Lewis

“There’s a bear! There’s a bear!! It’s got a cub! It’s GOT A CUB!”

That’s how my fall bear season started. We had just closed the gate and were headed to the top of the ridge. My friend Troy was driving and I was watching the road ahead with my fingers gripping the seat like always when he starts up a mountain road.

He slammed on the brakes and I bailed out with the camera to get a shot over the hood of the truck.

She was a good momma. I was proud of her. She sent that little black ball of fluff up the tree and it never once looked our way, just watched his momma. Who was watching us. She stood up on her back legs — she had a white patch on her chest — and put a small fir tree between us.

Then she barked something at the cub and he skittered down the tree and the pair skedaddled uphill and into the blackberries. Life is hard for little bears because they are on the menu for every big male bear in the neighborhood. And that little bear knew it.

As for me and Troy, our bear hunt was already successful as far as we were concerned. We had gone looking for bears and we found two. Now we could pick blackberries and look for the big bear that has been eluding us now for several years.

This season I was hoping to bag a bear with my father-in-law’s old Marlin 45-70 lever-action guide gun. Way back in 1985 I started hanging around with a curly-haired girl from Clackamas, Oregon, and sometimes I would stop in the Gun Broker in Clackamas and ogle the six-shooters. One day the proprietor picked up a Marlin lever gun off the shelf and handed it over to me for closer inspection. The next week the curly-haired girl’s father showed me his new rifle, the very same Marlin the red-headed gun broker had tried to sell me. I couldn’t afford it — I was not a gun broker, I was a broke gunner. My future father-in-law went on to extol the virtues of the 45-70 and I was happy to listen as long as we weren’t talking about my virtues.

Since then the Marlin has been passed down to me and has helped turn a buffalo and a couple of my biggest black bears into steaks and burgers.

The lever-action is the quintessential gun of the Northwest woods, and while it isn’t always the right choice, sometimes it is the ONLY choice.

Up in a tree stand in Minnesota in September, when the temperature hovered around 95 degrees, I was glad I had a quick handling lever gun in my lap. The bear came in fast, on the trail I had walked in on, and, its head up and on a swivel, it headed straight for my tree. Now, I had to lean over to get the angle on it and, with the hammer eared back, stood partway up and fired almost straight down, the bullet striking between the boar’s shoulders. It spun and I fired twice more, as fast as I could throw the lever.

A mile away my friend Rod thought someone was shooting a semi-auto.

“Couldn’t be Gary, not with that lever gun,” he said later.

I walked up on the bear and turned it over, a thick black coat, scars on its nose from fighting. I had had no time to decide whether or not it was big enough to shoot, I just didn’t want it coming up my tree.

I’ll be taking bear steaks to camp this week and I still have my Oregon fall bear tag in pocket. Last week I found fresh scat from that big boar we have been hunting and maybe we’ll get a chance. Me and that old Marlin.