As I lay awake in my sleeping bag listening to the incessant drumming of a lovesick ruffed grouse, I realized that my Manitoba spring bear hunt would soon be coming to an end.  I tried to go back to sleep, but my mind was plagued by an unyielding array of troubled thoughts. 

“What if I don’t kill a bear or even see a bear?  Worse yet, what in the heck am I going to write about on the talk forum when I get back home?”

I tossed and turned until daybreak, but I wasn’t alone.  Monty was also feeling the strain.  After all, he was hosting clients during the worst two weeks of spring bear hunting that he had ever encountered during his career as an outfitter, and it seemed the only end in sight was the abrupt finality of a discomforting 40-minute flight back to the float plane base with unhappy hunters.  Not a pretty picture.      

Once we finished eating breakfast Monty and I slipped off to talk in private.  We spoke at great length about the situation. 

Monty began by saying, “I don’t know what to do, Steve.  This is unlike anything I have ever experienced; except for the time I got talked into scheduling a bear hunt in the month of June by an outdoor writer who was convinced hunting during that particular timeframe would produce bears.”

He continued, “That year the bugs were absolutely horrific, and the bears had switched over to native grass and berries by the time we arrived in camp.  The bait sites were dead.  It was a complete nightmare from beginning to end!”

“Don’t worry about it, Mont.  You’re doing everything you can do, right?  You can’t control the weather; hopefully things will turn around.  Besides, we always have the fall hunt.  All is not lost,” I said.

“Yeah, you’re right about that; we sure hammer them in the fall, but we normally do that in the spring too,” Monty answered.

Although somewhat squelched for the time being, a multitude of concerns still weighed heavily on both of our minds. 

We soon rejoined our camp compadres and began working out a plan for the day.  I would help Monty and Nolan check bait sites again and then plot the rest of my day around the feeding habitats of the resident bear population.  Monty and Nolan would take Bob and the two Kansas boys to hunt later that afternoon, and with any luck someone would end up killing a bear before nightfall.    

After visiting all of the sites in the area, it turned out that I would be toting my fishing pole and tackle box along with me once again.  However, this would be the last day that I would devote to fishing.  As mentioned previously, Monty and I agreed that I would spend the last two days of the hunt in my tree stand regardless of whether my bait had been hit or not, and I wasn’t about to let him down. 

As the day was winding down, Monty and I stood on the shoreline filleting fish.  We had just finished up the last fish when a rifle shot suddenly rang out, breaking the silence of early evening.  It was 9:15 p.m. 

With fish scales still clinging to his hand, Monty threw up a high-five in response to hearing the echoing blast of a single gunshot.

“That’s Jim! I knew that bear would come into that bait sooner or later.  He hit it three nights in…” 

Bang!  Another shot rang out before Monty could finish his sentence.

That second shot concerned Monty, especially since Jim was shooting a hard-hitting, .270 Remington, bolt-action lead-chucker.

“Maybe it was just an insurance shot,” I said.

“Maybe… well let’s hope so anyway,” Monty replied.

Assuming Jim’s bullet found its mark, the full responsibility of tracking the bear was now placed upon Monty’s shoulders.  Without any hesitation, we located a couple of flashlights and some reflective trailing tape and then hurriedly jumped in a boat with our expectations running high.  Candis, an aspiring bear hunter in her own right, tagged along so as not to miss the much-anticipated possibility of a downed bear.  Hopefully, Monty would be able to find enough sign at the scene to quickly recover the animal.   

Hearing the news over the radio, Nolan retrieved Bob and Darrel from their unproductive afternoon vigils on stand, and they soon arrived to join Candis and me a few hundred feet from the shoreline on the footpath leading to Jim’s stand.  Monty was already on the bear’s trail.

After a good 30 or 40 minutes of searching on his hands and knees for blood, Monty walked out to the shoreline to meet us with Jim following closely behind.  He told us that the blood was spotty at best, and it was just too dark to continue the search.  He was certain that he had heard the bear crashing just ahead of him as he followed the blood trail. 

Back at camp, Jim relayed his experience to all of us over another midnight supper.  He explained that he knocked the big bear down to the ground with his first shot, causing the hard-hit bruin to rapidly execute several quick somersaults upon the bullet’s impact.  The bear then gathered his feet and sped away. 

Jim’s second shot was taken through a small opening in the brush as he tried to stop the big boar from fleeing the area.  We would discover from Jim’s account that when the bear stood on all fours, its back stood even with, and at times over, the top edge of the barrel.  Given the fact that Monty uses large 55-gallon drums at all of his bait sites, we knew that it was a fairly big boar.