I’ve had several close, and not too pleasant, experiences with grizzly/brown bears, but my scariest experience (and probably the scariest experience of my life), was an incident on Kodiak Island about 17 years ago.
My wife’s out of state uncle and I flew down to Kodiak for a two week deer hunt in October 2006. We ended up getting dropped off on the backside of a lagoon about a 45 minute flight from the town of Kodiak. We were the only ones there at that time and we quickly pitched a large camp to avoid the possibility of weather coming in and catching us by surprise. We had brought an electric bear fence, but it was only big enough to go around our 6 person Alaskan Guide Dome and XL vestibule, so the rest of our camp, which consisted of two large, cooking and just hanging out under, shelters were unprotected. It took us probably close to an hour to get things set up the way we wanted and pitching our tent up against the side of a hill for weather protection. Then, about 30 minutes later, we had a bear in camp. It was just an adolescent that was curious and decided that he, or she, would try and test us a little. The bear worked its way up to within about 15 yards of camp, and after multiple gun shots at its feet, yelling and rock throwing, it stopped behind a big log of driftwood. I told Dan that if it came any further to go ahead and shoot it, and aim for its head. Fortunately for us, and the bear, it put its two front feet on the log, then ended up turning around and meandering away.
Our camp just happened to be about 200 yards away from a stream that had a silver run, so we ended up seeing bears every day that would come in and fish at the mouth of the stream.
Fast forward about eight or nine days, and a plane flies in with a group of hunters, and they end up pitching camp about a mile or so, around and on the other side of the lagoon from us. We had already killed our limit of five deer (three for me, and Dan had filled the two tags that he had purchased), but we had hung them all from a meat pole, a couple miles from camp, in the area that we had killed them. We ended up spending the second to our last day, hauling meat into camp from that meat pole. That day we also watched, through the spotting scope, a couple of guys from the other camp, kill a deer, and and start breaking it down. As we were watching them, we could see a bear coming in on the hillside, heading directly towards them, but there was no way of warning them, because they were over a mile away from us. Fortunately, for them, they were able to get things cleaned up just in time and started packing the deer off the side of the mountain, as the bear came into their kill sight.
That evening we used our sat phone, to call our operator, and tell them that we were all ready to go for our pick up the next day. We were informed that there was a big storm coming in later that night, the remnants of a typhoon in the Pacific, that was expected to bring very heavy winds and a lot of rain. They told us that they would not be able to pick us up the next day, and that we should make sure that everything was button down tight in preparation for the storm. We spent the rest of that evening, staking everything down and taking the deer meat off of our makeshift meat pole, and wrapping it up in a tarp, then piling rocks on top, to keep any rainwater out.
The storm ended up rolling in at around 7 or 8 o’clock that night, and we spent the better part of the next three or four hours just trying to fall asleep. I can remember trying to talk to Dan, as we were laying in the tent, and the rain and wind being so fierce that I had to practically yell at him, even though he was laying right next to me.
I woke up the next morning at around 6 o’clock (it was still pitch black outside and lightly raining), to the sound of a bear breathing/huffing around our tent. I told Dan that we had a bear in camp, and we needed to move. We quickly got up, donned our rain gear and headlamps, and headed out to try and drive the bear out of camp. By the time we got outside of the tent, the bear was gone. We found that our meat pile had been shredded, and all of our deer meat was gone. By the time it got light enough out, we could see where the bear had taken all of our game bags up the side of a hill, that our tent was pitched up against, and had cached everything on top of the hill. You could see where the bear had ripped up the side of the hill where it was dragging the meat up to cache it.
While Dan covered me, I climbed up the side of the hill and threw all of the dirty, torn up game bags, back down onto the beach, then we quickly waded out into the lagoon and thru the meat out as far as we could, to get it as far away from camp as possible. My thought at the time was that the bear would eventually come back to find all of the meat gone, and it would leave as well. We then went ahead and called our transporter to tell them that we were still ready to go whenever they could come to pick us up, but that a bear had come in and took all of our meat the previous night.
That night, just before dark, two bears came in on the hillside looking for their meat cache. We contemplated killing them at that point, because they were only about 50 yards from camp, and there was still plenty of shooting light. They appeared very agitated about the whole situation, popping their jaws, and occasionally going back-and-forth down the side of the hill towards our camp, but not actually coming into camp. For this reason, I opted not to kill them, in the hopes that they would eventually just leave. We gathered up a bunch of driftwood to build a large fire, just in case they decided to come into camp, we could hopefully keep them out with a big bonfire.
Unfortunately, just after dark that night, the bears came in. We loaded a mountain of driftwood on top of the bonfire, but it made no difference whatsoever. The bears would split off and come at us from opposite directions while we would be back to back, firing our rifles at their feet, yelling at them, and throwing burning pieces of wood at them, but nothing worked. We had only brought two rifles on this hunt, and both had fixed scopes, and it was impossible to make out any definitive part of the bear, in the dark, looking through the scope of the rifle. We didn’t want to shoot one of them, not absolutely knowing that we could kill it, and we thought that having a wounded bear in camp would be much worse than not, so we only fired rounds into the gravel in front of them. This whole situation went on until almost 10 o’clock, when we decided that we couldn’t continue to waste ammunition, and figured that our best course of action was just to go into the tent, and hope that the bear fence would do its job and keep them out. We sat at the back of the tent, against the hillside, with our rifles locked and loaded and pointing in the direction that we could hear the bears. We figured that they wouldn’t come up and around the side of the hill, and down into our tent, so we thought that if they did come in, it would be in only one of three directions. The bears would fight and carry on right outside the tent, and we could occasionally hear them tearing up other parts of our camp, while we waited inside the tent, expecting them to come in at any moment. I remember telling Dan that, whatever happened and if this all went to shit, just to make sure and keep our rifles pointed away from each other, so that we didn’t end up shooting each other. This went on up until about 2 o’clock in the morning, and after about an hour or so, of not hearing them anymore, we started hearing gun fire from across the lagoon in the other camp. We were pretty wiped out from the last almost 24 hours of no sleep and having not had anything to eat, plus our adrenaline being pumped up for the last several hours, and we eventually just fell asleep.
We woke up the next morning to find our camp had been destroyed, but felt incredibly fortunate that they did not come into our tent. I went ahead and called our operator again to let him know that we were having serious problems with two bears, that we hadn’t had much sleep in the last couple days, and we didn’t know what to do at that point. He said that he would call the state troopers and for us to call him back in an hour, but that there was another storm coming in, and he would not be able to pick us up that day. Upon calling him back an hour later, he stated that the troopers said “it was the bears problem, and we needed to do whatever we had to, to deal with it, and be safe”.
We decided that it was probably time to take a hike and go meet our neighbors around the other side of the lagoon, to find out how they had fared the previous night. As it turned out, there were 7 of them in their camp, and the bears had also visited them, and taken two of their deer. Fortunately they had put all four deer back straps into a cooler, that the bears didn’t find and get to. We explained our experiences from the two previous nights, and we all came to an agreement, that we would spend that day, moving our camp over to their camp, so as to have more safety in numbers. That evening we all ate fresh grilled blacktail backstrap tacos, and after almost 2 days of not eating anything, I think that was one of the best meals I’ve ever had.
To be continued.
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