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A hunter from Sedgwick, Maine discovered himself a bonus buck final weekend when he shot a hefty black bear that was working over a whitetail carcass. He didn’t understand his luck till he approached the downed bear, which he killed with one shot from his .308.
Sam Allen had been deer searching on Nov. 4 when he kicked up a buck within the space. He took a shot however missed, which he confirmed after two hours of looking for a blood path, he tells Outside Life. He left the realm hoping the buck was nonetheless close by and determined to return the next Saturday to hunt. As he labored down the identical steep draw, he noticed a big black bear.
“I used to be attempting to go the identical route I went earlier than, so I used to be stopping and listening and seeing if that deer would mess up once more,” Allen says. “I got here round a nook and noticed black, and I wasn’t certain if it was a bear or not. Then I noticed it shifting, and I knew it wasn’t a cub. I really like bear meat, and I’d take that over a deer any day.”
Allen shouldered his .308 Thompson and fired a 150-grain bullet. The bear dropped the place it stood.
“I used to be stunned, as a result of that was the primary bear I’ve ever shot that simply dropped in his tracks,” Allen says. “Often they run off, however I don’t know if this one was so heavy that he simply was finished, or if I hit one thing adequate to finish him proper there.”
Allen waited a couple of minutes earlier than approaching the boar. He messaged his pal Tyler and mentioned he’d need assistance packing it out. When Allen ultimately walked all the way down to the bear, he realized it had been pawing at a whitetail carcass. Trying nearer, he noticed it wasn’t only a younger buck with a couple of spindly tines. The large 8-point had strong most important beams that palmated into thick tips about the ends.
Allen questioned if it may need been the buck he shot on the week prior, however after additional investigation he concluded it wasn’t. After climbing again out to gather some gear and a four-wheeler, Allen and three mates started the lengthy extraction course of. Allen needed to haul the monstrous bear carcass out intact, however his mates assured him that such a transfer wasn’t bodily attainable. They must costume the bear out and forfeit getting a reside weight.
Allen’s one razor blade on his replaceable knife snapped in half when he tried to chop into the disguise, and not one of the different guys introduced one other knife. One pal had a boxcutter, which Allen used to decorate out the bear. The foursome hauled the bear up the hill on a sled, which required a number of breaks. Finally, they bought it to a four-wheeler, which Allen had hauled to the realm on a 12-foot trailer hooked as much as his Toyota Prius.
The dressed black bear tipped the dimensions at 332 kilos. It’s not exceptional for grownup boars to succeed in 400-plus kilos, and the Maine Division of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife says bears within the state may even attain 600 kilos. (Common-sized black bears are nearer to 200 to 300 kilos.) A 350-pound black bear clothes out at roughly 210 kilos and produces 140-plus kilos of intestine pile, in accordance with the Alaska Division of Fish and Recreation. Meaning Allen’s bear probably weighed upwards of 480 kilos earlier than they dressed it.
As soon as Allen and his mates had extracted and weighed the black bear, Allen went again all the way down to the scene with a recreation warden to research the deer kill. He concluded the carcass had been there for lower than per week and didn’t have any bullet holes, which alleviated Allen’s stress that he may need killed that buck in spite of everything. The warden gave him a carcass tag and Allen took solely the pinnacle out. He says he is taking it to Cassida’s Taxidermy to get it mounted with the bear in a design that replicates the scene he stumbled upon.
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“I’m going to have the bear on high of a mud pile with the deer head protruding, however the bear’s going to be standing up on high of it with one paw up and his mouth open, as if he’s guarding the pile from one thing,” Allen says. “The man goes to enter it in competitions.”
Going ahead, Allen suspects he’ll by no means have one other searching expertise fairly like this one.
“I can attempt to beat this, but it surely’ll be laborious,” he says. He emphasizes how a lot it means to work laborious for a harvest, and that discovering the bear felt extra like luck than anything. “But it surely was fairly cool. It was actually cool to have my mates there.”
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