reliably going to water first then off to feed. It gets dark about 7:30 so that gives you some decent time to hunt every evening. Morning hunts is ambush between feeding areas and their beds. First you have to find their beds, trails, water, and feed, and put the pattern all together along with times and wind direction. Alot of things have to line up. I found a really good bear and waited at his bed for him one morning and missed him at 45 yards as he came bombing in behind me. I was watching forward of course. I was completely unnerved by his size and how dominant he came stomping in. He shook me up!

I tried again a week later and took my wife along, waiting at the same bed with no bear that morning. About 11 am we moved upslope and moved over 400 yards. I called using a combination woodpecker and deer fawn bleat. About 5 minutes later I see him sidehilling from the right up to us, right from where we just came from, circling downwind to get our scent. I got two shots at 60 and 80 yards. I did get a little blood this time and after trailing him for a half mile decided he was just clipped high on the back and was going to be just fine. I was really upset with myself for missing this guy two times and drawing blood. I almost punched my tag right there but my wife convinced me we needed the great meat and that bear wasn't fatally hit so keep going. If I had hit it hard I would have tagged and been done but she was right, we do love the meat. I caught the same bear on trail camera a week later so she was right.

I added a scope to my 358 carbine that had been open sighted and sighted it in on the way up the mountain one day. I had the load for it so it only took 6 shots to zero. This was a good combination and it shot hole for hole at 70 yards. I just wasn't able to focus on a 16" barreled carbine with iron sights and my eyes. As much as I wanted to hunt with an open sighted little carbine, I just couldn't shoot well enough.

I decided to leave the big bear alone for another week and hunt a long tall bear we had seen only the back half of. His tracks appeared bigger than all but the big one we had been hunting so we named him #2 and went after him. My neighbor got a bear tag and went with me and we watched a stretch of road on opposing corners where the bear had been crossing. He came up near me but caught my scent. This was the 2nd time he had come up to the edge of the brush along the road and busted me. We saw one bear in front of the truck that night on the way out that ran right up the road in front of the truck. Bill was thrilled, it was the first time he'd ever seen a bear in the wild. He couldn't quit talking about it.

I'd been having a lot of leg and foot pain from a pinched nerve in my back that put me down for a couple hours a day. That and bone on bone on my left knee and I was limited to about two miles a day walking in the mountains. I decided to quit acting like I was still 20 and outsmart this bear as close to where he crossed the two track road as possible to ensure I could get him out of the steep canyon country.

I would make a big aggressive hunt in the morning hiking, glassing, and calling and by mid day the left knee was really angry so I'd go for a ride on the quad for a couple hours to check sign and scout deer sign for this weekends blacktail opener. Always looking at bear slides and road crossings for timing and size of bears. About 4 pm I'd head back for the evening hunt. The road had enough slope I could shut off the machine and coast it in pretty quietly close to where I wanted to set up. That saved wear and tear on the sore knee. I had to be very quiet because this bear was bedding just a 100 yards or less below the road in a nasty salal thicket.

I didn't want to go down in there because the wind swirled and visibility was low. I am confident he would have come to a call but hunting alone I prefer not to get a bear in my lap without backup. If visibility had been 30 yards I would have tried it, but this bear needed to be left alone in his thicket and caught when he went out for the evening. I wasn't 100% sure he had water down there but I suspected he did and that would mean he'd cross the two track road about 6 oclock, after going to water and stretching, waking up from his nap.

He busted me one more time with the damned swirling wind. The next time I went up to hunt him he had started crossing at a real brushy piece of road 40 or 50 yards around the corner from where he had been crossing earlier. This told me that even though he knew I was hunting him, he didn't want to leave the area, and he still needed to cross that road to go to food. So I rode the quad about 3 miles around a ridge and found his track down in the bottom of the next canyon over. I glassed around and found some good acorn bushes on the opposing slope, which was about a mile from where he was bedding. Knowing they like to be in the food by 7pm at the latest, I figured I could catch this guy on top of the ridge, above the road I had been sitting, before he dove into the canyon where he was feeding, hopefully in good daylight with enough time left to process him before dark.

I headed back to his bedding area and coasted the quad down the mountain, stopping shorter this time to save on the noise. Loading up the pack and making sure I had a good flashlight, I hiked uphill to the ridgeline then south until I found his trail coming up from below. I was about 150 yards above the road where he had busted me three times in a row. Since he had moved over to the brushy ravine to cross the road, I left his trail and moved over about 40 yards so I could see the ravine real well. It was 4:30 pm.

My mind was alert and I was 80% hopeful I could catch him, but you always have doubts, that's why they call it hunting and not killing. Missing that big dude twice was heavy on my mind, working on my confidence as I sat there and waited. Would I miss again with the new scope setup? It was a tack driver with a scope on it, but you always wonder.

Right at 6pm with no warning, no bluejays squawking, no squirrels scolding, no twigs snapping, I see him coming up the hill on my left, right up the ravine. He had done exactly what I'd hoped and crossed at the brushy spot again and come straight up the hill about 60 yards over from his regular trail. I guess he hadn't heard me coast down in on him and he thought he was all alone. He was just off to my left about 25 yards broadside and moving along sniffing the ground and acting like his food was running away and he was going after it.

This was the first full look I'd had at him. He was a long legged bear and a long bear, but not heavy for his size, if that makes sense. I hesitated and was trying to decide whether to shoot or let this one go when all the work and effort of figuring him out came flooding back in. Deer season opened up next weekend so then my attention would be divided, making it harder to dedicate the time to figure out a bear. Also, I have friends, usually new hunters or people with alot less experience, that I like to help with their tags and having a deer and bear tag unfilled would take away from that, which is one of my big joys each fall. I didn't have a lot of time to ponder the meaning of life, so my instincts just kind of took over and I fired once at his chest. He jumped forward and began to run but by then I had racked the lever and shot again. He made it about 5 yards in all and went down. He let out that gawd awful death moan, twice no less, and laid still.

I sat there trying to get that sound out of my head and making sure he was really done. It really bothers me when they wail like that. They have such a tremendous will to live and are so strong they die hard. Like I said before, if I didn't love bear meat I'd photograph them instead.

When I cleaned him I discovered he had a broken canine tooth that was dark gray, and a healing abscess that broke through the skin on his lower jaw. He was nearly healed but had been suffering for most of the summer and I believe had not been able to put on the weight he should have. If he had not been handicapped by the injury I think he would have been 75 or 100 pounds heavier for his size. His meat was perfect and no odor or sign of anything off other than the scab on his jaw. I finished cutting him up today and it was some of the most beautiful dark red meat I've ever processed. It should be wonderful eating.

Since I was in a hurry to get done before dark and get him off the ridge I only took one photo in the waning light. Here's the little 358 carbine I hunted with irons until it got new glass I picked up here in the classifieds. I load it with 180 grain Barnes ttsx and TAC powder. A real shooter and it shoots flames and bullets! LOL





All cleaned up