I travelled south of Wrangell Island last week with my friend Zack for an overnight trip to do some fishing and bear hunting and just to get out of town for a little while. I've discussed my personal view regarding bear hunting which, to briefly restate it, is that I am not an avid bear hunter but am willing to shoot a black bear in the spring for the meat and for the hide. I am not interested in shooting any bear I see nor am I interested in shooting a brown (grizzly) bear since the meat is typically not eaten. There is a healthy and prosperous population of both bear species here and the hunting of them is managed very well so I do not have any issues with the hunting of bears although I will admit I do find trophy hunting of any kind not for me.
Anyway, the first day of the trip was spent unsuccessfully trying to find some rockfish or ling cod while we let the day pass toward evening when the bears would be more likely to be out on the beaches eating the tender new growth of sedges and whatever other edible goodies that might be found once the tide ebbed. The fishing was surprisingly disappointing but the day was beautifully sunny with a few distant rain squalls keeping it real.
So, this photo is getting a little ahead of the story but I didn't want to lose anyone with too much reading! This bear is the key character in this particular experience so I will get to the point of this story.
After the beautiful but unsuccessful fishing day, we tied the boat to a mooring buoy in a bay called Frosty Bay located on the mainland about 10 miles south of the southern tip of Wrangell Island. There is a public Forest Service recreation cabin just to the left of the above photo which is the reason for the mooring buoy. This area is known for the numerous bears found here, both black and brown, and the large island just across narrow Ernest Sound from Frosty Bay has the highest concentration of brown bears in the Wrangell area. One of those distant rain squalls found us shortly after tying up in the bay so we spent and hour or more waiting for the unexpected heavy rain to either stop or at least slack to a drizzle while sitting in the comfort of a covered cabin cruiser playing cribbage. The rain eventually stopped so we decided to do a short walk down the old road system leading from the bay that is a somewhat overgrown remnant from logging operations that were done here 20 years ago or so. We didn't intend to go far or be gone for long so we only took our rifles and one inflatable life jacket with us as we rowed Zack's brand new inflatable Zodiac type raft to shore. We went up and looked in the cabin for any interesting things possibly left behind by previous users (none) before we took the short boardwalk trail to the road. We walked down the road for maybe 30 minutes mainly to see if there was any fresh bear scat on it to let us know if there were bears in the area but found none so went back to the cabin where Zack made a detour to the outhouse while I went down to the raft where it was pulled up on the low tide rocks. When I got to the raft, I looked into the head of the bay and saw a very big black bear down there searching the exposed tidal flat for anything edible. We did not have a lot of time left before nightfall which made us make the bad decision to not go back to the boat to properly gear up for stalking that bear. As I said earlier, we only had rifles with us and the rifle I had with me was more of a close range bear protection rifle rather than one I would use to shoot a bear at any distance over 30 yards or so. No binoculars, no range finder, no flashlights.
Hindsight right? We made our way down the beach as quickly as we could while not alerting the bear to our presence and eventually got to a spot where I doubted we could go further without being seen by the bear but where I felt comfortable shooting. We both guessed the bear to be about 200 yards away so Zack let me use his rifle which he said was dead on at 150 yards. I had a good shooting rest and the bear was standing broad side to us looking at something on the ground just below the edge of the forest. We both thought I got him on that first shot but the second shot was low as Zack saw the rock beneath him explode. We waited 15 minutes or so and then made our way over to where the bear had been to begin tracking him but found no blood anywhere, nothing until I found the rock where my first shot had hit beneath the bear as well. I was really disappointed and mad at myself, I couldn't believe I shot low twice! I'm typically a good shot, I had a good rest, I was calm when I shot, had plenty of time to shoot and was using a good rifle with a good scope that had just been sighted in recently. That is hunting sometimes, just not usually the stories hunters tell to elevate their hunting status. Failure is usually not as interesting as success. Admittedly though, it didn't break my heart to not kill that bear and knowing that I had two clean misses that did not wound him made me able to accept my defeat a little more easily. (If we would have found any blood at all or not found where both bullets hit the rocks, we would have looked for that bear until it was too dark to see and then come back again the next morning) We walked back to the boat sometimes on the shore, sometimes in the forest where it was almost too dark to see feeling disappointed. I also spent the walk back silently berating myself for not going back to the boat first to prepare properly and, as it turned out, a range finder would have dramatically changed the result of that hunt.
I was the first one of us to get to a spot where I could see the raft and could see without a doubt that it was no longer inflated. No longer inflated was a briefly optimistic thought that went through my mind before I accepted that it had been mauled by a bear. Not really just mauled, closer to destroyed. I knew that it wasn't the bear that we had just tried to shoot, that bear was in the opposite direction somewhere and would have had to pass by us to get to the raft. This was done by a different bear, a bear that had probably been in the area the entire time watching and listening to us. Kind of creepy knowing that this bear had most likely been in the forest nearby when we hiked up the trail to the road and back and when I walked down to the raft before spotting the black bear. Bears are very curious and have a taste for plastics, rubber, petroleum products, etc. I don't mean that they like the taste of them and eat them but the smells of these things attract them and seem to be too hard for them to resist inspecting. There are countless stories of bears chewing on plastic fuel containers, fuel lines for diesel cabin heaters, unattended kayaks and rafts left on beaches. This shiny new raft still smelled strongly of new rubber so was probably just too much for this bear to resist and it really tore it apart, no patch job for this raft.
Zack was not happy. The raft was brand new and cost him $1600 and was now reduced to a useless piece of rubber crumpled on the rocks with no sign of the vandal anywhere. Zack had a tag which allows him to hunt a brown bear so he vowed to shoot it if it showed itself again but our more immediate concern was getting to the boat which was only about 50 yards away but with 50 yards of cold, dark water between us and it. It was getting dark now so we had to do something soon, either decide to spend the night in the cabin or swim to the boat. I've had to swim for more than one boat in remote areas here so I volunteered to swim out and bring the boat to the shore to load up the limp shredded raft and Zack. After tying back up to the buoy and while I was putting on some dry, warm clothes, Zack vented and fumed a bit about his raft vowing to shoot any brown bear he saw. I was still mulling over my unsuccessful shooting so got out my range finder and picked a spot that I thought was about the same distance as the bear was when I shot. 325 yards! I got Zack to do the same thing and he got a distance of just over 300 yards which explains why I shot low both times. The bear was farther away than we realized which made me aim to low to correct for the bullet's drop at that distance. If we would have taken the time to go to the boat and get the range finder I have no doubt I would have some bear meat in the freezer right now.
The disappointing day ended and the next morning while we were drinking coffee, Zack spotted the brown bear in the above pictures come out of the forest and begin to make its way down the rocks to the exposed low tide beach. We felt pretty sure that this was the same bear that mauled the raft and sure enough, the bear went to the exact spot where the raft had been and began sniffing and moving rocks around. Zack's determination to shoot the bear that mauled his raft waned upon seeing this bear as she was not very big for a brown bear and seemed to be a young female probably 5 or 6 years old. She seemed to taunt us for over an hour as she mostly ignored us on the boat even when I blew on a deer call and blatantly started to loudly yell at her to try to get her to look at me so I could shoot her with my camera.
