Into brown bear country
The year was 1962. Fred Bear did not fly into a lodge. There was no Internet. No satellite phone. No safety net of any kind.
He boarded a 45-foot boat called the Valiant Maid in Cordova, Alaska with two hunting partners and a guide named Ed Bilderback who knew these waters the way most men know their own driveway. They headed north into some of the most remote coastline on earth. Brown bear country. The real kind. A place where the rugged peaks and their flanks of massive fir, cedar and Sitka spruce confront the Pacific in a way that makes a man feel genuinely small for the first time in his life.
The Alaskan coast in spring is not a place that welcomes you. Storm-driven swells pounded the hull crossing Shelikof Strait, forty miles of open water between Kodiak Island and the mainland that has swallowed ships and taken lives for as long as men have been foolish enough to cross it. Rain that never fully stopped. Tides that rose and fell twenty feet in a day leaving beds of slick kelp and black volcanic sand where the ocean used to be. The skiff had to be bailed constantly. At one point the bail itself sprung a leak. Nobody seemed particularly concerned about this.
This was not a hunting trip. This was an expedition into one of the last genuinely wild places left on the continent.
Life on the Valiant Maid
Between the crossings and the storms the men lived on the boat and made the most of what the country offered. They pulled Dungeness crab from traps on the ocean floor. Dug razor clams from the beach with long-nosed shovels the locals called clam guns, racing the tide and the clams burrowing faster than a man can dig. They stalked Canadian honkers in quiet sedgefield estuaries and came back to the Valiant Maid with enough geese for a proper feast. They watched glaciers calving into the sea with a sound like distant artillery. Finback whales surfacing in the distance. Sea otters floating on their backs in the cold green water. A red fox on the beach that had apparently never seen a human being and was not entirely sure what to make of one.
Between all of it Fred sharpened broadheads. Shot practice arrows at plastic disks tossed overboard from the deck watching a growing collection of colored feathers bob in the dark water behind the boat. Glassed miles of wild shoreline looking for the dark shape of a bear working the beach at low tide. Bilderback moved the boat at one speed only. Full ahead.
The Kodiak bear had been on this coast since the Pleistocene age. In country this remote they had never needed to fear much of anything. The coastal streams ran thick with spawning salmon from July through October and a bear could gorge itself through the season on nothing but fish. They were the largest flesh-eating land mammal on earth and in this country they knew it.
Fred spent his days in the skiff running the coastline. Following fresh tracks pressed deep into the black volcanic sand. Learning the terrain the hard way. On foot. In the rain. One careful mile at a time. He found fresh hat-sized tracks on a black sand beach and limbered up by shooting a few blunt tipped arrows into the end of a driftwood log.
The morning on the beach
Then came the morning on the beach.
Binoculars picked up the bear across the bay. Even from that distance the field glasses confirmed it. Big. Really big. Fred and Bilderback crossed the bay in the skiff, rowing instead of motoring to keep quiet, and made the shore without being seen. They moved carefully along the beach with the wind in their faces.
Between them and the bear fate had placed a single glacial boulder.
They reached it just as the bear appeared.Twenty feet.
Fred Bear. A 65-pound Kodiak recurve. And twenty feet of open beach between him and one of the most dangerous animals on the planet. The bear came straight toward them. Looked right at them. Could not make out what it was seeing with those notoriously poor bear eyes and turned to continue down the shore.
Fred waited until the angle was right. Drew the bow smooth and back to anchor. Released.
The arrow buried itself just behind the front shoulder driving deep into the chest cavity. The bear lunged forward and ran hard down the beach. But its hindquarters were already fading. It fell at the edge of the alders less than a hundred yards from where the arrow hit. One arrow. Fifteen seconds. A single Bear Razorhead through the lungs and it was done.
They spent nearly an hour skinning it on the beach. The hide and head alone made a pack close to two hundred pounds. Bilderback shouldered it and sank ankle deep in the black sand with every step back to the skiff. The early spring pelt was long and in perfect condition.
As the Valiant Maid turned back toward home port Fred was already talking to Bilderback about coming back the following spring for an even bigger bear.
The man who built this world
That is Fred Bear. The hunt was never quite finished. There was always more country to see and more animals to chase and more distance to close with a stick bow in his hand and a broadhead sharp enough to do the job.This is the man who built the traditional
bowhunting world every one of us grew up in. Before Fred Bear there were no archery hunting seasons. No Bear Razorheads. No blueprint for what this life could look like. He drew that map himself. One hunt at a time. In country that asked everything of him and got it.
He did not do it from behind a fence or inside a blind or at distances that kept him comfortable. He closed the distance. Every time. On the most dangerous game on the continent. With a stick bow and a broadhead and whatever he was made of when the moment arrived.
We could all stand to be a little more Fred Bear.
Fred Bear hunted Alaska the way it was meant to be hunted. Closed the distance. One arrow. No excuses. That's the same country we built Vol. 1 around. If you haven't read it, this is where Trad Hunters started.