Final part. Close Encounters of the Worst Kind

While the bruin never got closer than ten feet I could feel the rotten smell of the dead deer carcass he had been working over before I stumbled upon his morning meal.  The air was so thick and rinsed it felt like you could cut it with a knife.

I guess I should feel very fortunate he had evidently eaten enough to be satisfied before my arrival.  While the number of people killed each year by black bears is pretty small they will kill you under the right circumstance.

It very rare really for a person to be attacked killed by a grizzly the mean big brother to the black bear but when you include all brown bear species the numbers match the black bear evenly.  The reported numbers are not very accurate especially in the very rural areas of Canada and Alaska.

The reports only indicate about fifty kills per species in the last 100 years.

The following day that big boy wandered by where I was waiting in ambush he was a magnificent Cinnamon color and would have made a beautiful rug to be sure. He was a very easy shot and would have piled up almost immediately but as good as he would have looked on my wall he looked better walking through the woods.

I made a silent pack with him that day that I would not hunt him as long as he did not hunt me. I caught glimpses of him for three or four more seasons. However, thankfully I never had any more close encounters with him.

As bad as my encounter with him was it was not the close encounter of the worse kind.

One year I decided to try rifle hunting one more time as I was going after a very large mule deer I had seen several times.

Mule deer unlike white tail are really difficult to pattern.  They have a much bigger range and the buck tend to put on a lot of miles on each day.

Anyway I hit the mountain opening day and was optimistic I’d get a shot. I got several shots that day and every one of them impacted within a few feet of me. The woods were absolutely full of idiots that had no business owning a gun much less carrying it into the woods hunting.

That was by far and away the closest I came to dying since taking a bullet in the head many years ago, but that’s another story for another time. That was my close encounter of the worst kind and it’s led to me swearing off ever rifle hunting again. Each year nationwide far more people are killed by other careless rifle hunters than people killed by bears in the last one hundred years combined.

Now I hunt a lot with a camera rather than a weapon, I love the outdoors and I’m blessed to live in an area with a great deal of wild life.