| Bear Essentials - Page Two | |
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Page One - Keening and Backpack-eating
More recently, as in four days ago, I was in the same patch of woods as that first experience, hunting squirrels with my nephew. After an initial quarter-mile hike down the same trail where I'd seen the bears the previous season, I plunked down on my folding stool to let the woods settle down. As any fifteen-year-old will do, Rusty got restless. I sent him on down the trail to chase squirrels, while I sat and enjoyed the woods.
After fifteen or twenty minutes, I heard something behind me. I twisted around and watched, and a bear strolled by. I initially thought it was much smaller than it turned out to be, I now estimate its size at around one hundred twenty-five to one hundred fifty pounds. It disappeared behind some brush about 30 feet away, and things became quiet.
There are two animals that make more noise in the woods than any other critter -- bears and people -- so I felt sure that he hadn't left. At any rate, I twisted around on my stool and continued to wait, eyeballing the trees for squirrels, with my old Savage bolt-action .22 mag rifle in my hands. Before long, I heard something else from the patch of brush where I'd last seen the bear.
I saw movement -- there he was. But wait... there was another one with him! Then the two bears started wrestling, there before me, on the ground just as I was, thirty feet away. Now here was something worth remembering... it doesn't happen every day, that's for sure. The second bear was bigger, and would pop its teeth together from time to time.
They wrestled for a few minutes, standing up on hind legs, wading towards one another, grappling, falling, nipping. Then the smaller one decided he'd had enough, so he strolled out to the trail, and turned towards me. If I hadn't moved, I feel certain that he would have plowed right by me, as I was sitting on the edge of the trail. I didn't want him to be that close when he discovered me, so I waved my rifle at him. That was all it took -- he turned tail and plowed up some real estate getting away from there. I heard him clobbering brush for a long distance down the trail.
The second (larger) bear hadn't seen me, and I'm sure it was wondering what the heck had gotten into its buddy. When it, too, walked out to a point twelve to fifteen feet from me, heading my way, I again waved the rifle to make my presence known. It also ran -- but not far. It stopped back in the brush, and I couldn't see it, but I knew it was there. Soon it circled to where it could see me through some brush, and spent a few minutes there, watching, sniffing, and popping its teeth, at a distance of around fifty to sixty feet.
Soon it decided to leave, but got in no hurry. When it crossed the trail again, I got a full appreciation of its size -- that bear probably weighed in the neighborhood of two hundred pounds.
After collecting Rusty, we moved on down another trail a ways. He stopped and sat down in the trail for a while, and just as the woods were starting to settle down, he got up and went on down the trail. I stayed behind, watching and listening. Soon I heard something in the brush, and started watching what I heard. Sure enough, it was a bear. As it hunched up the side of a tree, I saw that there was another one there, too.
Perhaps it was the same two bears, perhaps not... I have no way of knowing. I decided an experiment was in order, so I popped my teeth together a few times. Immediately, one of the bears started heading my way. It stopped once, popping its own teeth. I popped back at it, and here it came.
I decided that perhaps tooth-popping was, to a bear, an invitation to kick butt -- so I ceased the popping and just watched. He came on, stopping about fifteen feet short of the trail, twenty-five or so feet from me. At that time, Rusty shot at a squirrel with my 12-gauge shotgun, about seventy-five yards down the road, and that bear left in a hurry, going back the way he'd come. So much for my experiment!
The next afternoon in that same area, I came across a strip of land which an adjacent landowner had cleared and paved with cracked corn, obviously to attract wildlife. It worked, as evidenced by the two bears I kicked up nearby, and I encountered another in the trail on my way out to my truck.
When, oh when, will Florida once again open bear hunting? The season was closed years ago, for purely political reasons, and has never been reopened. Every hunter who's spent time in these woods knows that seeing a bear is quite often more likely than seeing a deer -- so why don't we thin out the bears?
Nuisance complaints and car-bear collisions are on the rise, and still no bear season. I talked with a friend who lives outside Orlando, who told me that bears stroll into neighborhood garages and take the garbage, while the homeowner stands there agape! Seems to me, we have too many bears in Florida, and it's high time we did something about it.
Page One - Keening and Backpack-eating
- Russ Chastain
