About five years ago, a friend and I were baiting bears near the Dalton Highway. We had built a nice treehouse to stay in during the night. It is so far up there we usually spent a couple of nights when we went up. One night in early May, there was no moon that night. It was overcast and really dark. Several bears had come in to hit the bait. Twice we had two bears fighting right under us. That's a scarry feeling, being able to hear them fighting and not being able to see a thing. Anyway along about 3AM, I was lying there in my sleeping bag listening to a bear feeding, when suddenly a fight got started. From the sound of it one bear was trying to get away, but the other one kept heading it off. Suddenly we heard them coming up one of the trees we had our stand in. The first bear got to the treehouse and kept right on going up the tree. The second bear stopped and came across the platform. My partner had started climbing out on a limb. I realised that he was behind me, so I fired my shotgun, not knowing exactually where the bear was. That lite up the whole world, there was the bear to my left several feet from where I had shot. It seemed like that light lasted forever, the bear and I was just standing there looking at each other. When it got dark I expected to get hit, bit, mauled, or something. I pumped a new round into the shotgun as fast as I could. Then I heard a startled sound kind of like a muffled scream, and something heavy hitting the ground below me. At first I thought my partner had either jumped or fell out of the tree. Then my partner started calling thinking I had jumped out of the stand to get away from the bear. I finally found the flashlight, turned it on. There was my partner, out on a limb. There was a Black bear lying on the ground under the stand, the bear had either jumped or fell off the platform. The first bear was still up the tree looking down at us. I went out on another limb, then crossed over into another tree. Somewhere in hurriedly climbing around I dropped my shotgun, and flashlight. We spent the rest of the night watching the bear up the tree with my partner's mini-mag, waiting for him to climb down. I quess he was waiting for us to go away, cause he did not come down. After daylight my partner and I climbed down to the ground, grabbed my shotgun. The fallen bear had disappeared. I did not want to try and shoot the bear in the tree with a shotgun, and we did not want to try and get to our rifles, they were too close to the bear. We headed to the truck. After fixing some breakfast, we streatched out on the seats of the truck and went to sleep. Around noon I was awakened by the truck shaking, I looked up and saw a black bear standing on the hood looking through the windshield at me. I blew the horn and the bear jumped down and ran away. We decided to go back down to the tree stand and get our rifles and other gear, we had lost all desire to spend another night in the tree. The walk to the stand was uneventful, all bears were gone when we arrived at the stand. We grabbed our gear and left.
A week later we went back, but this time we decided to sleep in my camper instead of the tree stand. During the night I felt the truck shaking and opened the curtains covering the front window. There stood a bear on the hood of the truck, looking in the front window of the camper. My rifle was by the door. By the time I got out of bed and reached my rifle the bear had jumped down and run off.
