This proud hunter was sitting at the end of a beaver dam, behind a small tree for cover and to get out of the ferocious wind that day.
He could see for two hundred yards out in the mash below the dam, and figured he had it well covered.
I was dogging the bush ooooowwwwww!
He hears a little noise, and right in front of him, ten feet away, this monster bear appears climbing out of the mash from behind his screening tree.
I think he pretty much crapped his drawers.
The bear let out a woof, and he fired his rifle at black hair, all he could see in the scope. He hit the bear in the neck, and he quickly fired twice more, but it turned, and jumped in the water above the dam.
the scope is a 4X20 with a 50mm objective. I didn't ask him what he had it set at.
Where after a couple of side strokes, it died.
He was using the mighty 25-06, with 120 grain Nosler Partitions, at better than 3000fps, or so he said.
Recovery was lots of fun, and he radioed for a few of us to help.. We have an old trappers boat at the cabin, and he used that to go out and tie a rope to the bear. That was much more fun that you might expect, as the boat is small, and both he and the bear are large. He had quite a time getting a rope on it in the freezing water, while the wind pushed him further and further upstream.
He finally succeeded, and after we pulled him and the bear to shore, we used the ATV to get it up the bank.
After gutting, we found that four of us could not lift the big ####er on to the trailer, and we had to winch him on with a second ATV.
Post skinning analysis indicates that the neck shot was fatal. One shot blew the right front leg to bits, pretty much ruining the entire quarter. The other slid into the fat down the side of the bear doing no visible harm whatever.
Hundreds of pounds of fat and hide later, there really wasn't that much meat considering his massive bulk. But then he did wreck that one quarter.
