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Chapter Bears I Have Known

Handsomely furred but too small for a trophy, this sow Alaskan brown bear strolled down an Admiralty
Island creek with no fear of man - and she could have caused trouble because we discovered that her cubs
had wandered into the bushes BEHIND us!

SIX FAT Alaskan blacks nosed out onto the sedge flat that evening, but only the last one fulfilled my requirements for a
perfect hide, unblemished by any rubbed spot. I dropped into a little tidal creek, eased along behind its low bank to
where the bear should cross some fifty yards out and flopped across the bank edge into a murderously steady shooting
position. At just the right moment, the scope crosshairs settled on the black's near shoulder, and a finishing trigger
squeeze sent a 270 bullet smack into his shiny hide.

Guide Ralph Young snickered behind me. "What gives here? Missing at fifty yards?" And I could only stand
open-mouthed, hardly thinking to jack in a fresh round.

For that medium-sized black had reacted as if the crack of the rifle had been only the pop of a starter's pistol. Hardly
flinching at the impact of a 130-grain Remington Pointed Core-lokt hitting him at roughly 3,000 feet per second, he had
started a mad race across the muddy flat. Fully forty yards he sprinted at top speed, the right foreleg swinging free from
the smashed shoulder, before piling into a dead black heap. The bullet had broken major bone, had mashed to pulp the
heart and forward lung area, yet the black bear had not gone down at all, had first reacted only in a blind sprint of
escape.

That experience is not unique. Repeatedly I have seen black bears of very ordinary size but apparently extraordinary
toughness that showed less tendency to collapse at a square hit than did Alaskan brown bears or grizzlies similarly hit
by slugs only relatively heavier, faster, or harder driving. In some ways the black seems tougher for his weight - not
more dangerous, since unlike the grizzly tribe he will never charge save perhaps to fight his way through dogs or out of
a penned-in corner - but harder to anchor with one shot from rifles logically well suited to his size.

If we go back no further than 1949, during three trips to the Alaskan coastal areas where bears big and small abound, I
have taken eight blacks. That's counting as black bears the two rare glacier bears collected in May of 1952, since they
are blacks in every respect save their odd blue hides. At least three did not drop at the first hit however well placed.
Friends along on those hunts have taken as many more with much the same results. Always we were primarily after
bigger trophies than black bears, yet on and after every trip occurred campfire gabfests about the peculiar rubber-ball
resiliency of the black.

Up in the Yakutat last spring, top guide Ralph Young and I were chewing over just that point when a really fine black
wandered out onto the rock slide we'd been watching. The shot was an extraordinarily long one for Alaskan coastal
hunting, way over three hundred yards where the average is closer to one hundred, on the salmon creeks even less. But
for once, I figured, if I laid the bullet in there at all well the black would need no finisher, because once started tumbling
down that slide he'd break his ornery neck! The slug from my 7-mm Mashburn Short Magnum, as we later discovered in
the autopsy, smashed his spine; yet that black, after tumbling ears over tail for a hundred and fifty yards straight down
broken slide rock, still had gumption left to try to make some covering alders by foreleg power alone. He was a big one,
true, but he had no business being so tough, a mere black bear - or had he?

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The Alaska-side blacks, bear for bear seen, have it all over the bruins prowling the woods of the United States for size,
generally speaking. There's far greater likelihood of killing a blackie worthy of entry in the Boone and Crockett Club
records, which is to say one with a skull measuring over 12 inches long without the lower jaw and 8 inches across after
cleaning and drying, in one or two trips up on those Alaskan islands than there would be in two dozen hunts in this
country. Furthermore, many of the blacks highly publicized down here actually weigh only half or two-thirds the printed
guess-weights. But even stateside blacks can on occasion be as hard to deflate as gum rubber balls. A pistol-making
friend of mine helped drag in a two-year-old in Maine last fall that had been smacked seven times with a 30-06, some
hits in vital portions of its anatomy, before giving up the ghost.

Black bear armament, however, varies less according to size of the trophy hunted, since after all there are occasional
whopper members of the Euarctos Americanus family found even in the densely populated states, than it does according
to local hunting techniques.

Warren Page and Ralph Young, his guide on three Alaskan bear hunts, watch a glacial wash in the Yakutat
wilderness, ready for bear.

Up and down the Alleghenies, from New Hampshire to Georgia and Alabama, the laws of most states permit running
bears with hounds. In the Blue Ridge counties of the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Kentucky, packs related to the Plott
hounds have been bred to the task for years, big-boned dogs with trail stamina and keen scenting ability, plus the
combativeness needed to hold a black for following hunters. Elsewhere the packs are conglomerations of a few hounds
for trailing and two or three scrappers with a strong Airedale strain for holding. In the dense laurel thickets of the high
ridges and down in the coastal swamps of Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina, the usual technique calls for spotting
guns on stands along the anticipated route of the bear. The brush is thick, ranges short.

Common armament is a lever-action rifle, a semi-auto, or a slide action, in the 30-30 class, or in 35 Remington, 300
Savage, and the like. The heavy-bullet loads of blackpowder origins, like the 45-70 and 38-55, crop up often. But in the
real thick stuff into which bruin will dodge given half a chance, a bear hunter is well off indeed with a shotgun,
preferably a slide action or semi-auto, loaded with rifled slugs. Put a Williams or Redding peep sight or a Weaver K1 on
such a smoothbore and you have a murderous fifty-yard weapon, accurate enough for most seventy-five yard shots and
ruinous to a bear's anatomy. Buckshot is far more limited in range, and on a bear held at bay, scattering shot over the
landscape may mean injury to a prized hound.

The Maine, Michigan, Ontario, or New Brunswick whitetail hunter who tools his car home with a black bear draped over
the fender - an excellent method of ruining a trophy hide, by the way - usually picks up his bruin by a fortunate
accident, as the gravy on his venison. Finding a bear in the woods is a mean task. In Pennsylvania, where a considerable
kill on blacks is made each year, usually by groups of hunters that conduct organized drives through individual swamps
or ledgy areas in the laurels, I recall watching a deer hunter pussyfoot across a ridge clearing no more than a hundred
yards from where I was watching for a buck. Figuring he had ruined the prospects, I later moved up - and jumped a
black bear that had lain doggo within twenty yards of the other hunter's tracks. He dove into a thicket before I could
have shot, even had the bear season been open. Hence in the Eastern whitetail areas most blacks are killed with deer

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rifles, which means almost anything that will shoot.

When blacks are a strong possibility on a deer hunt, I personally would lean even more strongly away from the 25-35,
30-30, 32 Special, and their brethren, toward rifles chambering at least the 35 Remington or the 300 Savage, like the
Marlin 336 and Savage 99 lever guns, Remington's new slide action 760, or even Winchester's Model 71 in 348. The 308
WCF should be a good bet. Not that lesser cartridges won't kill bear, but a bullet of at least 180 grains and a muzzle
energy approaching 2,000 foot pounds will handle bruin more forcefully. As a 257 Roberts fan, you may like the
100-grain bullet for deer, but the 117-grain soft point is a better penetrater on bear every time. I have no quarrel with
the bolt-action rifleman who figures to bowl over a black with the heavier bullet loads he shoots from a 270, 7 mm,
30-06, or similar caliber in brush work on deer. Why plenty of bullet weight, you ask?

Because a bear's nervous system - any bear's - seems to be hooked up differently from that of a buck deer which may
weigh out almost as heavy. Superficial blasting wounds, however productive of what we loosely term shock, will not hold
him down even if they knock him down, and trailing a wounded bear, even a blackie so very unlikely to charge, is no
fun. He will take you into the roughest tangle of rocks and briars the country offers and travel miles doing it.

The best shot on any bear is the shoulder shot. Head shots are poor because they ruin the skull as a trophy, and much of
bruin's noggin is jaw and non-vital bone. Neck shots are chancy because there's so much loose hair and hide to fool you.
Gut shots are never either sporting or advisable; and a broadside lung area hit on a bear may, because of his great
vitality, permit considerable travel before he drowns in blood. One spring my rifle finished off a medium black bear that
had traveled a country mile after a cross-chest hit from a friend's hot-shot 280 Wildcat. That travel just might of course
be in your direction if the game is a grizzly or brownie. The diagonal shoulder hit that breaks the nigh shoulder before
smashing up the heart area, or that drives across the boiler works to crack up the off shoulder is always a better bet, the
only improvement being a transverse shoulder hit that completely breaks bruin down forward. Either means deep
penetration by bullets that will hold together even after impact on sizable bone.

Shooting bears over baits or off garbage piles has always seemed to me poor sport unless you're trying to get rid of a
camp nuisance; but it has also always seemed to me a good thing that so many bears shot in states like Wyoming and
Montana, usually killed over very dead horses that an enterprising outfitter has driven up into the mountains and
executed to save the trouble of burying them on the ranch, are killed with elk rifles. Every now and then a grizzly comes
to one of these baits, and even if the visitor is only a black, he probably shows up so near dark that he'd better be
anchored on the spot or he'll be lost before morning.

One more tale of black bear toughness might have you believing I hold the blacks as rough and rugged as the grizzly
tribe - but that isn't by any means so. This particular black was feeding along a Disenchantment Bay beach. On the
lookout for a big brownie, and armed with a wild-catted version of the 375 H & H Magnum that increased its muzzle
velocity by two hundred foot-seconds and its energy by nearly half a ton to over 5,000 foot pounds, I decided to take
him for a nice warm bedroom rug. At no more than a hundred yards, I whacked him in the shoulder with the 375,
nonchalantly got up, and started back for the boat and my camera. "He's up again!" yelled the chap with me. Lo and
behold he was - and it took another 270-grain slug tearing another wound diagonally clear through him to keep the
black quiet. He just didn't know that he was dead the first time.

No, blacks aren't as rugged as grizzlies, but they often take a deal of killing. Under most circumstances any deer rifle will
handle them adequately, but the hits had better be well placed, and if you're hunting blacks as trophies, not as
accidental extras on your deer hunt, it's wiser to use a harder-hitting load by at least one step than you'd figure as
adequate medicine for a buck.

The general tendency is to put grizzlies and the coastal forms of overgrown grizzly we term Alaskan brown bear, Kodiak,
or what have you, into the violently dangerous category. The gun medicine often prescribed for them reads like an
arsenal for an African safari or a tiger hunt in jungle India. Brownies and grizzlies have mauled or killed thousands of
puny humans, and after racking up four Alaskan whoppers for my own trophy room and after watching twice as many
more coastal bears go down, to say nothing of several inland grizzlies, I'd be the last to belittle the danger potential in
any encounter with Ursus; but by the same token I can't see the need for toting an eleven-pound super-calibered
wildcat, or a 470-500 double rifle after brownies.

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The first such trophy taken by a sportsman since 1905, this blue or glacier bear is particularly prized by
Warren Page. Three years of planning and 4,500 miles of travel into the virgin wilderness behind Alaska's
Yakutat Bay and the glacier bear was finally located - two hours of climbing on a brush-tangled slide and he
was dropped with one hundred-yard shot from a 7-mm Mashburn Short Magnum. In Alaska alone, Page has
taken a round dozen bear, four of them Alaskan browns of a half ton or more, the rest blacks or glacier bear -
and pound for pound he rates the non-dangerous blacks as tough as the big coastal grizzlies.

Here again, hunting techniques and localities have almost as much bearing on proper armament as other considerations.
For example, the average spring bear hunt is over relatively open terrain, the slides and fairly open lake shores of
Kodiak, similar country and open valleys out on the Peninsula, the sedge flats at the heads of Southeastern Alaska's
bays. Not open like Kansas prairie, but such that shots may come as far out as three hundred yards, although every bear
guide worth his salt will if possible sneak his hunter within seventy-five yards or so of the bear, close enough to make
the first shot reasonably certain, far enough to give time for follow-up hits if bruin gets rambunctious. Ordinarily the
hunter has had ample time to glass the bear carefully, looking for the rubbed spots that ruin so many of the long-haired
spring hides, and to dope out a stalk to a spot permitting steady shooting from prone or sitting position. For this deal a
bolt-action rifle between 30 and 375 caliber, its scope sight protected against Alaskan weather by quick-off rubber caps
like the Storm Queen type by Anderson of Yakima, Washington, should mean a skull on the mantelpiece and a rug on
the floor.

The fall brownie hunt, when the salmon jam the creeks and the brownies are fattening on them, is usually another horse
entirely. Prowling an alder-bordered creek in the more northerly and westerly areas of Alaska often means a close-in
shot. Down in Southeastern Alaska, where the steady rainfall borders the creeks with stands of four-foot spruce, with
literal jungles of fern, salmon-berry, and devil's club bushing up around them, the easiest walking is either up the creek
itself or along the deepworn trails beside it - and you may meet your bear either around a quick creek bend or just over
the next log. The last brownie I killed we couldn't even see further than the hundred-foot mark, although we'd heard
him chasing salmon for several minutes. That was in a jungly slough back of Admiralty Island's Whitewater Bay, thick
enough to suit leopards and monkeys, given a 30� rise in temperature. For these close-up operations, while there are
those, myself among them, who prefer a scope, a receiver peep sight with the target disk removed is all that's needed.
The rifle can be a lever gun, the 348 or 405 Winchester for example, or even the double if you insist.

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The cool rifleman who places his hits properly doesn't need a shoulder cannon to handle either grizzlies or
Alaskan brown bear. On a trip with Warren Page, Jimmy Cullum whacked this whopping Yukon grizzly and
took two trophy brownies with five 220-grain bullets from his 30-06, a Remington Model 721 with Weaver
K4 in a Stith Master Mount. Granted a reasonably adequate cartridge, placement pays off better than sheer
power.

In either event the brownie rifle should be as much musket as a man can carry and shoot well and no more. If he can't
stand the belt of anything bigger than a 25 caliber or a deer rifle, he should stay home, keep away from the big bad
bears. The 270, regardless of its prowess on open-country game, is not a brown bear rifle. Hosea Sarber, who before his
passing had killed more brownies than most of us could hope even to see in two-score hunts, tried the 150-grain factory
soft point load and handloads with the 160-grain Barnes bullet. He dropped his bears, but such was the manner of their
going that Hosea would never again suggest the 270 as a brownie rifle and I'll ride with him. In the standard calibers
and common wildcats for bolt-action rifles the 30-06, 300 magnum in either the H & H or various improved versions, the
333 OKH on '06 brass or preferably the short magnum type, the 35 Whelen and the several 35 magnums by Ackley,
Mashburn, Griffin & Howe, and of course the 375 in standard or blown-out form will handle brownies, assuming proper
bullets, and assuming they can be shot well by the hunter. I've had full satisfaction, pronto kills, on four brownies with
the 300 Weatherby Magnum, the best bullet for its high muzzle speed being Ackley's solid-based type. Now that I know
the ropes, I would not hesitate to carry my 7-mm Short Mashburn Magnum, or a similar cartridge loaded with the
180-grain Barnes bullet or the 200-grain slug made in that caliber by Bert Shay.

But a big rifle won't kill brownies any better than a lighter one if it isn't shot well. Here are two cases in point. Since the
bulk of Alaskan bear guides carry rifles in 375 H & H as dude-insurance, many preferring the 270-grain soft point as a
tougher bullet than the 300-grain Silvertip, a friend of mine decided a 375 was the ticket for him. This despite the fact
that he was a very handy shot with a Springfield '06 that had already decorated his trophy room very well. He borrowed
an ill-fitting 375, beat himself into a severe case of the flinches by pounding away on the target range, and so managed
to flub opportunities at three first-class brown bear trophies before finally killing a junior-sized sow. Too much cannon
for the rifleman.

On the other hand, Jimmy Cullum, with good Texas confidence in himself and his rifle, a Remington 721 in 30-06, on a
trip with me bunged himself a fine Yukon grizzly, probably the best one I've ever seen, and a fortnight later rolled over
two good brown bear on Alaskan salmon creeks. All with five shots, and one of those was totally unnecessary.

The moral of the tale is obvious. Your heavy investment on an Alaskan hunt is more likely to pay off through the use of a
30-06, 220-grain loads, that you can really shoot to hit the shoulder with that first round, than it is if you tote a
half-cannon that has already scared you more than it will the bears. Bears aren't scared to death by large-caliber rifles -
they're killed by well-placed bullets.

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