"Dispatch for a Wounded Bear"

Larry Lewis and a partner relax after dispatching a bear that had been wounded in a defense-of-life-and-property shooting.

DISPATCH FOR A WOUNDED BEAR

June 2009

The brown bear sow had been shot in the face and in the backside by a fisherman along Russian River. When the bear hurried off into the brush, ushering her three butterball cubs ahead of her, someone called the Soldotna office of the Alaska Department of Fish & Game, and within a short time Larry Lewis was picking his way through the alders in search of an animal he was expected to put out of its misery, while simultaneously protecting the public.

Lewis, a wildlife technician with ADFG, was accompanied by two officers from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Lewis was on point, acting as tracker, occasionally down on his hands and knees, alert for a blood trail or crushed vegetation that might indicate the passage of the wounded animal. Behind him were the other two men, their eyes casting out to the periphery, alert especially to the sides and behind them.

What the three men didn’t know, as they worked their way up the brushy side of a mountain, was that the sow had urged her cubs up a tree and then reversed course on the trackers.

“She circled around and got downwind of us,” Lewis recalled. “She circled around on us and was watching her back trail. She was laying down. She was hunting.” Lying flat and facing forward, she was awaiting her opportunity. Fortunately for the men, who had already passed her when she rose to all fours in the brush only eight feet away, they were prepared.

“I just saw her out of my peripheral vision,” Lewis said. “She stood up, and the guy that was standing there was looking directly at her. As I turned around, he was already shooting. He had a semi-automatic rifle, and he brought it up and just shot three quick times. I just had time enough to turn and shoot twice, too.”

They fired at “center mass,” the biggest target offered by the animal, and she went down quickly. 

 That’s the way Lewis likes it—quick and merciful, as humane as possible—but he doesn’t like it when a wounded bear gets that close.

Usually, he said, a wounded bear tries to flee the area, tries to escape whatever “bad experience” it has just endured—a defense-of-life-and-property shooting, most commonly—but occasionally it can turn the tables on the trackers. And that is when Lewis prefers to be in the company of another tracker he knows well and trusts.

With the department since 1993, Lewis honed his tracking skills with long-time ADFG biologist Ted Spraker. For the last several years, since Spraker’s retirement, Lewis has been tracking with ADFG wildlife biologist Jeff Selinger, with whom he has developed a special rapport on the trail.

“You can’t pick up a manual and read how to do this,” he said. “You kind of develop things, and you develop even your working relationships. Jeff and I could be at each other’s throat and angry at each other that day, but when we get called out on a bear call like that, we’re like married. We’re one hundred percent there for each other, and we’re in synch.”

Such synchronous behavior and thinking has served them well, as they are called out numerous times each year to dispatch animals that have been shot but not killed—and sometimes to take care of unhurt bears that are perceived as threatening human lives.

“I kind of look at us as sort of like a fireman,” Lewis said. “We’re here doing public service work, you know, phone calls, walk-ins, emails, all that kind of stuff, until the phone rings. Something bad’s going on, and you’re out the door and running. The next thing you know, you’re out literally crawling through the pucker brush, looking for a wounded brown bear. You never know what you’re going to be doing.

“I love it. You can rest in the grave. It keeps you young.”

On the trail, Lewis prefers to pack a Remington Model 870 12-gauge pump-action shotgun loaded with 1¼-ounce Brenneke slugs, forged of lead alloyed to a small percentage of antimony to harden the load and help it remain intact as it penetrates the body of a bear.

Brenneke slug extracted from a bear kill. Note the higher retention of original mass.

In his department office, Lewis has an old Brenneke slug that he extracted from a bear he shot. Careful weighing of the slug showed that 472 of its original 500 grains remained after passing through the bear and lodging in the thick hide on its backside. Lewis referred to such weight retention as “incredible,” and said that such a slug, traveling out of the muzzle of his gun at 1,500 feet per second, is capable of inflicting maximum damage, which is essential when dealing with powerful, dangerous animals in close quarters.

“When we go out and deal with an animal, it’s not a hunting situation,” Lewis said. “We’re going out with the intention of putting an animal down. It’s not like we’re going to get up close to it, and we’re going to try to figure out what we’re going to do when we get there.

“We’re (also) not worrying about trying to preserve the meat and all those sorts of things. We want to stop the threat.”

The trackers do, however, make every attempt possible to salvage meat from the animals they dispatch. ADFG works with the State Troopers to donate the meat to people who need it, or to organizations that can use it. Sometimes, salvaging the meat is not practical—for instance, the meat from a bear shot in an isolated area or in especially difficult terrain.

Also a matter of practicality may be the fate of any cubs involved. ADFG’s Permitting Section in Juneau usually has a plan in place for the acquisition of a certain number of cubs—for zoos or other institutions—and when officers go into the field on a bear call, they know whether any cubs can be saved.

Another aspect of keeping the cubs alive, versus euthanizing them, involves their age. Cubs born in that year are usually too young to survive on their own, and those that might survive are likely, according to Lewis, to do so by relying on humans. Such reliance often produces “nuisance bears,” and nuisance bears are often shot at in defense of life and property.

In the case of the three cubs up in a tree on a mountainside above Russian River, the department had no plan in place for them, so they were killed by the officers. Lewis considered the killings the most practical and most humane action to take. “I think it would have been less humane to leave them there,” he said. “There are no nice deaths in nature.”

Lewis said that the hunt for a wounded bear may take a few minutes—usually when the bear has simply wandered off a short distance and died—but can also take several hours. The hunt can be complicated by the density of the brush and difficulty of the terrain, by the weather and the amount of ambient light, by the extent of the bear’s injuries and how badly it is bleeding, and even by officer fatigue, biting bugs, wind direction, and area noise.

Generally, however, “we sneak up on them,” Lewis said. “We’re really close before that animal realizes we’re there.”

Larry Lewis.

In more than a decade of dispatching wounded bears, Lewis and his accompanying officers have avoided getting hurt because of a combination of preparedness, caution and good fortune.

“I won’t glamorize it,” Lewis said. “But I won’t negate the danger, either. It’s the real deal. I go home at night after dealing with one of these (situations), and I’m ready to put my feet up and have a glass of scotch and go to bed early. Because it drains you.

“We’re not just focused on that bear. We’re all focused on getting home safe, too.”