The Hunter's Alaska

by Roy F. Chandler

  A Pack for One Week Hunting Goats:

  *=Optional

  Air mattress*—for aging bones

  Backpack

  Binoculars

  Boot laces, extra

  Candle*

  Cup, tin*

  Gloves, cotton

  Handkerchief, Red

  Insect repellent

  Jacket, w/hood

  Knife & stone

  Matchbox, with matches

  Mosquito bar*

  Nylon line

  Pants, extra pair

  Pistol*

  Poncho w/hood

  Rifle

  Rifle ammo

  Salt (for trophy)

  Sleeping bag (hat on top)

  Sneakers*

  Socks, two pair

  Stuff bag w/mess kit

  Sweatshirt, sleeved

  Toilet articles*

  Toilet paper

  T-Shirt, extra

  Windbreaker, lightweight*

  FOOD, freeze dried

  What a hunt! The year was 1956 (or maybe it was 1957—it gets hard to remember). We had been up Ernestine Creek about sixty miles north of Valdez hunting goats and bear In this ancient photo you can see the tractor that got us in and the trailer that earned the gear that made the trip a luxurious safari—until it became time to hunt. Then, the cliffs were as steep and high as ever. My .300 Weatherby took the bear at less than one hundred yards (running) and the goat was dropped by Jerry's .270 Winchester at about 150 yards

  19 - The Great Bears

  In Alaska, there are three kinds of bears. They are the brown, the polar, and the black.

  Little will be said about polar bears. Those mighty ice bears have quite wisely been removed from the common hunting list. A group called The World Conservation Union claims there are only about 25,000 polar bears across the arctic. The count sounds about right, but I view most organizations using Conservation in their titles with suspicion. Too many such clubs are anti-hunting and are fanatically (and militantly) wed to the "catastrophic collapses" about to occur due to human-induced global warming. A recent pitch has been that loss of arctic ice will force the polar bears ashore and separate them from seals, their primary food source. Perhaps they are right, but even forty years ago, polar bears—then numbering about 5000 in the Alaskan area—were too few and too endangered to be hunted except under rigidly controlled conditions.

  We have never hunted polar bears in part because the hunting was rarely fair chase. Of course, the chase (the hunt) is never absolutely fair. We humans do not strip naked and attempt to do in animals with rocks and clubs. By fair chase, we mean that we pit our hunting and basic abilities against our quarry's natural skill, caution, and rage. Too much technology reduces fair chase. Adoption of breech-loading firearms began the most serious erosion of fair chase principles, flat trajectory cartridges further unbalanced the scale, and telescopic sights really wounded the fair chase concept. Yet, we believe in the idea of fair chase. We do not hunt from airplanes or helicopters, and we do not deliberately bait game. We do our best to actually hunt the animals, and unless a hunter goes for polar bear in a dog sled, there is zero fair chase involved.

  The common technique for polar bear hunting is to take two light aircraft from Nome or Kotzebue out over the ice and search until a satisfactory bear is found. The bruin is then herded by one aircraft while the second lands. The shooter dismounts, walks as far as necessary to get his shot, executes the bear, and loads the hide with head intact onto his plane while the other aircraft circles. The sport in that kind of hunting has escaped me. I do not do it.

  Something will be said about black bears, but they are so common throughout our continental states and Canada that there is little significant or different in hunting them in Alaska.

  The mighty brown bear will be our main bear topic.

  The most desired North American hunting trophy is a brown bear. No other game animal so captures a hunter's imagination as does the great brown bear. The sheer size of a big brownie excites any serious trophy hunter, and the idea of a wall-to-wall bear rug is certainly appealing. Here is Leo Neuls with a 10' 2" brown bear shot in open country at 200 yards with a .375 H&H Magnum.

  However, it is the hint of danger attached to brown bear hunting that primarily intrigues big game hunters. On the North American continent only the polar and the brown bears can honestly be considered dangerous game. Only those big bears genuinely add the spice of personal risk to a hunt.

  There are a few facts to be gotten in order before brown bears can be intelligently discussed.

  1. A brown bear can be any color. Brown refers to the bear's species, not his coloration. There are black-colored brown bears and yellow brown bears. Most brown bears are brown. It is unfortunate if that all sounds a little like the old, Blackberries are red when they are green, but that is the way it is.

  2. A black bear also refers to species and not to color. Black bears can be almost any color from blond, through cinnamon, to jet black. Unfortunately, there is one further breakdown that demands clarification.

  3. Trophy hunters divide brown bears into two types. Those types are the brown bear and the grizzly bear. The differences between a brown bear and a grizzly are NOT biologically justifiable.

  4. Trophy hunters have peremptorily ruled that any brown bear taken within 75 miles of the sea is a brown bear.

  5. A grizzly bear has been determined to be any brown bear taken more than 75 miles from the sea.

  The only justifications for the existence of the name grizzly are that it has been around a long time, and trophy hunters refuse to let the name go.

  The brown bear lives close to the sea. Because he eats a lot of salmon, he grows immensely large. The brown is the biggest of the bears.

  A brown bear killed on Kodiak Island is traditionally called a Kodiak bear, but it is simply another brown bear.

  The so-called grizzly lives in the interior of Alaska and has a hardier existence. The grizzly does not eat as well. So, he does not grow as large as the brown bear.

  Maintaining a grizzly class for trophy hunters allows the inland bear to be judged separately from his monstrous salmon-eating relative. A big brownie can square ten feet. A comparable grizzly will square eight feet.

  Square means to measure a laid flat bear hide from front paw to front paw, then from nose tip to tail root. The two measurements are added together. Then divided by two. That result is the square of a bear.

  Incidentally, a bear is never judged by his square. I have seen hides stretched until the bear's legs looked as long as a deer's, just to make an impressive square. Bears are judged by skull measurements which cannot be altered.

  A big brownie can weigh 1200 pounds. A big grizzly will run about 800 pounds. Obviously, the two bears should not be grouped for trophy judging.

  The photo above shows hunter Ray Dillman, who has taken everything in the world that there is to take, with a nice brownie. As I look at Ray, hunting attire comes to mind. In Alaska, the real hunters seem to simply wear old clothing. When I see Dillman on the street today, he is dressed about the same. Only the new guys coming to Alaska have the latest "Hunter Garb" from the out-of-doors catalogs. The rest of us just go out wearing what we own.

  Unfortunately, the 75 mile rule encourages cheating. It is not difficult to load a big brownie hide into a camper or onto an airplane strut and haul it quickly into the Alaskan heartland where the bear is instantly transformed into a record book grizzly. Do such things happen? Yep, and let me include a horrific example of trophy cheating.

  Back in the fifties an army test pilot (helicopter) stationed at Fort Greely was transferred outside Alaska. I happened by as his household goods were being loaded. Out came some of the grandest trophy mounts I had ever seen. I was stunned. I thought I knew every successful hunter in the area, and this unrecognized pilot had game mounts and rugs that put ours to shame. As I watched, superb examples of every Alaskan animal native to that area emerged.

  I had
never realized the pilot hunted at all. Well, to make it short, he didn't. He and his crew chief flew the Tanana flats and the various mountains looking for animals. When they found what they wanted, the pilot herded the animal to a good spot, landed the copter, and shot the beast. They flew to Fairbanks and popped the trophy into a taxidermy shop. I got the whole story from the crew chief who thought it was all pretty funny.

  This next photo shows Arthur Rausch with a huge grizzly taken in the big burn between the Richardson Highway and the Alaskan Highway near Big Delta. Art's rifle was always a Winchester Model 70 in 30/06.

  Because of easy fakery, the grizzly class will always be a bit problematical. We might also recognize that it is not improbable that occasionally a world class brownie wanders upstream past the 75 mile limit and gets nailed as a Boone and Crockett-worthy grizzly bear.

  Despite any such classification problems hunters claim, with some justification, that there is more than just a size difference between the brown and grizzly bears.

  This next photo shows Steve Naylor of New Bloomfield, Pennsylvania with a tremendously large grizzly. I absolutely love this unpretentious pose with the downed trophy. It is hard to find a photograph of a bear taken without the hunter crouched a yard behind the bear's butt so that the head looks huge. This photo provides a more true perspective of how large Alaska Range grizzlies can get.

  This bear squared more than nine feet and weighed an estimated 900 pounds. Steve dug the bear out of a thicket and shot him on the run with a .338 Winchester Magnum. Magnificent!

  Fifty years ago there was a continuing battle between ranchers on Kodiak Island and the big brown bears. The ranchers held the bears in disdain and shot them as cattle killers. The ranchers shot them with about any rifle handy and showed little respect for the vaunted brownie charge or deliberate brownie vengeance. Familiarity can bred contempt, I guess.

  Ninety-nine times out of one hundred a brown or grizzly will do its best to avoid humans. Often, a bear will flee when encountering one of us. Bears do not like us. To them, we smell bad. After a week or so in the bush I suppose any hunter is pretty strong, but that probability aside, the scent of a human is repugnant to most bears. Catching our scent, the big bears act much as we do when we get downwind of a skunk. There can be a snort of disgust, a shake of the head as though to clear nostrils of stench, and immediate departure toward clearer air.

  I took this big guy wrist wrestling—NOT! This was a large brown bear and seeing the size of his claws gives one pause. (A Jonas Brothers mount.)

  Of all the bears, I like most to hunt the griz. No one should hold a grizzly less because he does not weigh quite as much as a brownie. An ancient Alaskan once told me that a grizzly was born with a stomach ulcer, and that accounted for its alleged ill-nature.

  A doubtful conclusion, but grizzly bears can be unpredictable, and an angry grizzly is an unnerving vision of rampaging power.

  My first close and personal experience with an irritable bear occurred while pike fishing in Quartz Lake. (This was long before they killed off the pike and put in trout and opened a road to the lake and let in cabins and just about ruined the place.)

  A pair of good pike were laid out on a flat rock when a large, black colored grizzly stepped soundlessly from the brush and stood snuffling at the fish.

  Some fifty feet away, I saw the bear appear almost magically beside our fish, and it took me a moment to accept what my eyes claimed they saw. Ordinary bear noise would have helped, but that seven hundred or more pound grizzly turned not a pebble.

  By the time I got myself unwound, the bear had one pike dangling from his jaws and was turning to leave the scene. I encouraged him with an angry bellow that I expected would frighten him a little while I salvaged the remaining fish. Instead of tucking his hindquarters and moving off smartly, the big bruiser came to a halt, faced me, and snarled with all the hair on his neck seeming to stand straight out in an instant bouffant styling.

  How a bear can snarl around a face full of fish I do not know, but he did, and my own furious rush in his direction jerked to a precipitous halt.

  The bruin flipped the pike aside, lowered his head, and I saw muscles stand out as he came straight at me.

  He came, and I went! Straight into the lake! Never has ice water felt so good. I plowed for deep water and distance as hard as I could go.

  When I could no longer resist looking back I trod water, as best I could with a big pistol pulling me down and hunting boots getting heavier each instant. The grizzly was on the bank, crouched low, almost tigerish, with his hump high and neck still bouffant with hair on end.

  Then the big bear roared, and a grizzly's roar will put an African lion to shame. I am sure that my own wet hair stood out as straight as the bear's.

  A grizzly can swim, and I had no wish for that irritable brute to join me in the lake. So, I did no shouting back and disturbed the water as little as possible.

  The bear calmed himself by pacing along the shore, and finally sat down like a great shaggy dog and watched me still valiantly treading water.

  The scent of the fish must have overpowered the grizzly's anger, and he stalked majestically to the undisturbed pike, and getting a good grip on its middle he started toward the woods. At the timber edge he stopped and fixed me with a hard look. I said nothing, and he stepped from sight.

  I crept ashore cautiously, shaking water from my .44 Magnum pistol. I did not shout belated insults after the bear. I knew who was boss around there, and it was not me.

  This is Roy Lindsley's 1952 world record brown bear mount. The Karluk Lake, Kodiak Island bear was taken at thirty feet, three shots with a 30/06. The bear squared ten feet, four inches.

  Big bear mounts are usually doctored a little by placing the trophy on a natural looking mound or on a platform—as is this one. Makes the trophy look even bigger. A convenient 10-foot height measurement is a ...

  basketball basket!

  Assault by a brown or grizzly bear must be a horrendous experience. I have never been reached by a bear, but I have known a number of people who have been. I have never had an acquaintance killed by a bear. My friends survived but, in every case, they felt their survival was a result of their surrender to the bear and their successful attempt to appear dead.

  A grizzly attack is usually a combination of savage, almost maniacal bites, coupled with fierce shakings of the victim in the bear's jaws, and a number of powerful cuffs in the form of left and right hooks with the front paws.

  I have seen a grizzly in the throes of death bite through half-inch thick alders, so a grizzly bite can be a serious matter. Their front teeth and powerful jaws can apply a merciless hold while their saber-like claws rake and tear. The immense power of a grizzly can effortlessly rend a human body. An unarmed man cannot defend himself against a grizzly bear.

  Every survivor of a grizzly attack is seriously scarred. While the mighty jaws create deep and dangerous puncture wounds and some chewing damage, it is usually the raking by claw that does the most injury.

  The inherent strength of a grizzly bear's arm that allows casual brushing aside of huge boulders while searching for marmots, or that can propel an 800 pound bear into full speed quicker than a horse can start, or that can smash the skull or spine of a moose with a single swipe is capable of dismembering a human at will.

  Here's a happy hunter, contented guide and a superb bear trophy. Wow! Hunter: Brent Ebling; 416 Lazzeroni Meteor.

  A human survives a grizzly attack only if the animal loses interest. Survivors have regained consciousness to find themselves covered with leaves, twigs, and tundra apparently stored for future meals. Most survivors, however, "played dead" until the bear went away.

  There is strong evidence, demonstrated in part by the high survival rate among bear victims, that a human is distasteful to a wild grizzly. Even humans killed by the bears are rarely eaten (by the bear). Grizzly bear attacks appear to be the result of bear rage rather than interest in something to eat. There are the
usual exceptions where bears lay in wait for passersby, and in a very few cases bears have eaten some of a victim.

  If attacked by a grizzly, an unarmed man's only hope is to lie on his stomach to avoid those great claws getting into his vitals and wait for the bear to go away. Attempting to fight off a grizzly is hopeless and will usually prolong the attack.

  There is no reliable record of an unarmed man defeating or driving off a serious bear attack. There are a great many windy tales of such feats, but they do not withstand close examination.

  A typical grizzly attack is initially ferocious, as though the bear had "blown his cool," gone berserk, or run amok. He is not fooling! He lunges, snarls, bites, and claws. He shakes his victim as a dog shakes a rag doll. He pummels his victim with one or more front paws.

  An attacking bear's rage seems to cool quickly. Following his initial assault he is apt to sniff about his victim and poke at him with a paw. The slightest show of life by the victim can initiate another attack as furious as the first.

  Assuming the human victim is unconscious or has the courage to lie "doggo," the bear is most likely to wander off. However, grizzlies are also known to withdraw and lie watching a victim for signs of life. At the first movement, the bear again attacks and again mauls the helpless human.

  I once encountered a young survivor of a grizzly attack. The man had been hiking along a trail through dense willow growth. He saw a bear cub close by and attempted to withdraw by retracing his steps. The sow attacked and removed his backpack with a single swipe knocking the hiker to the ground.

  The sow grizzly attacked the pack tearing it into bunting. Anger apparently dying, the sow sniffed at the prone man, and in parting took two swipes at him with a front paw. The first blow badly tore the side of the man's head. The second ripped his thigh to the bone.