“Alright cub scout, close your eyes and hold out your hand.”
I heard cabinet hinges squeak open and Frank rustling through some clutter above his reloading bench. It was evening in late July and we were in his garage. The overhead doors were open, and a drop of sweat slid down my temple and curled around my jawbone. A moth bumped into the lightbulb that dangled from the ceiling by my head. My eyes still closed, I counted four bumps, and still Frank was shuffling around.
I’d come over to pick up something—the one thing he said I must have for my upcoming bear hunt. But what? A map of his property in Maine? That would be useful. I’d never been up there before. Maybe a key to the cabin? That would be more comfortable than spending a week sleeping in the bed of my truck. Unless there were mice in the cabin. I thought about it for a second. The moth kept bumping the light. There would definitely be mice.
Then a darker thought wriggled into my mind. Maybe Frank was looking for a first aid kit, one with a tourniquet and those new sponges that have the blood-clotting compound already soaked inside. I wasn’t exactly afraid of hunting bears by myself, but as the hunt approached, the thought of tackling dangerous game—even the mildest—had evolved from a daydream into a stark impending reality.
Frank walked out of the garage through the door to his basement. The fridge door swung and I heard a bottle top whoosh open. This was too much. My right eyelid opened a crack.
“Do you want to just tell me what you’re about to put in my hand?” I asked. “It might be easier.”
I heard lips smacking, several steps, and then felt something small and heavy drop into my palm.
“Okay. Open.”
As my eyes adjusted I saw Frank’s broad grin stretched beneath the waxed moustache.
“Two-hundred-and-twenty-grain Nosler Partition,” he said. “That’s your Northwoods bear medicine.”
I rolled the bullet between my thumb and forefinger and held it up to the light. It was 30 caliber, but the copper-jacketed bullet was much longer and blunter than any I had ever loaded in my 30-’06.
“This bullet doesn’t have a point,” I said, rubbing the tip. “This thing looks like it will fly as far as a musket ball.”
“Al, you’ve been spending too much time on those long-range message boards,” Frank said. “You’re not hunting Dall sheep in the Alaska Range. You’re after black bears in Maine. The bullet should be slow and heavy. As for the nose, that semi-spitzer point will cut the brush like a Stihl 250. What do you have loaded now?”
“I’ve been shooting 150-grain Silvertips,” I said. “I killed my eight-pointer with them last year.”
“That’s a good bullet for knocking over November deer in a field of cut corn,” said Frank. “But in Maine in the early season, it’s rare to see a clear shot at a bear unless he’s treed over a pack of hounds. Since you’re hunting over bait, you can’t expect that. Chances are, you’ll have to shoot though some grass or light brush. If you try to do that with spitzers, you’ll be lucky if the bullet lands in the same county.”
He pulled the black-and-gold box of bullets out of his pocket and handed it to me.
“Thanks Frank,” I said. “I’ll load some rounds and see how Old Betsy handles them.”
He cocked an eye at me, “Who or what is Old Betsy?”
“That’s my ’aught-six. You know it, the Model 70. I watched Daniel Boone reruns last week on TV. Kind of catchy right?”
Frank’s eyes goggled like a trout, not trying to conceal the underlying disdain.
“Don’t you remember—Fess Parker?” I said. “Old Betsy is what he calls….” Frank put his hand up.
“How about I pretend I never heard that coonskin blather. Instead, let me tell you something about the camp in Houlton where you’ll be hunting. Do you know the street name? Good. Thanks to the Democrats, the place has an address for tax purposes, but that won’t help you because there are no numbers on the cabin. MapQuest will get you to the general area and then you eyeball it the rest of the way.” He paused mid-sentence to take another long draw on his bottle of Labatts and then he continued.
“Lucky for you the cabin isn’t hard to see. It’s square and rough with a red roof, and there’s a sign above the door that says, ‘Bear Paw.’ See that and you’re in the right spot. I’ll try and get you a key,” he paused to shake the last frothy dregs into his mouth, then beckoned me outside the open garage into the driveway.
The floodlights clicked on as we left the garage. Frank crouched down and swept away some gravel with the side of his hand.
“Here’s the camp,” he drew a box in the dirt with his finger. “There’s a trail about a quarter-mile long that cuts through the spruce woods into a big clear-cut. At the far end of the cut there’s a beaver pond. That’s where the bears like to hang out.”
He stood up and dusted his hands off his pants. “Put your bait around there and don’t be cute. Hang your stand so the shooting lane is perpendicular to the wind. And don’t be afraid to set up sixty or seventy yards away from the bait. You’re not bowhunting, so you don’t need to be in halitosis range.”
“Thanks Frank. I don’t know how to thank you.”
“Then don’t. Just go out and enjoy yourself. It’s been a while since anyone pulled something bigger than a woodcock out of that camp. No one has tried either, so the bears should be stupid. I’m excited to see how you do.”
A month later, I was white-knuckle gripping the sides of my climbing tree stand. Frank hadn’t mentioned that most of the trees up there were either too skinny to climb or had so many bottom branches that it wasn’t worth trying. My only choice had been this little lighting-killed maple in the middle of the clear-cut. I was only 15 feet high, but a stiff alternating breeze caused the little tree to swing like a mizzenmast in a squall. For a while my intestines were like worms squirming as the bottom of a coffee can.
When the wind slackened enough for me reach equilibrium, I noticed the clear-cut was a sea of wild raspberry bushes rimmed by evergreens on three sides and the beaver swamp 75 yards to my front. The bushes were stripped bare and all around were piles of seedy scat. Near the swamp stood a thicket of birch saplings. That’s where I had placed 50 pounds of doughnuts and dried dogfood the night before. The breeze swept the little trees back and forth like metronomes. The gusting neutralized my ears as hunting tools, but at least it kept the bugs from biting.
I pulled the brim of my cap low on my face to protect my eyes from the blazing afternoon sun. Betsy lay across the safety bar, a 220-grain Nosler Partition kissing the oiled rifling from inside the chamber. Four like it were queued up in the magazine. I was ready, but nothing much was happening.
A pattern emerged that afternoon: I would nap a bit, awake with a start, straighten up in the stand to look for game, then slump back and repeat.
Finally, the sun began to slide behind the evergreens. The air stilled as the light drew away, and the sounds of the forest melded with the dusk. Sight gave way to sound. A beaver slapped its tail. A coyote whined. A bullfrog loosed a series long, crude notes from the swamp.
The sounds quickened my hunter’s instincts. I leaned forward and turned Betsy’s scope upright, hooking the leather sling on my off forearm. My senses were tense, but not strained.
Suddenly a rustling. It was close—just to my left at the edge of the clear-cut. In my conceit, I figured whatever made the noise couldn’t be a bear because a bear would go to my bait. It was probably something smaller—a fox or fisher cat.
The rustling persisted. Whatever made it was moving quickly through the clear-cut and getting closer. I looked down and saw a flash of black fur, drifting like smoke through the bushes. The sound moved behind me. I tucked the butt of the rifle into my side, fingers purple and on the pistol grip. The safety was still on. There was no need to get hasty—yet.
The beast scratched the trunk of my tree and started panting like a big dehydrated retriever. It snuffled the bark and popped its jaws. This was no fisher cat. Confirmation came when it rounded the base of the tree, and I craned my neck down for a peek.
I wondered if I should take him, it was probably a male; there were no cubs in sight. There was still enough light to shoot, but barely. The thought occurred to me: What if I shot and wounded him? I nervously touched the outside of my pocket and felt the hard outline of the Energizer headlamp. I didn’t want to have to use it for tracking, so I decided to let this bear go.
Then the brute gripped the trunk with his claws and rippled his way up the tree. In two bounds, his face was six inches from my boots on the bottom platform. I contorted my upper body to stare into the little piggish eyes. His ears were pinned back, and his head floated from side to side, sizing me up from different angles. A shaft of twilight caught in his eyes so they glowed green. He woofed, and I inhaled a warm cloud like stale malt liquor and raspberry preserves. He was drunk on raspberries, something a few of the old timers say can happen, but I had never believed. I’d have been amused if I hadn’t simultaneously glimpsed the canines, gleaming white and wet.
Without having a moment to rationally think it over, my mind changed. I would take this bear. But he was so close that I didn’t even have room to swing the rifle and shoot him in the face.
Then the thought occurred to me: Who could say that the sudden movement wouldn’t provoke an attack?
Inexperienced and frightened as I was, I knew he wasn’t a big bear. Then again, any bear that survived its first winter is strong enough to claw me into 200 pounds of Italian sausage.
The bear continued to grip the blackened bark of the maple, panting his hot, sour breath. I kept as rigid as I could, by now persuaded that any movement might mean a mauling—or worse. I tried to regulate my breath, which shuddered out of my mouth like exhaust from an old muffler. My thumb pressed against Betsy’s wing safety, forefinger sliding around the outside of the trigger guard, ready for sudden action.
The bear’s ears twitched; there was a little notch cut out of the right one. As the last of the twilight seeped away, the green glow drained out of his eyes. Soon, it would be illegal for me to shoot him—unless….
Something happened. By nervous accident, my thumb pushed the safety off with a loud double click. The bear woofed again and scurried down the tree with much panting and crackling of bark. Once on the ground, he bee-lined out of the clear-cut toward the woods the way he came. Betsy snapped to my shoulder. I wanted to take a quick shot, but the bear was too fast.
Then he made a mistake.
Maybe 40 yards from the obscuring blackness of the woods, the bear stopped, hopped on a stump and looked back at me. The rifle banged, and the bear tumbled off the stump. The bolt cycled by instinct, twirling the spent case into the bushes below.
The drama wasn’t done. Somehow, having just been bowled over with 220 grains of hot lead and gilding metal, the bear regained his feet and galloped toward the woods. If he made it to the trees, finding him would become much more complicated.
I tried to track the blur, but the scope’s crosshairs dissolved into the darkness. There was only the swishing of the bushes as he plowed over them. Cold fear squeezed me hard around the gut. Would he get away? Would I have to follow him?
“Oh, let him die,” I pleaded out loud. “Please Lord, let his lungs burst and let him die.”
The bear’s frantic dash carried a little farther, then the sound of movement stopped. Blackness and silence had dropped like a pall over the woods. I lowered the rifle. My ears strained but detected nothing. There were no sounds: no owls, no frogs, no crickets. There was only the soft beat of blood pounding in the back of my skull. Da-dump. Da-dump. Da-dump.
I tried to calm down. Maybe God had heard my prayer, I thought. Maybe the bear was crumpled up in a neat pile waiting for me to take pictures and never, ever mention how scared I am right now.
A cold wind cut through my shirt into my soul. Now I was positive I had pulled the shot into the bear’s guts. The little brute had made it into the woods where he was padding soundlessly over the soft spruce needles, looking for a thorny patch to ambush his tormentor. That was it. He was going crazy with pain and hate. I couldn’t blame him. This wasn’t his fault. It was my fault for catching a wild hair and gallivanting off to Maine on my own.
I thought about what to do next. I could wait until morning to follow him. That way, he might be a good sport and die in the night. Yes, he would die—a slow, agonizing death. The bacteria would seep out of the holes I had punched in his intestines, poison his blood and choke the life out of him. That would take six hours at least, probably longer. Some way to die.
I couldn’t let it happen that way. I would follow him with the headlamp in the darkness with the safety off and the Bushnell cranked down to 3X. I would creep along, hoping and praying to deliver the finisher before he got a chance to get on me. He’d snarl, rush, then bite me low on the body. Once he got a hold, it would be nothing for him to snap my femur like a chicken bone.
These slimy, evil thoughts slithered through my head like eels caught in a weir. I don’t know how long they lasted. Probably only a minute or two. The dry smell of burnt gunpowder was still floating around my nostrils when a low, mournful wail rippled through the night. A cool bucket of cold relief washed over me. I whooped for joy.
The tension lifted from the air and night noises started up again. Maybe they had been there all along, but I had been too scared to hear them. With trembling fingers, I depressed the button under the action to drop the floorplate. The shells tumbled into the bushes below with soft thuds. I cursed, and very slowly worked the bolt handle to retrieve the chamber load. It was another few minutes before I felt composed enough to climb down the tree.
The blood was ample and easy. The bear lay crumpled up fewer than 30 yards from where I had shot him. The bluish light from the headlamp painted the body up and down. He looked dead all right, dead and small. The eyes, so curious and luminescent in life, were now as two glass marbles—milky and dull.
I ran my fingers through the coat. The hair was coarse and painted garishly with sticky red blood. The teeth and claws were the only body parts that hadn’t shrunk. They looked large and out of proportion with the rest of the body. The front claws interested me. They were long, almost two inches, and curved like fishhooks—powerful weapons I was glad I hadn’t confronted.
Soon, I got down to work, removing the innards and doing my best to respect the life I had taken. The Nosler bullet had performed perfectly, passing through, destroying both lungs and exploding the heart in the process. I wondered how the bear had managed to run at all after the shot.
The carcass didn’t weigh too much, maybe 100 pounds, and I was able to carry it back to camp in my arms with Betsy slung behind. I would return for the tree stand the next day.
Back at camp, I peppered the hide with the restaurant-sized cayenne shaker brought along for this purpose. An old-timer told me this keeps the flies away. Using the truck’s headlights for illumination, I rigged a makeshift pulley by looping a rope around the bottom branch of a birch tree in camp. I tied one end of the rope around the bear’s head and muscled the body off the ground. The other end of the rope was fastened to the cabin’s door handle. With this finished, the bear swung eerily by the neck, the shriveled tongue clamped rigidly in one corner of the mouth.
The next day, I brought the bear to the check station in Houlton, one of those do-it-all variety stores you find all over rural America. A clerk greeted me when I walked in from behind the deli counter. I told her about my bear, and she led me out back to where the bear lay in the bed of my truck.
“Oh he’s a little one,” she said. “You probably shot him for the meat. They taste a little better before they get old enough to breed.”
My stomach twisted a little in shame as I watched her pencil my name in a ledger. She cut a slit in the bear’s ear and attached a white tag that had a confirmation number in raised block letters.
I skinned him out back at camp then drove a few hours south to a butcher in Winslow. After, I crossed the Kennebec to the taxidermist in Waterville. I would get the skull bleached and the skin made into a rug. Then I made a phone call.
“You got a small bear,” Frank told me. “Once the hide is tanned and stitched, you may have something to stretch over a toilet seat, but do pay the extra fifty bucks to have his mouth done.”
“Why?” I mean if it’s a small bear….
“Just pay the extra 50—don’t go cheapskate. You gotta have the bear’s mouth open on the rug. That way your little Boo-Boo will at least look like he might have scared you.”
