Welcome to the final article covering my Minnesota Black Bear hunt this past September. You will enjoy it.
“This is probably really stupid,” I said aloud to myself, standing at the edge of the trail. The rain poured down, soaking the forest and drenching my clothes. I shucked my shotgun’s pump back a little ways, inspecting the dull brass and red plastic casing of the magnum twelve-gauge slug in the chamber. Reassured I was loaded up, I stepped off the trail and into the Minnesotan woods.
For a touch over two weeks, I sat in the woods, chasing one of Northern Minnesota’s apex predators. When I wasn’t out in the stand, waiting for a Black Bear to take the bait, I spent my time writing. When I wasn’t writing, I spent my time reading Death in the Long Grass by Peter H. Capstick. Capstick’s book is a series of stories from his time as a Professional Hunter in Africa during the 1960s and 1970s. All of the stories discuss the various dangerous game on the Dark Continent, in particular the “man-killers.”
With my head full of stories about lions, leopards, and killer crocodiles, I sat in a blind just sixty yards from where I hoped a Bear would make an appearance. On one hand, I was aware that Black Bears are much less likely to attack me than their Western and Alaskan cousins, the Grizzly, Kodiak, and Polar Bears. On the other hand, I was also aware that if I was almost 8 feet tall and over 600 lbs of teeth, claws, muscle, and rage, I would consider a hairless ape a third my size as a snack or maybe minor inconvenience.
I couldn’t help but draw comparisons between Capstick’s stories in Africa and my experience in the Northwoods. The environment is wildly different, for sure. Where the Professional Hunter hunted in vast savannahs, I was sitting in a lush forest. There were, however, some similarities.
For one, the bugs. The African hunter deals with the vicious tsetse fly, the Minnesotan hunter contends with the 50+ species of the tenacious mosquitoes that inhabit the state. Methods of hunting can be similar as well. Hunting Bears and Leopards are very similar. Both are hunted over carefully placed baits from a blind close by.
In what turned out to be my final week of Bear hunting, I tried switching up blinds, bait composition, and even hunting methods. My bait and blind combinations were stretched across the hunting ground from East to West. Following the trails, the furthest East and Furthest West bait/blind combos were about two miles apart, with the middle bait not quite halfway between and a little further to the West.
I had seen only one Bear in a week and a half of hunting. When he snuck out of the woods, I first saw him in the corner of my peripheral vision. My first thought, in those first milliseconds of noticing the fuzzy, black shape, was that our neighbor’s Labrador Retriever had gotten loose. When I focused my eyes on the moving blob, I realized it was a small Bear.
Through my binoculars, I watched the Bear approach the bait. He was shorter than the 27 gallon trash bin containing the bait. I figured him to be only slightly larger than Calvin, who weighs around 60lbs, too small to justify shooting. Despite his small stature, the Bear had no trouble ripping through the bait, and he spent about fifteen minutes gorging himself.
While I watched the small bear, he suddenly looked up and back towards the way he came. Without waiting to see what was coming, the little guy scampered off into the woods. I got excited, figuring the cub scented a larger Bear on its way to the bait.
Nothing materialized, and I left the blind after it got too dark to see.
The next several days, I sat in a ground blind underneath an old deer stand that was too dilapidated to make use of. Even though my clothes were soaked in Permethrin, the mosquitoes found any bare patches of skin and even started ignoring the pesticides, landing on my pants, shirt, and even my face mask and biting through the cloth.
During the second night in that blind, I saw a grey shape slinking through the woods, down by the lake. Figuring it for a Coyote, I brought my rifle to bear on the canine as it trotted along. I thought that if I wasn’t having any success acquiring a Bear-skin rug, I could at least get a consolation Coyote. When I drew a bead on the canine with my rifle, I found myself looking at what was clearly a Timber Wolf. I let her make her way safely to the East.
The moon was in its New Moon phase, and the nights got dark quick. Even though hunting hours extended from one half hour before sunrise to one half hour after sunset, the night was pitch black almost as soon as the Sun disappeared over the trees. One of the nights walking back, with my headlamp illuminating the fifteen or so yards in front of me, I was startled to see a glowing orb running across the woods, just outside of the light beam.
I knew the glowing orb was an eye, but I didn’t know what the eye belonged to. The eye was moving fast and silent. Logically, I knew whatever is making noises in the deep-dark Minnesota woods is probably not a man-eating lion or leopard. My monkey brain, however, told me I couldn’t be too sure. Without much time to react, and with a head full of stories about man-destroying African game, I drew the .45 caliber Colt pistol from the holster on my hip.
Stuffed with over-pressured, hard-cast bullets specifically designed to defend against large, dangerous animals, the pistol tracked the eye in my hand. As the eye got closer and closer to me, I snicked the safety off. With a crash, the eye broke through the brush and onto the trail, just ten feet in front of me.
It was a Whitetail doe.
With my hear racing, I stood in the middle of the dark trail and watched the deer rapidly disappear again into the woods. Taking a deep breath, I flicked the safety back on and carefully replaced the pistol in my holster. Returning to the cabin, I fed my faithful guard dog, gave him some pets and scritches, then we both went to sleep.
The following day, I remained bear-less. I was given some late-day hope when a fox came to sniff around the bait. The fox hung around the meadow I was watching for over an hour before suddenly growing agitated and hustling away from the forest edge and towards my stand. Every couple of yards, the fox turned around to bark at the woods, then hustle closer to me and repeating the bark.
I thought a Bear was coming for sure, because the fox had been completely unbothered by the trio of raccoons fattening themselves on my bait. Barely daring to breathe, I waited and waited until darkness set in and I couldn’t hunt any longer.
The next day, a thunder storm slammed into the woods. I sat in the cabin, writing, reading, and talking to my dog until I couldn’t stand it any longer.
Picking up my shotgun and strapping on my pistol, I set out into the rain-soaked forest to see if I could stumble across a bear hunkering down against the rain. After making sure the shotgun was loaded with magnum slugs and stepping off the trail and into the woods, I picked my way slowly through the woods.
Maybe two minutes after stepping off the trail, and before I reached the point in the woods were I wanted to start my push, I was alarmed by a machinegun sound erupting from mere inches in front of me. A ruffed grouse exploded from cover when I nearly stepped on it, flying nimbly through the woods and leaving me standing there with my heart pounding up into my throat.
I stepped forward two or three steps, then stopped to look, listen, and smell my surroundings. No Bears, two steps, look, listen, smell. Moving this way, it took me a half-hour to cover two hundred yards, spooking the grouse up again, this time with a second joining her.
Within minutes, my clothes were soaked through, the boonie cap on my head barely keeping the rain out of my eyes. My boots stayed surprisingly dry for a surprisingly long time, especially considering these boots are the first pair of boots the Air Force ever issued me, making them over sixteen years old. Eventually, even my socks were wet under my boots.
My hope was that I would scare a Bear out of its hidey-hole, close enough that I could draw a bead on it but not so close that I was within claw-reach. It took me over three hours to pick my way slowly through the woods, but aside from the grouse I spooked up early in my drive, I saw no animals bear or otherwise.
I slogged my way back to the cabin, this time using the trail. Tired, soaked, and discouraged, I grumbled to myself how stupid it was to stomp through the woods in a rain storm. As annoyed as I was, I knew I couldn’t have sat in the cabin all day, wasting one of my last hunting days.
On the way back to the cabin, a quartet of turkeys busted out of the woods and onto the trail, squawking and clucking at me. They mocked me as they ran down the trail, and back into the woods. I returned to the cabin, and after one more Bear-less day I returned home.
That’s it. That’s the whole story. If you enjoyed, SMASH those like and subscribe buttons and go to the shop to buy a book.