Big time brown bear 10-foot-6 bruin impresses guide, tooAnchorage Daily News
By CRAIG MEDRED?cmedred@adn.com
Published: January 6th, 2008 01:24 AM?
Last Modified: January 6th, 2008 05:55 AM
http://www.adn.com/outdoors/story/256356.htmlWhen guide Jake Jefferson spotted a brown bear the size of a Volkswagen Beetle rolling up a valley east of Kodiak last fall, there was no need to ask hunter John Pomazi if this is what he'd come to Alaska to find.
Over the course of a decade of hunting the bear-filled "Emerald Isle," the guide had never seen a bear like this. It stood out like a tank in a parade of bicycles.
Even from a half mile away, Jefferson said, "you didn't need binoculars or anything" to recognize the animal's monstrous proportions.
"The grass (in 2007) was so tall most of the bears we saw disappeared (into it),'' Jefferson said. "He still stood out. His back looked like somebody was pushing a canoe on top of the grass.''
The guide would later estimate the bear's height on all fours as five feet at the shoulder. He guesses it weighed 1,500 to 1,800 pounds, but cautions that's only a guess. Jefferson has never seen a bear this big before.
In body size, he said, "it was probably twice the size'' of a record-book-size, spring brown bear.
Jefferson has seen bull moose that weighed 1,000 to 1,200 pounds, and this bear, he said, was considerably bigger.
The guide knew when he saw it, too, why he and Pomazi hadn't seen a single brown bear sow with twin cubs in days of glassing the valley.
"We saw probably 10 sows,'' Jefferson said. "All the sows we saw had only one cub.''
Brown bears are well-documented cub killers. No mother bear could hope to defend two cubs against a boar like this, though it was clear some had tried.
"He was scarred up pretty good,'' Jefferson said, "and any little boar isn't going to mess with him. They're going to beat it out of there. I'd guess that (protective) sows were putting holes in him.''
STAKING OUT A SNOOZER
An estimated 12 to 14 years old, the big boar had probably owned the valley for years, Jefferson added.
When the bear finally met his demise, it was almost by accident. Due to competition with other hunters in the valley, Jefferson and Pomazi had all but given up on bear hunting when they spotted him. They were heading out to hunt for Sitka blacktail deer that day.
The plan quickly changed.
"We saw him downwind,'' Jefferson said, "and he was winding us when we spotted him.''
The guide figured the bear would flee if he sensed people moving in his direction. So he and Pomazi headed away from the bear and higher onto a mountainside from which they could get a view. The tactic worked perfectly.
They were already up high when the bear turned and headed up valley behind them.
"He went up to a cliff edge and sat down in an alder patch,'' Jefferson said. "He sat there looking down the valley like he was waiting for us.''
The guide doesn't know how long the bear sat and watched, but he does know that once the animal bedded down, it slept for three hours. Guide and hunter waited only a couple hundred yards away. By 3 or 3:30 in the afternoon, with the bear still sleeping, Jefferson was getting nervous.
"I said, 'If we're going to do it,''' he remembered, "'we need to do it now.'''
Pomazi said OK. Jefferson let out a yell to wake the bear.
Nothing happened.
So the guide tried making some high-pitched "whooping'' noises "like a monkey,'' as he describes it.
CUT HIDE IN HALF? NO WAY
"The bear sat up,'' he said.
Pomazi shot. The bear looked back toward the men.
Jefferson shot. Pomazi shot again.
The bear moved barely six feet and died.
When the men got to the carcass, Jefferson said, it was next to a deep wallow the bear had obviously dug on an earlier occasion.
"He got in a safe spot and got a little confident,'' the guide said.
That spelled the end for the animal that had once been king of the valley.
The bear's hide squared at 10 feet, 6 inches. It weighed more than 150 pounds. Packing it to the beach so Pomazi could ship it to a taxidermist to be mounted was a body-straining chore.
Many guides would have cut the hide in half to make it easier, but Jefferson soldiered on.
"I wasn't about to cut him in half,'' he said.
Fortunately, Jefferson added, it was the second-to-last hunt of the season, and he was in tiptop shape.
"It was one of those things,'' he said, "that hurts so good.''
Find Craig Medred online at
adn.com/contact/cmedred or call 257-4588.
