HiBC said:
jgcoastie,I am interested,What is your up close and personal experience killing a bear in Alaska that was in the process of hurting someone?
Us outsiders would be thrilled to hear how you did it.
I don't think I've shared this experience with TFL'ers, and this is as good an excuse as any, since you're not being sarcastic or condescending about it...
I went as a backup for a buddy of mine a couple of years ago. He wanted to kill a Kodiak Coastal Brown Bear with a curved stick, string, and straight stick with a pointy end (bow & arrow, I'm not a fan, BTW). He's not completely retarded, so he asked me and Uncle Jesse (my nickname for the 1895STP, .45/70, I carried at the time) to tag along for the hunt. Naturally, I'm not one to pass up on a free ticket to the interior of the island, so I went.
We took a charter boat down to Deadman's Bay, an area I had deer hunted and was familiar with. I'd taken several deer there and had seen some decent sized bear tracks in the area. We camped along a stream running through a valley kinda towards the east of the end of the bay.
Anyhow, we'd been there for two days and had not seen any fresh-ish sign of bears where we were, so we eased further inland, kinda towards where Old Harbor is on the far east side of the island from where we were. We went over a couple of steep ranges, y'all might call them mountains down in the Lower 48... After we cleared the ridges and came down the other side, there was another valley with a decent sized lake on it. The lake had a few streams running in and out of it, so we set up cold camp alongside the one we were following down when we were about halfway down the backside of the ridge.
The next morning, we woke up and started glassing the valley. Saw a couple of decent sized bears, so we went down to get a closer look. After Jim had selected "his" bear from the two we could see, we started stalking over towards him. After Jim had gotten set up in a good spot behind a salmonberry bush about 50yds from the bear, I set up about 5-10 yds to his
left right and we waited.
After a couple of hours, the bear started making his way towards us at kind of an angle. When he ambled to within about 30yds, Jim released his arrow. The bear just kinda stood there for a second, then started walking around in wide circles. Jim had hit him in the lungs, a fatal shot, but the bear just didn't realize it yet. Well, when Jim stood up to get a better look at what the bear was doing, the bear saw him, laid his ears back, and started charging.
I had held my rifle at the ready in case something had happened, and I'm glad I did. I fired one shot, the 405gr JFN Buffalo Bore slug hit the bear just slightly above his left eye, and exited at the back of the skull. The bear dropped, graveyard dead where he lay.
After we skinned the bear, we rolled the hide and packed it in Jim's frame pack. I pulled out my maps, because I wanted to see if we could get to shore easier than the way we had come. I figured we could just follow the stream at the south end of the lake, but I wanted to double-check just to be sure. That south stream indeed was the quickest and best way out, so we started our trek down to the beach. I called the charter captain and gave him our new pick-up position, and then we set up camp on the beach.
Next afternoon, we were back in Kodiak getting Jim's hide sealed at the ADF&G office.
I guess I could have summed up that story into something a lot shorter, but I kinda wanted to paint a picture of the trip for you.