Written By: Luke Merickel. Richfield, MN
A fresh blanket of snow had fallen earlier that morning. The past two days, we enjoyed snow free ruffed grouse hunting which is a treat in the late November woods of Northern MN. It was a Sunday morning and time to head back to Minneapolis to prepare for the work week ahead. (Shells and kibble need to be paid for somehow). We slept in, had a nice breakfast, loaded the dogs and my fiancé in the truck and hit the road. Unbeknownst to her, I had a quick cover picked out to hit on our way out. I had marked this cover two summers prior on a failed fishing expedition when I couldn’t help but notice from the road a 2018 cut bordering a 2006 cut all surrounded by some swampy lowlands. There was plenty of young aspen with conifers mixed in and it looked grousey. My fiancé riding shotgun was so engrossed in her crossword puzzle she failed to notice me pull off the main drag and was startled when I pulled off the side of the road at my chosen cover. “A quick 30-minute hunt” I told her. She replies “Okay. Which dog are you taking?”
I collared up Randy my 5-year-old Irish Red and White Setter, set a timer and stepped into the cover. If she was kind enough to not give me any grief about my hunting pit stop, the least I could do was stick to the agreed upon 30-minute timeframe. But, she was really into that crossword so I figured I had at least 45 minutes if not an hour before she’d start to worry.
After weaving through a good portion of the cover with not a single point, nor a single flush, and not even cutting a single grouse track in the fresh snow my time was dwindling and I was really beginning to doubt my ability to pick late season grouse covers. Then I see Randy my setter at 30 yards cut hard to his left, briefly stop, start again, and slam into a point along the edge of a low spot full of tag alders. “Finally,” I said to myself. I hustled up to the dog and swung wide to his right out into the tag alder mess trying to set my self up for a decent shooting angle. No bird erupted yet the dog was still staunch as could be. At this point I was maybe 20 yards ahead of the dog and I decided to walk straight back at him thinking that maybe the bird was holding super tight in the thick cover. That’s when I saw a small patch of dark hair on the ground about 15 feet in front of the dog. “What is that?” I said to myself. “A raccoon, an opossum, God forbid a porcupine maybe?” The furry creature started to move a bit and I saw the tannish muzzle first and my heart dropped. What I thought was a small furry mammal was in fact just the back of the head of a bear. The bruin was curled up on the ground like a sleeping dog. His giant body had been obscured by the shallow divet he had dug up against the root mass of an uprooted tree. His head was up, and he had been staring back at my dog before he turned his head to look at me.
Now I had a predicament. I had a dog on point 5 paces from a semi-sleepy mature black bear and said bear was also directly in-between me and my dog blocking my path to the dog. I let out a low but firm “woah” to keep that dog steady. Generally, I don’t “woah” a dog that is already stopped but I couldn’t afford for him to take a step. He could have been on that bear in a second if he broke. With my 16-gauge double in one hand and e-collar controller in the other ready to stimulate that dog if he broke, I began to circle back the way I had come. Navigating the thick cover made what probably only took 45 seconds feel like 5 minutes. I think I said “woah” a few more times as I worked my way back around and up to the dog approaching from his rear and slipping my left hand under his collar. All this time the bear just stared at the dog and the dog stared back at the bear.
Now all three of us were stuck in time staring at each other. A 135-pound man holding a 60-pound setter by the collar a mere 15 feet from a 300 pound bear whose mouth was open yet wasn’t making any noise. I couldn’t walk backwards as the cover was too thick, and I surely wasn’t turning my back to that bear. After about 15 seconds of this staring contest, the bear began to stir. He groggily pulled himself to his feet, turning away from us, walked two shaky steps and ran off crashing through the cover.
A feeling of relief rushed over me. I waited a few minutes to let that bear get some distance on us, released the dog, and we hunted our way straight out of the cover back to the road. While walking the road back to the truck, I cut a set of grouse tracks going into the other side of the cover. I decided to leave that bird alone.
This encounter occurred in the Bowstring State Forest not from the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe’s tribal lands. Now having recently finished reading Brown Dog by Jim Harrison I can’t help but wonder if this bear encounter has some deeper spiritual significance for me. It occurred on land historically occupied by the Anishinaabe a people’s whose culture highly reveres the black bear. I asked my fiancé about this, and she replied with “maybe you just stumbled upon a bear and that’s all there is to it.” If Jim was still living, I think I’d send him a letter asking for his thoughts on the matter.
