A whole lot of nothing. About 3 hours of nothing to be exact, and then,………..
a skunk.
That’s right, a squatty, waddling, butt scratching, bait stealing skunk. I watched that skunk steal the bear bait and scratch his butt for well over 30 minutes. In hindsight, that butt-scratching skunk probably saved my trip. He was calming. Watching his bait stealing and butt scratching, I think, allowed me to conquer the greatest enemy I have and had yet encountered in the bear stand and in life….
myself.
The man in the mirror. As I was quietly sitting there watching ole’ butt-scratcher and contemplating how I was going to stay awake on the late night return trip the following night, it happened. A ‘non-sow with cubs’ bear showed up silently out of the trees.
It stopped, looked right at me, turned around and left.
I didn’t think that I could feel lower than I had felt the previous friday, I was wrong. I was terribly, terribly wrong. I had another bear in front of me and it busted me in my stand.
I didn’t move, I didn’t blink, I was a statue, and it still busted me. I was bear camp taboo. There was nothing else to do but sit and wait and try to pick my head up. At this point I had to decide how the rest of this trip was going to go, I decided that, you never know, maybe another one will come in, but another one didn’t come in. Fifteen minutes later, the same one came back, cleared the trees, looked right at me again, turned around and left…..
AGAIN!
This was different though. As I watched her this time she just crept about 10 yards up the trail, stopped, and sat down. I could see her shadow through the undercover, so I readied myself. Between her and the bait pile was a denser patch of scrub that if she came back I would have the opportunity to raise my gun. It didn’t take her 15 minutes this time, it took about 10, and when she passed that scrub, i shouldered my gun, and with the ‘learn from your mistakes knowledge’ from a week prior I held high on her shoulder, and this time when it looked up at me, I returned the stare with a wink, one eye closed and one eye in the scope. As I squeezed the trigger I strained to not flinch and to keep me eyes on the ‘x’ and I could see the impact and knew that it was a pretty good hit.
Expecting that bear to drop in its tracks, the roller coaster of emotions continued as she turned and bolted, just as the one a week earlier had done, and as Yogi Berra said:
“It was de ja vu all over again”.
I sent a text to the guys waiting and told them I hit one, I would wait for 10 minutes and then proceed to look for blood. OK, it was more like 6 minutes. As I approached the spot where it last stood something was different than the week before and from my partners kill the night before. There was blood, and lots of it, the old 30-06 had done a wonderful job of a through and through producing an exit for blood. I went a short distance out of the bait clearing and followed the apparent trail for about 20 yards.
Twenty yards for us flatlanders out here on the prairie is nothing, a joke. Twenty yards in these cedar and pine woods and cedar swamp is an eternity, especially for this flatlander. I conceded that I should return to the bait pile clearing and wait for the rest of the party……..
and wait
and wait
and wait.
They finally arrived and I showed our host the blood splatter and he just got a big grin. He knew already what I did not, we were looking at the remains of what would be a dead bear. I took them to my position of ‘Last blood” and the search was on, the search was not on for long. The 30-06 on its path had destroyed both lungs and that bear was basically dead on its feet, running on adrenaline, like I had been running on adrenaline for about a week.
