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| Bears on elk carcass |
On this year's elk hunt we saw a lot of bears. We saw quite a few while hiking, 2 claimed our elk 'leftovers', and we even had a brave audacious bear try to get at our elk meat while we were cutting it up inside my house back at Kodiak. And yet we did not lose any elk meat to the bears. We actually have not lost any meat to bears in the 21 years of the elk hunt, and I hope to keep it that way! (fingers crossed)
This year we shot 2 elk a long ways from the boat, and it took 3 days to pack it all out. We set up a meat cache where we shot the elk, and to protect it from bears we set up an electric fence around it. We also put another electric fence around our camp. At the cache we put spruce boughs on the ground to help keep the meat dry and set up a tarp tent over it to keep off the the rain and snow (yes it did snow). We usually set up our meat cache a 1/2 mile or so away from the kill site, but this year we shot them so late in the day that we did not have the time schlepp the meat so far away to cache. Hence our initial meat cache was only 100 yards or so from the elk carcasses.
This was not ideal, and indeed when did return from our first trip to the boat we found that 2 bears had claimed the butchered elk carcasses. But the electric fence had kept them out of our meat cache. Still it was a little nerve wracking packing up the meat cache and sneaking back around the bears to our camp. We set up a new meat cache right next to our camp for the final night in the field.
On our final night there was a glorious sunset and we watched the 2 bears fight over the elk carcasses down below us. They had a tug of war with the hide, and we could hear them crunch the bones. But they wanted nothing to do with us, our pepper spray, and electric fences!
Back on Kodiak we hung the elk meat in my barn and since there have been a lot of bears in town we did not throw the elk scraps over the cliff, and we kept the leftover elk bones in a cooler for making bone broth. Despite our precautions a bear showed up and tried to get into the house. He even stood up and batted at a window. But we all flooded out of the house with our pepper spray and the bear backed off. After that we set up an electric fence around the barn to protect the meat inside. We had no further bear problems!
Patrick
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| Moving the meat cache to near camp and keeping wary eye on the bears to our left |
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| Bears on the elk carcasses as seen from camp |
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| Setting up the meat cache |
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| Electric fence around the cached elk meat |
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| Bear paw print on the outside of Stuey's bedroom window |
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