Gr8Scott
01-03-2005, 06:49 PM
My older brother and dad were out hunting this season for the tail end of the black powder season in Virginia. My brother joked about how he wanted to snag a bear up in the mountains with his muzzle-loader. He took his .45 pistol with him to use as a backup in case he didn't get a clean enough shot the first time. Anyway, he's walking along in the Jefferson National Forest on the Big Walker Mountain and he hears something coming from both above and below his position. He freezes and holds still. The sound from above his position is fading, but the sound from below is getting closer and louder. Whatever it was sounds big and it seemed to be headed right for him. He knew it wasn't a deer because it's footfalls were heavy and wide where a deers are sharp little punches. He nearly stained his pants when he saw a pretty large black bear emerge roughly 75 yards from him and it seemed to be on a general path that would take it right past him. He waited until the bear was about 40 yards before busting a cap into the shoulder of this shaggy beast with his .45 cal muzzle loader. He left his .45 pistol back at camp because he thought it would cause trouble should he be searched by a game warden. Kind of hard to explain a pistol during black powder season. Anyway, the bear drops like a sack of potatoes and starts thrashing around in obvious pain. My bro starts to reload his muzzle loader, but in his excitement, he missed the muzzle of the rifle with his powder and probably dumped the whole load on his boots. Then he stuck a patch and ball down there which pretty much made the rifle a useless club until he could take the breechplug out of it with tools etc. Anyway, much to my brother's intense dismay, the bear starts trying to get up. First it got up on it's rear legs and fell back over. Then it gets up and starts moving like it was never hit. It's headed right for him and my brother is now completely defenseless without a single firearm to use for defense against an animal that outweighs him by roughly 100 pounds and has massive teeth and claws. My bro didn't know what else to do, so he throws his arms up in the air and screams "HEY" as loud as he can to scare the bear away. Luckily for my bro, it made the bear take notice of him (I think it didn't know he was there) and it wheeled around and ran the other direction. It picked it's head up and looked right at him before it turned and ran the other way. At this point, my bro is severely unnerved and the bear probably isn't too happy either, but both are alive. My dad and a friend of theirs helped my bro track the bear after waiting a bit to let it calm down and take a nice nap. Unfortunately, the nap was rudely interrupted when my dad and bro both woke the bear up by being noisy and they wound up pushing it further away. It was bleeding heavily at first, but it clotted up pretty quickly and became a small trickle before long and nothing at all after a bit. They tracked it the rest of the way up the side of a mountain and then had to head back because dark was setting in and they had a LONG hike back. The next day, they tracked it a while before the rain set in (it looked bad but wasn't too bad afterall). The day after I went with and we picked up where they left off and tracked it for another mile in the woods before losing the trail completely. The rain and time hadn't done us any favors. The leaves had been blown about and the rain washed away the blood. Mud occasionally helped us out, but there was no blood at the end of the trail and at more than one point we had some serious gaps between signs. We traced one large lot of private land with the owner's neighbor's approval (the owner was from a different state and wasn't around much and lets the neighbor pretty much do whatever on the land including hunting etc.) We looked all day and didn't find anything more than a couple of drops of blood and a few footprints. The bear eluded us. I took my newly refinished Para Ordnance P14 Limited with me in case the bear wasn't quite dead yet (I think it's still around too) and I managed to lose a mag in the hike without noticing. At the moment, that's a $50 mag I lost. Bro is heartbroken over not finding the bear, because it was a big one and he hates the idea of making an animal suffer needlessly. :(