A Grizzly Stole My Son’s First Deer. So We Tracked the Bear Down

This story, “The Cyanide Creek Affair,” appeared in the June 1970 issue of Outdoor Life.

“Get out of the way, kids!” I shouted. It’s coming down the mountain straight at you!”

“It” was a wounded, somersaulting grizzly bear. The children were my two sons: Tim, age 14, and Mark, age 12.

When our hunting trip began two days earlier, we had no idea it would end this way. In Montana there is a two-day teachers’ convention in late October, and the boys had a Thursday and Friday off from school. I had promised them three days of big-game hunting.

We didn’t get away from our home in Fairfield, Montana, until about 10 a.m. on Thursday, because I had just got home the night before from photographing wildlife in Canada and we hadn’t yet assembled and loaded our camping and hunting gear. Actually, I didn’t feel much like hunting, but I knew the boys would be heartbroken if we didn’t go. Besides, I believe that hunting and camping are a big help when you’re trying to make men out of boys.

My wife Mary and I have two other children: Michael, age 9, and Colleen, age 6. I’m pastor of the Assembly of God Church in Fairfield and am also a freelance wildlife photographer.

As we drove toward the mountains that morning, conditions seemed ideal for a hunting trip. Though we were having a beautiful Indian-summer day. which doesn’t make for good hunting, the weather bureau was issuing weather warnings to motorists and stockmen, and large V-shaped flocks of waterfowl were winging their way south. One flock flew low over the highway ahead of us, and we saw that they were whistling swans. Perhaps 80 or 90 miles to the north (you can see a long way in this country) a dark band of clouds stretched ominously across the horizon. They spelled cold and snow.

We made our camp on Cyanide Creek, a small tributary of Elk Creek. The area is beautiful and mountainous and offers mighty fine deer and elk hunting. I didn’t intend to kill a deer but would concentrate on getting the boys a shot at one, since their time to hunt was more limited than mine. I figured I could kill a deer later. Besides, I prefer to hunt for trophy bucks during the rut. I did, however, intend to shoot an elk if I got a chance.

It was well into the afternoon when we finally got around to hunting. I have found that hunting in the middle of the day is pretty much a waste of time anyway, since game animals usually are out and on the move only in the morning and evening. We followed the creek for a way and climbed onto a high ridge. Deer tracks were everywhere, and we even saw some fresh elk sign.

Tim had been hunting for two years, and so far he’d scored on antelope and a mountain goat but never a deer. It was Mark’s first hunting trip. He had only recently turned 12, the minimum legal age for big-game hunters in Montana, and had taken a hunter’s safety course in order to get his license. The boys each had a brand-new 6 mm. Remington Model 660. Tim’s was scoped with a 4X Lyman and Mark’s with a 2.5X Weaver. They had earned and saved their own money to buy the rifles. I shot a .30/06 Winchester Model 70 with a 3X Lyman scope.

On the way up the creek the question of which boy would get first shot at a deer had occurred to me. I had the boys draw straws, and Tim won.

At 5 o’clock the sun dropped behind Steamboat Mountain, a towering escarpment that overshadows the entire area. We decided to wait until dark near some large boulders on top of the ridge. We were above some good parks where I thought deer would be likely to come out to feed.

We had hardly got comfortable when Mark said, “I see some deer.”

He had spotted the animals with his binoculars. They were about half a mile away across a canyon, feeding on an open hillside. Two obviously were fawns, and two others were larger. But we couldn’t spot horns on any of them, and the boys were hoping for bucks. They had accompanied me on many wildlife-photography jaunts and had developed surprisingly good eyes for spotting game.

We each had binoculars, and the boys knew how to use them. I consider binoculars a must for full enjoy-ment of the outdoors. In fact, my light pair of 7×35 Nikon glasses are my most used and treasured item of outdoor equipment.

After about 45 minutes, a flick of motion at the edge of the timber about 175 yards below me caught my eye. At first I thought it was a bird, but through my glasses a deer’s ears and part of its back materialized. I soon made out a doe, then a fawn, and then another. Then a two-point buck stepped into an opening between two limber pines.

Tim and Mark had just left to check the other side of the ridge, so I slipped down behind the overhanging ledge I was lying on and went to get them. When we got back and looked again we could see the doe and fawns. Then I spotted what looked like the hindquarters of the buck sticking out from behind a tree. He seemed to be pushing something.

“I can hear their horns,” Mark said. “They’re fighting.”

The deer swung into the open; they were both forkhorns, probably twins.

I wasn’t sure that Tim could make a clean kill at that range (almost 200 yards), so I decided to try to get closer.

The plan didn’t work very well. Three hunters make three times as much noise as one.
We hadn’t gone 30 feet when we came up behind a large boulder about 10 feet wide and eight feet high. When I looked around the edge, the doe was looking right at me. I backed up, looked around the other side of the rock, and saw nothing but trees. The only hope was to shoot from the top of the rock. I boosted Tim up and handed him his gun.

“Can you see a buck?” I asked. “Yeah,” he said.

“Shoot him!”

Long seconds passed. Then the little 6 mm. shattered the alpine stillness. Tim ejected the cartridge and fired again.

“I think I hit him, Dad,” he said.

We spread out about 50 feet apart and headed down the mountain. I found the deer piled up in some buck-brush, a hole through his lungs.

The doe and two fawns dropped down through a small draw and stood watching us from a park on the other side. The other buck had run back into the timber.

When I finished demonstrating how to dress out a deer, it was dark. Heavy clouds had rolled in against the mountains. The storm front had arrived.

We dragged the deer for about half a mile along the ridge, then dropped down into a patch of heavy timber and buckbrush. It was rough going in the dark. We came out at the bottom of a draw, about 200 feet above Cyanide Creek and about three-fourths of a mile above our camp.

Snow had started to fall, and I knew we were unnecessarily risking injury. We decided to hang the deer in a tree and come back for it the next day. But Tim seemed a bit uncertain.

“Won’t anything get it there, Dad?” he asked.

I assured him that I had left a lot of deer and elk out overnight and that nothing had ever bothered them.

When we got up the next morning it was still snowing. We decided to try for a deer for Mark first and then get Tim’s buck on the way back to camp. On the opposite side of the creek we got to a spot from which we could look up the draw where Tim’s deer was hung. I looked for it with my binoculars but couldn’t see it. We decided that the buck was farther up the draw and then went on.

We hiked for a couple of miles and never cut a track. The game apparently had holed up to wait out the storm, so about noon we went back to get Tim’s deer.

To our amazement, we found that we had been right about the tree I had glassed earlier. But the deer wasn’t there. Something had pulled it out of the tree, breaking off the husky limb on which it was tied. About 15 feet away we found the deer crudely buried beneath a pile of earth and pine needles. Part of the hindquarters had been eaten, and one flank was torn out.

“What did it, Dad?” Mark asked. “A bear? A lion?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “The snow has covered the tracks, but I’d guess it was a grizzly bear. It probably cut the drag trail, possibly went back and ate the intestines, and then followed the trail to the deer.”

“Would he have come into camp if we had taken the deer all the way?” Mark asked. I told him I didn’t know. But I will always wonder about it.

Tim stooped down and put his hand on the little buck’s horns.

“Boy, I’m mad!” he said.

“He sure ruined a good piece of venison,” I said. “He probably isn’t far off, and he’ll be back tonight to feed.”

One side of the draw where the deer lay is heavily forested, with timber running from the bottom clear over the top of the ridge. The other side is mostly open, with a few scattered evergreens and patches of brush; at the top is a jumble of rock outcroppings. Though the snow had covered all the tracks, I felt sure that the bear had holed up in the timber. Our plan was to wait on the open mountainside above the deer in hopes that the bear would show up before dark.

We went back to camp, fixed dinner. and took a nap. About an hour before, dark we returned to the open side of the draw. It was a cold wait.

As I sat there, thoughts of grizzly bears kept running through my mind. With the exception of Alaska, Montana has more grizzlies than any other state. But even here they are very rare. Much of Montana’s vast mountain wilderness contains no grizzlies. The state probably has about 400 to 500 of the big bears, including those in Glacier and Montana’s portion of Yellowstone national parks.

The Montana grizzly season opens on the same day as deer and elk seasons. Any legal hunter can buy 8 Montana grizzly tag. A resident tag costs $1; nonresidents must pay $25 for the tag plus $151 for the regular nonresident big-game and fishing license. Any resident or nonresident hunter who bags a grizzly must also pay a $25 trophy fee within 10 days after the kill. In 1968 hunters killed only 12 grizzly bears in Montana. In 1969 the total jumped to 33, but that figure does not indicate an improved grizzly situation. A failure of the 1969 berry crop apparently caused many grizzlies to move down from the high mountains in search of food, and thus they became more accessible to hunters. It’s a rare year when many more than 20 grizzlies are killed in the state.

So a man’s chances of killing, or even seeing, a grizzly in Montana are very slim indeed.

Just laying eyes on one of these great beasts is an experience long to be remembered. I consider the grizzly Montana’s top trophy animal. He is handsome, smart, and potentially dangerous. He epitomizes all that is wild and free.

I had never seen a grizzly while hunting, but I had seen a number of them while on photography trips. I recalled one morning and evening when I located 14 grizzlies out on the meadows in Yellowstone Park. It was spring, and they were eating grass and digging ground squirrels.

I was surprised when I saw one bear feeding within about 50 yards of two cow elk. The cows occasionally looked toward the grizzly, but they didn’t seem very frightened. When I was about 150 yards away the cows saw me. They became very nervous and began to bark. I apparently frightened them more than the bear did.

My thoughts returned to our deer in the bottom of the draw. The grizzly had taken it for himself, and he would almost surely be back to claim it.

We waited until it was so dark that we couldn’t see the crosshairs in our telescopic sights. Then we went back to camp, cooked supper, and turned in early so that we could be back on the ridge before daylight.

By morning the snow had stopped, but the sky was still heavily overcast and the temperature was much colder. To come out above the deer we had to climb up and along the ridge. About 200 yards above the creekbottom we cut fresh deer tracks. I told the boys that if we didn’t find the bear we would come back and follow the deer tracks.

When we got to where we had waited the night before, I could see through my binoculars that the bear had been back. I couldn’t see the deer, but the snow where it had lain was packed down. I told the boys to chamber a shell.

A few yards farther on we cut a set of bear tracks running downhill toward the deer. They led down from the rock outcroppings above the open mountain-side. I’d been wrong in my guess that the bear had holed up in the timber.

We moved down to the deer. Bear tracks were all over the area. Long claw marks ahead of the front tracks proved what I had taken for granted up to this point: our deer thief was indeed a grizzly.

The bear had dragged the deer around to the other side of the tree, had eaten nearly all of it, and then had buried the remains again.

We followed the maze of tracks up the bottom of the draw. They seemed to go off in every direction. I thought of the possibility of there being more than one bear, but all the tracks were about the same size, and one animal can make a lot of tracks in 10 hours.

We found where the grizzly had lain down on the open mountainside 50 yards above the deer, probably to watch it and charge anything that tried to take it. The thought raised the hair on the back of my neck. The grizzly had to be close. But where?

I looked behind us, back at the deer, and along the lower edge of the timber. Then I looked up the mountain again. It was a sight I will never forget.

The new snow covered everything. Every pine and spruce, every rock and bush wore a frosting of white. The low-hanging clouds touched the rock outcroppings on top of the ridge. And there, just below the clouds beside a small patch of bushes, stood a beautiful silvertip grizzly. The abundance of white hair on its head, sides, and I back gave it the same frosted appearance as the trees.

It was like seeing a ghost. Though was standing in the bear’s tracks, I guess I never really expected to see it. The grizzly was about 100 yards above us, glaring down at us. We were between him and the deer.

“There’s our grizzly, kids,” I said. The boys looked up the mountain.

“It looks like a big dog,” Mark said with a mixture of surprise and excitement. It didn’t look like any dog I had ever seen, and it didn’t look as if it had any intention of running away, either.

I had been looking for a grizzly for 11 years, so I’d had plenty of time to think about what I would do if I ever got a chance at one. I had resolved to shoot only at a bear that was in the clear and standing, and to keep shooting as long as the bear moved. I didn’t have any hankering to follow up a wounded grizzly.

“Get ready, boys,” I warned. “It might charge.”

I knew that my sons and I were in a bad situation. I had seen grizzlies run, and I knew that this bear could be on us in five or six seconds. If I shot the bear it would almost surely come down on top of us. But if I didn’t take the relatively easy shot and the bear charged, I might not be able to stop it. Besides, we were on the mountain to kill a grizzly. Would the boys ever really understand if I didn’t shoot? I didn’t want them to think that their dad ran out of courage in a tight spot. I decided to shoot.

It seemed as if everything happened in slow motion. I raised my rifle but then decided against trying to shoot offhand. I saw a dead spruce about 30 feet to my left that would serve as a good rest. I told the kids to stay where they were. As I walked over to the tree the bear moved in the same direction I did. I knelt down and rested the gun on a small branch. The grizzly stopped behind another dead tree and stuck his head around the side of it.

We just looked at each other, and I recalled some of the things I had read about the dangers of shooting a grizzly on a hill above you. Then the bear stepped out into the open, stopped, and stared again. His left shoulder was pointed straight at me.
I started to squeeze the trigger, then hesitated. I remember giving myself mental instructions: “Make it good. Bust the shoulder. Hold about three inches low for bullet rise. Hold your breath. Squeeze.”

The .30/06 jumped back against my shoulder, and then things speeded up.

I heard Tim holler, “Good shot, Dad. You got him.”

The bear was rolling sideways down the mountain, straight toward the boys. I yelled at them to get out of the way. They ran over to me and then turned to get in on the action. Mark fired at the ball of flying fur.

When the grizzly reached our elevation about 25 feet away, it somehow came right-end-to and right-side-up. Both Tim and I fired. The bear fell over on its side again and kept rolling down the mountain. Mark fired once more. The bear caught on a bush, and all was quiet.

We moved in with the cautious respect that is due any grizzly. He was very dead.

It was a poor day for pictures, but I shot a roll of film anyway.

Then I asked Mark to go back to camp and get the packboard we had brought along in case we got an elk and had to carry it out by quarters. Mark looked hesitant about going alone — and understandably so in view of the recent events. But he went without any fuss. As I watched him walk down toward the creek, I couldn’t help thinking that he’d had quite an initiation to big-game hunting. Though he didn’t get his deer on this trip, he killed a nice three-point buck the next Saturday in another area.

Tim started a fire, and I set about the tough task of skinning the bear.

The bear had been hit three times. My first shot had broken its left shoulder. The 180-grain Herter’s bullet had angled back through the lungs and had come out the far side. As I had suspected, the other shots we fired had been superfluous.

Our bear turned out to be a dry sow. I guessed her weight at about 300 pounds. She apparently had lain down in the patch of short brush that she was standing by and had got up just before I saw her. She very likely had been torn between an instinct to flee and a desire to protect the deer.

Read Next: I’ll Always Remember the Day I Went Round for Round with a Grizzly

Mark got back before I was skinning the bear, and he and helped me finish. I tied the hide onto the packboard, and we headed for camp and home. As we walked down Cyanide Creek, I felt good. It’s a great moment in a hunter’s life when he kills his first grizzly. And for me, this grizzly would be my last. I don’t feel that any man deserves two.

The post A Grizzly Stole My Son’s First Deer. So We Tracked the Bear Down appeared first on Outdoor Life.