Well I bagged another bear this year. I found an area with a ton of sign while mountain biking and paid it a couple visits over the last month. The first time I tried using a predator call. After an hour or so of calling at a couple different spots I confirmed there was a bear in the area when it went boogying away from me on the other side of the valley. After that I became a bit less convinced in my calling ability and figured that I'd try some other options rather than continuing to imagine I could call one into my lap.
Yesterday evening a buddy and I went back up to the area and still hunted into the wind. After I spooked something big out of the valley(moose, big bear, cow?) I kinda gave up and was waiting for my buddy to catch up.
At one point I glanced over my shoulder and saw a 3-4 year old bear cruising down the decommissioned road toward me about 80 yards away with his head down. I've had a couple recent bad experiences with wounding and losing game so decided to duck down behind some bushes and see how close he'd come rather than take a quick and jittery offhand shot.
He popped into view 20 yards in front of me and a shot to the chest dropped him. He's not the largest bear but I still spent the next 10 minutes shaking from the excitement of it all. It was a very cool experience. I've got a bloody grip and grin of him but it kinda seems like the picture dumbs down the event so I'll leave it to your imagination. Plus I'm a lot uglier than the Rev's cute daughter so I can't compete with that.
