A Glibertarians Exclusive: Bear at Fortymile II
September 3rd
Breathing.
My eyes snapped suddenly open in the pre-dawn dark. I lay perfectly still, hardly daring to breathe myself. The moon had set, and the tent was absolutely pitch black.
Breathing.
Not my own. Outside the tent.
Softly, softly, I reached for the belt of my wool pants, which were lying alongside my sleeping bag.
A barely audible crunch; a footstep. Something was outside the tent.
In the utter darkness, my fingers finally found the leather of the belt. I felt along it until I came to the handle of my skinning knife.
Breathing.
I managed to unsheathe the knife and brought it up slowly to my chest.
Another slight crunch. Then another, farther away. I couldn’t hear the breathing anymore. Whatever it was, it was moving away.
I lay in my sleeping bag, wide-awake until the sky grew bright enough to see. Somehow, I managed to get dressed and crawled out of the tent. My first action was to string my bow and nock an arrow, before having a close look around the camp.
My backpack still hung in the spruce; nothing was touched. The ground around the tent was hard; I couldn’t find any sign other than a few spots of flattened grass.
Dilemma time. Whatever I’d heard, it could have been a bear, it could have been a moose, it could have been anything. I’m not one to take chances, though, when I’m alone in the wild. I broke camp quickly, and moved about two miles down the Fortymile, closer to the pick-up point. By ten o’clock, my camp was set back up on a dry hillside overlooking the river valley.
There was still a moose out there somewhere with my name on him. So, after a bite to eat and some more coffee, I set out again.
I had crossed a small creek coming back down the river valley. After consulting my maps, I decided to head that way. It looked like the creek bottoms opened out upstream from the river into a semi-open area that should be good moose habitat. And sure enough, it was. Late afternoon found me sneaking through a boggy area along the creek, about two miles from my camp.
A fresh moose track invited me into the brushy, swampy stretch, with scrub willows a bit over head-high. It took about two hours of patient tracking, step by step, but finally – about a hundred yards away – I spotted them, moose antlers raised briefly above the brush.
I worked my way in slowly, freezing whenever the bull raised his head, creeping forward when the antlers dropped out of view. Another thirty minutes passed while I cautiously cut the intervening distance, yard by yard, step by step, eighty yards, forty, twenty. The slight breeze was in my face, the rangy, wet-dog scent of the bull strong as I came to a spot fifteen yards away from the bull, his whole body now in view as he stood cropping twigs from a small willow.
Slowly, ever so slowly, I raised the longbow, came to full draw. Sighted, the steel arrowhead on the bull’s chest. As always at such moments, time seemed to slow to a crawl as the string slipped from my fingers; the arrow slid across the rest, floating, floating in a gentle arc to thwump between the bull’s ribs, leaving only the bright red and yellow fletching protruding.
The bull let out a bellow, and lurched out of the little hollow where he’d been feeding. I froze, listening as the crashing sounds of the moose retreating faded for a moment, then stopped. I looked at my watch; I’d give him thirty minutes. I sat down on a down log and pulled a sandwich out of my pack.
The activities of two buntings and a ptarmigan filled the half-hour. When the time was up, I followed a faint blood trail in the failing light, about three hundred yards to where the bull had piled up and died in a small clearing.
I stood for a few minutes, just looking. There’s always that moment of mixed feelings just after a kill, elation tinged with regret, excitement, a touch of sorrow, anticipation, all sorts of things all kind of mixed up together; I just stood there, enjoying the sensations, not wanting to rush anything. He wasn’t a trophy bull by some people’s standards, but to me every animal is a trophy. Still and all he was a nice bull, with a respectable set of broad, palmated antlers.
Finally I remembered the little digital camera I carried in a nylon pouch on my belt. I laid my bow across the moose’s antlers and took a couple of pictures.
Now, the exciting part of the hunt was over, and it was time for the work to begin. Field-dressing and quartering big game by the faint light of a battery-powered lantern isn’t much fun. I’d done it before, but never anything as big as this. My first moose wasn’t a trophy bull, his rack was middling average – but he probably weighed twice as much as any elk I’d ever killed. It was past midnight by the time I had the bull dressed, the meat boned out, wrapped in cheesecloth and bagged up in six cloth meat bags. I had more line in my butt pack, and I used it to hang the six meat bags from a big spruce that stood nearby.
It was well past midnight when I finished. I headed for my camp, intending to start packing meat out the next day. My watch read two thirty-four in the morning when I finally crawled into my sleeping bag and laid my head on my rolled up jacket, exhausted but very, very pleased.
September 4th
Morning came quickly, and the sun already high in the east when I finally woke up. I could hear the faint breeze whispering over the nylon of the tent, and the calls of birds. I lay there for a while, listening, enjoying the warmth of the sunshine heating the tent, until nature’s call drove me out into the chilly morning air.
A few clouds were coming in from the west, puffy, white fair-weather clouds. I started a fire for coffee, munched on a bagel, and set about removing my backpack bag from the frame to pack moose meat to the pickup point downriver. I suppose I set out for the kill site about a half-hour later.
From my map, I figured it was about five and a half miles from the kill site to the big gravel bar where Wayne Johnson would be picking me up at noon on the 7th. Figure six trips with meat, one more for the antlers, I told myself. Two today, two tomorrow, two the next day, get the horns out early on the 7th; if I can hold that schedule, it should work.
I wasn’t counting on Alaska.
The first trip went without incident. I hiked easily to the kill site, unencumbered with anything but the light aluminum pack frame. It was the work of ten minutes to lower one cheesecloth-covered, boned-out quarter from the tree and lash it tightly to the frame. Getting the frame on my back with sixty pounds of meat on it was another story; I managed by propping the frame against a tree, sitting down to work my arms into the straps and fasten the belt, and using a stout stick to lever myself to my feet. The four mile hike took over three hours with that load, but finally the first installment was hung in a spruce a hundred yards or so from the gravel spit, and I set out again.
When I arrived, sweating and tired, back at the kill site, the place was in chaos.
One of the meat bags, one that I hadn’t hung quite high enough, had been pulled down and dragged off. A few yards away, the offal pile had been sorted through and some of it eaten; bits and pieces were strewn over a wide area. And a large pile of droppings in the middle of it all proclaimed a bear, a big bear, maybe the same bear that had left the sign behind two miles upstream on the first day.
No weapon was all that came to mind. I’d left even my bow behind, wanting to travel light. I had my skinning knife at my belt, but it would be no more effective than a toothpick against a big grizzly.
OK, Nick, I remember thinking. Move slowly. Listen for anything moving. Back slowly towards the tree. Slowly, I took one step back, then another, back towards the big spruce where the moose meat hung like ripe fruit.
Almost five hours had passed since I’d picked up the first load of meat. I stood for a while, leaning against the bole of the tree, trying to listen for a footfall, a noise, anything over the pounding of my heart.
Nothing.
Working quickly, I dropped another bag out of the tree and lashed it to the frame. On an impulse, I tied the moose antlers on top of the meat; this bag was a good twenty pounds lighter than the first load I’d hauled out. It seemed like an eternity, but finally I was up and moving, watching continually over my shoulder and singing, in a loud voice, anything I could think of. I had no wish to take that bear by surprise if he was still in the area.
It was pushing dark by the time I got the second load to the pickup point and hung up. By this time I had decided to move camp down to a big open bench just two hundred yards up the hillside from the gravel bar, and dark or not, I resolved to get that done yet that night. A bit of snow was starting to spit from the sky by the time I had my camp relocated and set back up again, and it was well past midnight before I lay my exhausted, aching body down for the night.
***
Why oh why not have a .44 magnum or 10 mm strapped to your belt?
For that part of the world, .44 mag is a little light – more like .454 or .480 if not that .500 S&W beast.
Because you might be tempted to use it, and then you’d be proper fucked.
I can’t help but think that the weight penalty going from four pounds of useless .44 Magnum to six pounds of potentially useful 12 gauge autoloader, wouldn’t be all that bad in the overall loadout…
+ 1 slug.
Does Alaska have rules about what kind of firearm you can carry during bow season? I could see handguns being allowed but not long guns.
If that were the case, I’d be carrying a stockless 14” pump gun with a birdshead grip. Not the most fun to shoot, but effective.
you can always ice your hand afterwards, assuming you survive the incident.
I think I mentioned last week that in one article I read, the author said he carried a Henry’s Mare Leg in some big caliber. I think his comment was ” when you absolutely need to shoot someone through a solid oak door . . . . . “. Also effective for bears.
apostrophe fuck up.
Henry Mare’s Leg
Thanks as always Animal for your writing. I’m enjoying it (and learning… I assumed a travois, didn’t think of deboning the meat and taking it in parcels… too used to refrigeration and the idea of leaving that meat in the open for a couple of days didn’t even cross my mind).
And the bear thanks him for the service — though it sounds like he’ll ask the waiter to move the buffet a little closer next time.
It’s like being in kindergarten and story time is the best time of the day.
Monday is story time. And I like it.
Another fine story Animal.
Agreed!
Always a good story and for most of us that’s what it will always be. Alaska is still the last frontier, we all had or have the opportunity but as with other life’s possibilities we won’t take advantage of it.
Thanks, Animal
Seconded!
So, next up is nap time?
I’m in!
Don’t we get a snack break before nap time?
Milk & cookies.
In the “Was hoping RTD would at least make the story entertaining and not let the BBC do what they’ve been doing” camp: https://redstate.com/brandon_morse/2023/11/27/doctor-who-goes-all-in-on-insulting-its-male-audience-embraces-absurd-amounts-of-woke-feminism-n2166861
Not all that surprising, really — we all knew the Beeb was fully on board the “ram things down our ungrateful fans’ throats” — but wow… those clips were just painful.
Glad I didn’t have my hopes up and personally I’m just ignoring everything after Capaldi. Very much in the “too bad — but can’t work myself up about it, it has been dead for years” camp.
What about Wednesday’s story time?
Well, I certainly anticipate Wednesday story time.
A lot less napping after those.
Not without sedation.
The prospect of nightmares does tend to reduce the restfulness of a nap.
Poor Pugsley always gets left out.
Very entertaining so far. I was wondering how hard it would be for one man to get a whole moose out of the woods. Butchering it on site seems like the only way to do it without a vehicle. It has quite a lot of risks as you have identified. I imagine there would be multiple scavengers to deal with as well, wolverines, birds, etc.
There was a guy on the show Alone (I think relatively real, YMMV) that took down a musk ox and had to process on spot while hauling meat back to his shelter…Dude stalked the beast for 6 hours after hitting it with an arrow.
Thanks Animal for a great story once again!
If that’s the guy I remember, he finished it off with his knife. Dash in, make a stab and keep on running. Rinse and repeat until musk ox stops breathing.
I believe this is the episode.
https://www.history.com/shows/alone/season-7/episode-6
On my one successful elk hunt, we butchered on site and hauled out the meat. The elk was “face down” in a willow hell (as they are called in that part of Colorado), so we didn’t bother gutting him. The guide just took the meat off from the outside.
I always love how someone born in the late 90s is going to tell me how great things were from before my childhood and how rotten in my adult life.
But we’re not going to talk about what happened in the second half of the 70s, we’re just going to skip right over to how Reagan and free markets made a mess of that beautiful world of the 50s and early 60s. I wish I could sit this stupid little shit down and explain a few things to him.
Actually you intellectual chipmunk, that was JFK and his cut of the top marginal tax rates in ’62.
The Carter years.
Stagflation started much earlier, but Carter reaped the whirlwind.
I still think Biden has enough time left to make things worse than Carter left them.
The elephants need to run this clip constantly in 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rU6PWT1rVUk
Yes the inflation of the mid 70s was rooted in the guns and butter economics of LBJ.
Pay no attention to demolishing most of the rest of the world’s industry in the mid-’40s contributing to said economy and making it possible to compete even with the New Deal cruft weighing on us…. :eyeroll:
Or that the private sector unions got fat and lazy during the glory days of the 50s.
‘But by the end of that period, the economy was faltering, and voters turned against the postwar consensus.’
For absolutely no reason, the existing economic and social order stopped working, and then the voters did dumb things, just to spite the younger generation.
Who would’ve predicted that the Lost Cause for this generation would be the New Deal?
They thought they’d be the ones running the institutions of the Overweening State.
Some people did something.
Is he saying that things were better when we had real institutional racism?
Obviously
Because it was DEMOCRATS that were doing it! See, that makes it entirely different.
It isn’t racism then, it is Central Planning!
Progressive even!
Don’t forget that these are the people who tell us that the 1950s and early 60s were a hellscape of conformity, homogeneity, and consumerism.
“…someone born in the late 90s is going to tell me…”
As my Grandfather said very matter of factly to young teenage me: “You weren’t there. You didn’t see it.”
Mind you, I was 16 then and a lot smarter than I am now.
I saw that earlier. Apparently the Reagan years were terrible, people made more money and had disposable income which fueled a lot of creativity and entrepreneurship, but income inequality rose and that’s all that matters.
The first years of Reagan were rough. Iowa basically went through a depression while the rest of country had a hard recession. But that’s what it took to kill inflation.
I lost my job in 1982; said fuck it; and went back to school. The economy was horrendous.
In 1983 or 1984, McDonald’s opened a new store about 2 blocks from my house. They had hundreds of applicants the morning they started taking apps. They stopped taking applications midday and sent a hundred people or more home without applying.
In ’83, Madison, WI, I interviewed well over a 100 for a book store clerk, including a PhD. A year later I hired a lawyer and member of the WI bar to put books on shelves. These were jobs starting about minimum plus .50 an hour. It was a buyer’s market.
I sat that market out in school. The wife and I went to school full time while working part time and raising two children. It was challenging.
It’s not the crisis’ that get you. It is the day to day grind that wears you down.
I remember those days.
“strong unions, high taxes on the rich, huge public investments, and an expanding social safety net”
Mildly socialistic fascism, you mean?
“The idea, famously, was that a rising tide would lift all boats.”
You mean, like that booming post-war economy which caused reduced inequality? You know, the one you just mentioned?
Good bit on the reality that Milei is up against, and would likewise confront Trump if he wins again.
I suspect that Milei will learn, as Trump did, that reform isn’t an option because the system isn’t really broken. It’s working exactly as intended.
You need secret death squads to take out the obstructionist bureaucrats.
You need
secretpublic death squads to take out the obstructionist bureaucrats.No, that’s easily spinnable in the PR battle.
If the bureaucrats know they might get disappeared and don’t know who’s actually coming for them, they’ll be more tractable.
“obstructionist bureaucrats”
But you repeat yourself.
Regardless, that’s more “mass grave” than “death squad”.
You might only need to kill a few, pour encourager les autres.
Yeah, the quibble I have is intended. I think it is more an emergent phenomenon, made worse by good intentions of course. The Sadbeard piece accepted the premise that the bureaucracy is broken – it was just chock full of good ideas that would make it worse.
One answer is that American voters abandoned the system that worked for their grandparents.
The transformation from an agricultural to an industrial economy? Was there a vast “back to the land” movement when I wasn’t looking?
And one where we were pretty much left alone in the world with the ability to do so after two world wars.
Fyre Festival for boomers?
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/three-year-cruise-canceled/index.html
“They also lamented the loss of community that had been built in the run-up to the cruise: “I was looking forward to building friendships – that’s what made it different from a regular cruise. We were all of the same mindset and all started with the same thing in common.””
Alternative scenario: You’re stuck on ship for three years with an annoying loon who won’t leave you alone.
Where do you go for a vacation then?
Pay 5K for a weeks desk job in Atlanta?
They had three year cruises when I was growing up. But we called it “The Navy”.
My parents made exactly that comparison.
I was just impressed that they knew what Fyre Festival was…
The path out of our chaotic present to a new political-economic consensus is hard to imagine.
If only we could be more like Sweden.
Notorious antisemite
Elon Musk visited Israel Monday, meeting the country’s leaders and walking through a kibbutz destroyed by Hamas last month as he tried to calm outrage caused by his endorsement of an anti-semitic post on his social media platform, X.
Musk was taken to Kfar Azza — one of the kibbutzim attacked on October 7 — by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The kibbutz was the home of Abigail Edan, a four-year-old American dual citizen abducted by the militant group that day and released Sunday.
In a live online conversation on X with Netanyahu Monday, Musk agreed with the prime minister that Israel must destroy Hamas.
“Those who are intent on murder must be neutralized. Then the propaganda must stop,” Musk said. “They’re just training people to be murderers.”
He also said Gaza must be made “prosperous.”
“If (all) that happens, I think it will be a good future,” he said. “I’d love to help.”
——-
The billionaire’s visit to Israel comes more than a week after he agreed with the claim that Jewish communities push “hatred against Whites,” leading to a rebuke from the White House and a major exodus of advertisers on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
In an X post earlier this month, one user had accused Jewish communities of “pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.” The post also referenced “hordes of minorities” flooding Western countries, a popular antisemitic conspiracy theory.
In response, Musk said: “You have said the actual truth.”
The antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jews want to bring undocumented minority populations into Western countries to reduce White majorities in those nations has been espoused by online hate groups.
That sounds like something Donald Trump would say.
What would a South African know about multi-racial societies, anyway?
Everyone holding hands and singing kumbaya if I remember my history correctly.
Can I still buy the world a coke?
The post also referenced “hordes of minorities” flooding Western countries, a popular antisemitic conspiracy theory.
Wait – exactly how is that antisemitic when that is generally consider Islamophobic?
It’s the Jews what dun it. Or something.
Even before the latest tumult, X had faced criticism for the prevalence of antisemitic discourse on its platform. Organizations including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Center for Countering Digital Hate had reported an increase in hate speech on X over the past year — findings that Musk had either criticized or denied.
Disagreeing with the ADL is by definition antisemitism.
Please bring to my attention the first time the Center for Countering Digital Hate notes the decline in it’s raison d’etre.
It’s the Jews what dun it. Or something.
</em.
Something something vast Zionist conspiracy.
A conspiracy of tags.
Oh shit, I am dead.
In sidebar.
Never seen it, now I feel like I should.
Um, out of curiosity, not because I’m a serial killer … as far as you know.
That’s exactly what a serial killer would say.
Speaking of Wednesday stories….
Hunter’s favorite holiday!
https://babylonbee.com/news/san-francisco-residents-gather-downtown-for-annual-lighting-of-giant-crack-pipe
Stay classy, Atlanta. Sigh.
Everything said about that movie is true. I had to watch it 100 times with my young daughter. So creepy, so wrong.