A Glibertarians Exclusive: Bear at Fortymile II

September 3rd

Breathing.

My eyes snapped suddenly open in the pre-dawn dark.  I lay perfectly still, hardly daring to breathe myself.  The moon had set, and the tent was absolutely pitch black.

Breathing.

Not my own.  Outside the tent.

Softly, softly, I reached for the belt of my wool pants, which were lying alongside my sleeping bag.

A barely audible crunch; a footstep.  Something was outside the tent.

In the utter darkness, my fingers finally found the leather of the belt.  I felt along it until I came to the handle of my skinning knife.

Breathing.

I managed to unsheathe the knife and brought it up slowly to my chest.

Another slight crunch.  Then another, farther away.  I couldn’t hear the breathing anymore.  Whatever it was, it was moving away.

I lay in my sleeping bag, wide-awake until the sky grew bright enough to see.  Somehow, I managed to get dressed and crawled out of the tent.  My first action was to string my bow and nock an arrow, before having a close look around the camp.

My backpack still hung in the spruce; nothing was touched.  The ground around the tent was hard; I couldn’t find any sign other than a few spots of flattened grass.

Dilemma time.  Whatever I’d heard, it could have been a bear, it could have been a moose, it could have been anything.  I’m not one to take chances, though, when I’m alone in the wild.  I broke camp quickly, and moved about two miles down the Fortymile, closer to the pick-up point.  By ten o’clock, my camp was set back up on a dry hillside overlooking the river valley.

There was still a moose out there somewhere with my name on him.  So, after a bite to eat and some more coffee, I set out again.

I had crossed a small creek coming back down the river valley.  After consulting my maps, I decided to head that way.  It looked like the creek bottoms opened out upstream from the river into a semi-open area that should be good moose habitat.  And sure enough, it was.  Late afternoon found me sneaking through a boggy area along the creek, about two miles from my camp.

A fresh moose track invited me into the brushy, swampy stretch, with scrub willows a bit over head-high.  It took about two hours of patient tracking, step by step, but finally – about a hundred yards away – I spotted them, moose antlers raised briefly above the brush.

I worked my way in slowly, freezing whenever the bull raised his head, creeping forward when the antlers dropped out of view.  Another thirty minutes passed while I cautiously cut the intervening distance, yard by yard, step by step, eighty yards, forty, twenty.  The slight breeze was in my face, the rangy, wet-dog scent of the bull strong as I came to a spot fifteen yards away from the bull, his whole body now in view as he stood cropping twigs from a small willow.

Slowly, ever so slowly, I raised the longbow, came to full draw.  Sighted, the steel arrowhead on the bull’s chest.  As always at such moments, time seemed to slow to a crawl as the string slipped from my fingers; the arrow slid across the rest, floating, floating in a gentle arc to thwump between the bull’s ribs, leaving only the bright red and yellow fletching protruding.

The bull let out a bellow, and lurched out of the little hollow where he’d been feeding.  I froze, listening as the crashing sounds of the moose retreating faded for a moment, then stopped.  I looked at my watch; I’d give him thirty minutes.  I sat down on a down log and pulled a sandwich out of my pack.

The activities of two buntings and a ptarmigan filled the half-hour.  When the time was up, I followed a faint blood trail in the failing light, about three hundred yards to where the bull had piled up and died in a small clearing.

I stood for a few minutes, just looking.  There’s always that moment of mixed feelings just after a kill, elation tinged with regret, excitement, a touch of sorrow, anticipation, all sorts of things all kind of mixed up together; I just stood there, enjoying the sensations, not wanting to rush anything.  He wasn’t a trophy bull by some people’s standards, but to me every animal is a trophy.  Still and all he was a nice bull, with a respectable set of broad, palmated antlers.

Finally I remembered the little digital camera I carried in a nylon pouch on my belt.  I laid my bow across the moose’s antlers and took a couple of pictures.

Now, the exciting part of the hunt was over, and it was time for the work to begin.  Field-dressing and quartering big game by the faint light of a battery-powered lantern isn’t much fun.  I’d done it before, but never anything as big as this.  My first moose wasn’t a trophy bull, his rack was middling average – but he probably weighed twice as much as any elk I’d ever killed.  It was past midnight by the time I had the bull dressed, the meat boned out, wrapped in cheesecloth and bagged up in six cloth meat bags.  I had more line in my butt pack, and I used it to hang the six meat bags from a big spruce that stood nearby.

It was well past midnight when I finished.  I headed for my camp, intending to start packing meat out the next day.  My watch read two thirty-four in the morning when I finally crawled into my sleeping bag and laid my head on my rolled up jacket, exhausted but very, very pleased.

 

September 4th

Morning came quickly, and the sun already high in the east when I finally woke up.  I could hear the faint breeze whispering over the nylon of the tent, and the calls of birds.  I lay there for a while, listening, enjoying the warmth of the sunshine heating the tent, until nature’s call drove me out into the chilly morning air.

A few clouds were coming in from the west, puffy, white fair-weather clouds.  I started a fire for coffee, munched on a bagel, and set about removing my backpack bag from the frame to pack moose meat to the pickup point downriver.  I suppose I set out for the kill site about a half-hour later.

From my map, I figured it was about five and a half miles from the kill site to the big gravel bar where Wayne Johnson would be picking me up at noon on the 7th.  Figure six trips with meat, one more for the antlers, I told myself.  Two today, two tomorrow, two the next day, get the horns out early on the 7th; if I can hold that schedule, it should work.

I wasn’t counting on Alaska.

The first trip went without incident.  I hiked easily to the kill site, unencumbered with anything but the light aluminum pack frame.  It was the work of ten minutes to lower one cheesecloth-covered, boned-out quarter from the tree and lash it tightly to the frame.  Getting the frame on my back with sixty pounds of meat on it was another story; I managed by propping the frame against a tree, sitting down to work my arms into the straps and fasten the belt, and using a stout stick to lever myself to my feet.  The four mile hike took over three hours with that load, but finally the first installment was hung in a spruce a hundred yards or so from the gravel spit, and I set out again.

When I arrived, sweating and tired, back at the kill site, the place was in chaos.

One of the meat bags, one that I hadn’t hung quite high enough, had been pulled down and dragged off.  A few yards away, the offal pile had been sorted through and some of it eaten; bits and pieces were strewn over a wide area.  And a large pile of droppings in the middle of it all proclaimed a bear, a big bear, maybe the same bear that had left the sign behind two miles upstream on the first day.

No weapon was all that came to mind.  I’d left even my bow behind, wanting to travel light.  I had my skinning knife at my belt, but it would be no more effective than a toothpick against a big grizzly.

OK, Nick, I remember thinking.  Move slowly.  Listen for anything moving.  Back slowly towards the tree.  Slowly, I took one step back, then another, back towards the big spruce where the moose meat hung like ripe fruit.

Almost five hours had passed since I’d picked up the first load of meat.  I stood for a while, leaning against the bole of the tree, trying to listen for a footfall, a noise, anything over the pounding of my heart.

Nothing.

Working quickly, I dropped another bag out of the tree and lashed it to the frame.  On an impulse, I tied the moose antlers on top of the meat; this bag was a good twenty pounds lighter than the first load I’d hauled out.  It seemed like an eternity, but finally I was up and moving, watching continually over my shoulder and singing, in a loud voice, anything I could think of.  I had no wish to take that bear by surprise if he was still in the area.

It was pushing dark by the time I got the second load to the pickup point and hung up.  By this time I had decided to move camp down to a big open bench just two hundred yards up the hillside from the gravel bar, and dark or not, I resolved to get that done yet that night.  A bit of snow was starting to spit from the sky by the time I had my camp relocated and set back up again, and it was well past midnight before I lay my exhausted, aching body down for the night.

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