I conducted foot salmon surveys all over Alaska for the Alaska Department of Fish & Game Commercial Fisheries Division. There are lot’s of bears on salmon streams. I carried my own 375 H&H magnum Sako full stock carbine or the Department issued 870 Remington twelve gauge buck barreled shotgun with slugs. Did the mandatory charging bear target every time it was available. Never fired a shot on the job, at a bear, never had to, never wanted to shoot a bear. I did have to chamber around many times. I made myself as big as I could, from my six foot, one and a half inch, two hundred, twenty pound frame. I also talked to them in a loud, stern and as calm a voice that I could manage. I also counted salmon from the back seat of Super Cub aircraft, which was more dangerous in my mind. Flying low and slow kills more people in Alaska each year than bears do. Both jobs were extremely intense work that fed a appetite of a young adrenaline Junkie. Once our rural area had a bear breaking into chicken houses, barns and dog food sheds of dog mushers and eating domestic animal food. It followed me out once while I was feeding my horses. My wife was afraid to let our young children play outside. The common thought in the neighborhood was it was a garbage black bear that had hit the mother lode of good eats. One evening in late August, as the sun was setting, I walked out to the hay shed to get hay for the last feeding of the horses. As I approached the hay shed a dark bear walked into my driveway as though it was coming for a visit. As we all know, all bears are big in the dark and there are no small live bears. This guy was pretty big, I slipped back to the house, got my 375 H&H Magnum, loaded it with 300 grain Barnes copper bullets, then tiptoe’d back towards the hay shed. Out of the hay shed stepped the bear looked at me the slowly walked away. I gave him a Texas heart shot that cartwheeled him across the driveway it then staggered away into the ditch then into the encroaching alders. My neighbor came over with a half dead flash light and his short barreled shotgun. We formed a skirmish line, advancing slowly for thirty feet. There was the dead bear, but in the light of the dim flash light, it went from a black bear to the darkest of grizzly bears. The next day at the Fish & Game necropsy the bear weight was 503 lbs without blood, was extremely skinny with no fat and a mostly healed fracture of the right forearm. One of the bear biologists, John Hecktel was ecstatic that he finally had a complete Grizzly bear skeleton with no broken bones from bullets.
Moral of the story: I never wanted to shoot a bear, I have never shot another and hope I never have to again.
I only hunt grouse now in my dotage and shoot the occasional pine squirrel that wants to move into my house. Shooting a moose is just to much work for a old man.
