Didn’t take long

I said I probably wouldn’t be posting much but obviously like most hunters and fishermen I fib a lot. I had an outing with my grandson and a couple of his buddies yesterday that turned out pretty exciting.

The guys wanted to find some sheds so I took them to a place where I’ve seen quite a few bucks while chukar hunting. It turned out productive for them and as happens from time to time I had an unusual encounter. After about 8 miles of hiking by each of the boys and about 2 1/2 miles from me, here is our take.

Although you can’t tell by the picture, most of the sheds were brown from this year. One of the exciting parts of our hike was the amount of paired up chukars we saw. I had Jake and Grady with me and we had several points and busts along the way and the boys said they saw lots of birds also.

Now to the exciting encounter. While walking one ridge I saw a brown colored black bear in the distance. Through the binoculars it looked big and had a beautiful coat. I had the dogs sit by me and I watched him slowly move around and stretch. He didn’t go 20 or 30 yards from where I had first seen him and finally headed back into the thick brush. I figured his winter den must be right there and I had got lucky and saw him come out for a short stretch before going back in for the day. Here’s a picture of the bear from about 150 yards with my phone. To the left you can see a whole in the brush that led to the den.

I called Conner and asked him if he wanted to see a bear den and he enthusiastically said he’d catch up to me in about 20 minutes. I had cut the distance to the bear in half by the time he got to me and we now had a problem of controlling dogs. Jake and Grady know heal so they stayed right behind me but Blaze, Conner’s black lab, had to be held by his collar.

At ten yards from the den, Conner held onto the dogs as I got to the hole in the brush where I could see the dug out den. I was about to go in with my phone to take some pictures when Conner said “babies”. I didn’t hear them at first but when Conner said once again, “I can hear babies”, I could hear the crying of some baby bears. Turns out the bear I thought was a boar was a sow.

I immediately turned and said “let’s go”. We led the dogs out and luckily never saw the bear again. It was a good thing I had Conner with me or I might never had heard the little ones until I had gotten into a real bad situation.

Anyhow, we saw lot’s of chukars and had another great experience in the great outdoors.