Fred Bear and the Stone Sheep No Bowhunter Had Ever Killed

Commercial flight out of Grayling, Michigan. Through Seattle and Vancouver to Prince George. Then a chartered floatplane north for a four hour run into the British Columbia bush. The plane set down on Coldfish Lake, roughly 150 miles east of Telegraph Creek. A stretch of country so remote that before regular flying service the only way in was an eight-day packtrain journey out of Telegraph Creek itself.

Fred had not come this far for caribou or goat or grizzly. He had come for Stone sheep. The darkest of the four North American sheep species. Animals that lived in some of the most vertical and unforgiving terrain on the continent and had never, as far as the record books showed, been taken by a bowhunter.

Fred intended to be the first.

His party included Elisha Bud Gray, an accomplished Michigan bowhunter. Ed Henkel, a fellow archer from Detroit. And Kenneth Knick Knickerbocker, a longtime bowhunter from Virginia. Outfitter Tommy Walker and his partner Rusty Russell ran the operation out of a base camp on the lake with Indian guides, wranglers, and their families. These were serious men. Closing the distance to bow range was the whole point for all of them. Not just the kill. The stalk.

The country made that kind of hunting possible. Towering granite peaks. Glacier-fed streams. Tundra thick with mountain ash and blueberries. Willow flats where ptarmigan and moose moved through cover. A landscape built for patience. The kind where a hunter could glass for hours and see everything except the one animal he came for.

Which was exactly Fred's problem in the early days of the hunt.

Bud Gray connected first. A full curl Dall-class trophy and later a mountain goat. Knick put a well-placed arrow into a goat bedded below a rimrock ledge. Fred and his guide Charles Quock spent full days in the saddle glassing slope after slope. Goats. Grizzlies. Moose. A pale rock outcrop mistaken for a sheep more than once. But not a single Stone ram. Not even an old ewe.

By the end of one long empty day Fred had started wondering whether he ought to abandon his singleness of purpose and just take whatever legal game presented itself rather than risk going home without a shot fired.

Then the mountains gave him something that changed everything.

Glassing across a valley with Quock, Fred spotted nine Stone rams moving single file along a shale slide toward what looked like an impassable wall of rimrock. The rams did not slow down. One by one they hit a narrow vertical crevice in the cliff face, barely eight feet wide and sixty feet tall, and began bounding diagonally from one tiny foothold to the next, ricocheting up the crack until each animal topped out on the rim above.

Fred and Quock could only watch. There was no way to follow. But something about that moment left Fred certain, in the way hunters sometimes are without evidence, that the run of empty days was about to turn.

It very nearly did not.

The next real chance came almost by accident. Fred and Quock had ridden far up a creek chasing a moose that came to nothing and had stopped for lunch on a side drainage when they noticed a pale patch on a distant slope. Fred assumed it was a rock until the spotting scope showed otherwise. Full curl, Quock said quietly. Lunch was forgotten.

What followed was a long grinding climb that ended in disappointment. The ram spooked before Fred could get set. A rushed 60-yard shot sailed past without connecting. The ram bolted straight up the mountain and stood watching them from 400 yards above. A gap that, as Fred noted afterward, is exactly the kind of range that humbles an archer used to working close.

Rather than give up the two men pushed on, circling toward the top to cut the ram off on the far side. Along the way they blundered into two separate bands of sheep they had no business spooking. First three rams bedded in a hollow, then a group of seven that scattered the moment the hunters topped a ridge. But Fred had eyes only for the big ram and Quock kept urging him forward. Fred was gasping in the thin mountain air, having flown almost straight from his office chair with no time to condition for altitude. He kept pace largely on stubbornness. He later reflected that the physical grind of sheep hunting has less to do with the species than with the ground it lives on.

The chase finally came down to a single ridge.

Fred and Quock crept up the far side and found the ram standing roughly 40 yards off, facing them almost head-on. Aware by then that he was being followed. It is the shot no bowhunter wants. A narrow target with only a few inches of margin between a clean hit and a wounding one. Fred's instinct was to hold off entirely. But Quock, reading the moment differently, urged him to take it before the ram bolted for good.

Fred later confided that the pressure of the moment mattered as much as the animal did. The thought of hesitating after that much effort, and disappointing the guide who had pushed him the whole way, tipped the decision. He drew his 67-pound bow and lofted the arrow deliberately high, trying to drop it over the ridgeline and into the ram's chest before either of them lost sight of the target. The arrow vanished mid-arc exactly as the ram's head dropped from view.

For a moment Fred was certain he had sent it too low. He had not.

Quock crested the ridge first and called back that there was blood. A heavy trail leading down the far slope. The ram had run only about 60 yards before dying on its feet, coming to rest jammed against a rock partway down a shale slide.

What they found exceeded anything Fred had hoped for. The ram dressed out at well over 250 pounds. Unbroomed horns carrying a 41-inch curl and a 27-inch spread. It was the first Stone sheep ever taken by a bowhunter and it went on to stand as a world record for the weapon.

The wound told its own story about the shot Fred had been so uncertain of. The arrow had caught a major vein in the neck, skated between rib cage and shoulder blade, shed its insert blade along the way, and exited cleanly behind the front leg. A devastating path for an arrow thrown almost blind over a ridgeline at a head-on target. Fred called it, without qualification, the best shot he expected he would ever make. He also doubted he would ever be able to repeat it.

The very next morning a grizzly showed up on the mountainside across from camp.

Fred did not bother to hunt it. The sheep, he said, was enough.

What makes this hunt worth knowing is not just the record book entry. It is the honesty in how Fred described getting there. He was not shy about the run of bad days. The moment he considered giving up on sheep altogether. The fact that the shot itself was one he might not have taken alone without a guide pushing him to commit. That is a different picture than the polished, self-assured archery pioneer most of us picture when his name comes up.

Fred Bear was not just a great shot. He was a man who kept going when the mountain gave him every reason to quit. Who trusted his guide when his own instincts said to wait. Who lofted an arrow blind over a ridgeline and found blood on the other side.

That is what made him Fred Bear.