Bear Trouble
by JD Clapp
Tongass Forest, Southeast Alaska
I woke face down on rock and sand. My head screamed. Hot blood ran from my right ear down my jawline. Vision blurred, the boulders and rainforest came in and out of focus. That shaking…An earthquake? No. My guide for this Alaskan bear hunt, Chuck, shook me. Through the high-pitched, shrill ringing in my left ear, I heard. Gwwwwwit Uuuupppp! Gwwwwwit Uuuuuppp!
Chuck pulled me off the deck like a corner man in a prize fight. My scrambled gray matter spun like the wheel of death before an overdue Windows update. Then it came to me, I shot a bear. Wait, no, there were two bears fighting. Did I shoot them both? No. I only shot one. It went down hard… the other bear headed for the trees and…Shit. The bear I shot got up and ran. I remembered shooting again. Then…Chuck shot his .338 Ultra Mag with the muzzle break… And, to paraphrase the old Pat Traver’s song, boom, boom out went the lights.
As the reverberation in my head dissipated, I parsed out what happened—Chuck shot his big caliber, very loud rifle at the wounded bear trying to anchor it before it got into the thick shit. His muzzle break, a ported piece of metal screwed into the business end of a barrel, was inches from my right ear. Muzzle breaks reduce the kick of large caliber ammunition by dissipating the blast in 360 degrees. They also make the report of the gun twice as loud. My eardrum and the side of my head took the full sound and shock waves at six inches, leaving me with the unholy trinity of a busted ear drum, powder burns on my cheek, and a concussion.
Chasing a wounded black bear into thick forest is no joke. Even with scoped rifles and magnification turned all the way down, the dense, dark environment makes it almost impossible to find anything in the crosshairs, an especially unsettling problem with 300 pounds of pissed-off muscle, fangs, and claws coming at you with malice. Moving involves crawling under and over slick deadfall pines of various sizes and states of decay. The abundant vegetation and compost deadened the sound around us—not that I could hear at that point. A charge would likely be up close and personal. Chuck knew all this; I did too, but my brain was running on one cylinder right then. As we stood next to the blood spoor, Chuck quickly weighed our options: go in now, ill-prepared, and risk getting mauled, or go back to the mothership and get slug guns, flashlights, and more guys to search. Waiting gave the bear time to wander off and die slowly in some hole never to be found.
We went in.
Under the best circumstances, I am uncoordinated. A busted eardrum gave me the grace of a drunk ice skater. I tripped, slipped, or fell every few feet. We used gestures to communicate. Chuck motioned me to spread out and keep up. He pointed out blood drops and paw scuffs in the wet duff like a bloodhound.
We made about 100 hard scrabble yards before the bear charged. He came at Chuck. We both shot at the blur of brown bruin, who was now making a woofing sound. We both missed—one bullet hitting a stump, sending a chunk of it flying, and the other kicking up duff at the bear’s feet. It was just enough. The bear spun and raced off.
My wits still hadn’t caught up with the gravity of the situation, and I stupidly followed Chuck as he scoured the decaying pine duff for blood and spoor. We tracked the bear another twenty minutes before he lost us by walking in a foot-deep stream. We backed out of the forest to the thin ribbon of rocky beach and walked back to our 16’ skiff.
“WE WILL COME BACK IN THE MORNING WITH THE GUYS AND FIND HIM,” Chuck yelled into my left ear. I gave him a half-hearted thumbs up.
We motored back to the 52’ trawler we were using as a mothership. I watched a pod of orcas feeding a few hundred feet away. I should have just come up here to fish. My right ear got some sensation back and sounded like a Fritos bag crinkling. The left was almost back to normal. Thank God, I might not be permanently deaf in that ear.
Chuck pointed out another bear on shore, then a humpback feeding at the edge of the large bay we were heading toward. A bald eagle soared above with a small salmon in its talons. The beauty of the place masked its inherent brutality. The dance of predator and prey never stopped here.
Back on the boat, Chuck explained the situation to the other guides and my buddies. They all agreed to help search in the morning. I took a handful of Advil, washed it down with a whisky beer back, and went to bed.
It was a long night. If you hunt long enough, eventually you’ll wound and lose an animal. This was my first (and thankfully only so far). Hunters rationalize such losses as being natural, the cost of being a predator. When the topic comes up, they’ll tell you truths like, “This happens in nature all the time.” They’ll give examples of coyotes wounding deer that get away, and the like. “Nothing goes to waste in nature,” they’ll tell you. What goes unsaid is how goddamn bad it makes you feel to wound something. Or, how it makes you question why the hell you were hunting in the first place. The thought of the bear I shot, out there dying slowly, hurt worse than my physical injuries.
The next morning, we loaded up the skiffs, armed with flash-light-equipped slug guns, a couple of .44 magnum handguns, and hand-held radios. Five of us made our way back to the stream: three went upstream, two went down. We searched both banks looking for signs. About an hour in, Chuck radioed he’d found the bear’s trail.
We fanned out to search. “Shine the light in every hole you see. If you see eyes shining back, shoot,” he instructed. About twenty minutes in, Chuck called us over and pointed to a mudhole with blood in it. “He bedded here last night and rolled in the mud to stop the bleeding,” Chuck explained.
He showed us the bear’s tracks leading further into the forest. Based on the tracks, the bear had a limp but was moving at a good pace.
“He’s gone,” Chuck said.
“Will he live?” I asked.
“Fifty-fifty, I’d say. He ain’t gonna die soon from your bullet. If I had to guess, he’ll heal but be weak. A bigger boar will probably kill and eat him this fall.”
Nothing goes to waste in nature.
My hunt was over. We had a few days left, and a couple of guys in our group still had tags to fill. I ventured out with them. While they hunted, I took photos and fished. I thought a lot about hunting over those last days. I didn’t grow up hunting; I took it up in my 30s to become more connected to the food I ate. For me, hunting became a logical extension of my other outdoor pursuits—fishing, hiking, camping. I’d been killing and eating fish since I was a kid. I ate meat. I loved the outdoors.
Before I hunted, I considered the ethics of food. I studied the biological aspects of game management. My choice to hunt was informed and philosophical. I accepted the bear incident—wounded bear and deafness included—as the price of procuring my own meat. But that is another essay…
On the long boat ride from the Tongass National Forest to Wrangle, we made bear steaks. The meat tasted a bit like pork, a decent flavor, but it was tough as leather. Some people love it. I did not. After two bites, I knew I’d never hunt bear again.
The following fall, Chuck and I hunted wild boar together. He told me that on their last guided trip of bear season, they spotted my bear limping down the shore with a fish in its mouth. “That bastard is still out there,” he said. “Maybe.”
Maybe…
BIO: JD Clapp lives in San Diego, CA. His work has appeared in Cowboy Jamboree, Bristol Noir, Revolution John, and numerous others. In 2023, he was a Pushcart nominee in nonfiction, and had a fictional story selected as a finalist in the Hemingway Shorts, Short Story competition. He is a regular contributor to Poverty House.