Author’s Note: This story first published nine years ago in Outdoor Life magazine. I’m a firm believer that some of our hunting memories can only be truly appreciated in time. It’s not that we don’t feel the excitement in the moment, sometimes we just don’t realize what we have within the moment. I was ecstatic to get my first big game animal—a bull moose with 60-inch-wide antlers—but I didn’t truly appreciate how nice of a bull he was. Nineteen years later, I have yet to top him. The following spring, I shot a black bear that I could tell was big, but even when we squared the hide at 8-feet even, I didn’t know what I had. It took me many years to realize that I’ll likely never see an interior Alaska black bear to match it. I can say the same about my first interior grizzly, which was a bear I’d seen and had pictures of in previous years as he and other grizzlies overran our black bear baits. I knew he was huge, but I didn’t realize how huge. I also didn’t realize how luck I was to be able to get an arrow in him. Although I have killed several more grizzlies in the following years, nothing comes close this bear. This grizzly meant a lot to me at the time, but it means even more to me now.
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Anyone who’s come across one knows what Fred Bear meant a half century ago when he said that the thrill of tangling with a grizzly bear cleanses the soul. It’s an experience that relatively few people on this earth will have and that none who do will ever forget.
When you live and spend a lot of time hunting in Alaska, your odds of eventually having an encounter with a grizzly drift more toward the “guaranteed” end of the spectrum. Some of my most exciting have happened while hunting black bears over bait. I’ve been charged by a sow with cubs and have had bears huff at me from the brush as I walked to my stand. And I had a large boar walk to within 3 feet of my rifle muzzle.
Over the past several years, the area where my hunting buddies and I bait black bears has become overrun with grizzlies. We used to see only black bears, but in 2011, I had pictures of more than 15 different grizzlies on my trail cameras. One of them was an absolute monster, and one evening I got a glimpse of him in person. The dark-chocolate boar dwarfed all of the other bears that had been hitting the bait, and was the biggest I’d ever seen. He was truly a creature of dreams. Or nightmares, depending on your perspective.
Unfortunately, shooting a grizzly over bait was illegal there, so I had to watch in awe as he walked off with the swagger and cockiness that only the biggest bears display. It always amazes me how an animal so big and powerful can appear and disappear like a ghost.
I could not forget this bear. A day after seeing him, I found a set of his tracks on a mud bar nearby. Seeing that bear had an unexplainable effect on me, and a few months later, I got a tattoo of his left front paw print on my shoulder. I don’t take my ink lightly. Each piece has great meaning to me. My tattoos include a map of Alaska, a Dall ram I shot set in a backdrop of a topographical map, a wolf trap and pack of wolves under the northern lights. Somehow, more than I realized at the time, this giant of a grizzly bear had become a part of me.
A Legal Window Opens
In the spring of 2012, Alaska Fish and Game announced that hunting grizzlies over bait would be legal the following year in the game unit we hunt. I was both ecstatic and nervous at hearing this, for the flats along the south side of the Tanana River that hold the Kantishna, Toklat, T
Source: https://www.outdoorlife.com/blogs/hunting/2014/02/spirit-bear-world-record-grizzly-recurve-bow/
