The Mountain Monarch

For more than 30 years I'd dreamed it would be just like this. The kind of grizzly I'd always wanted was feeding on a moose kill in a little valley. A cold wind rippled his rich fur, and it was just a matter of closing the distance a bit, settling into a steady shot, and the bear was mine.

At this point the dream and reality diverged. We were on the ridge above him, hidden by the roll of the slope, even our sound masked by howling wind and blowing snow. We were also in a total standoff. From where we stood, there was no way we could spook the bear, but we couldn't shoot him, either. The distance and gale-force winds made for an impossible shot, and there was no cover to allow us to sneak closer.

We stood on the ridge for a long time, peering over the roll of the slope and studying the bear. He had covered his kill with brush and snow and now was lying on top of the mound, preventing it from freezing. As long as we didn't do anything stupid to spook him, he would stay with his moose. But he had more time than we did.

We were a long way from our spike camp, and the weather was terrible. It wasn't especially cold--yet--but the wind chill was severe and snow was falling fast. The wind was left to right, so we could circle to the right and try a different approach, but we couldn't see what that would buy us. There was just no cover.

Alaskan Master Guide Dave Leonard is my old friend and, in many settings, my peer and colleague. In his Alaska he is very much my guide and mentor. We agreed we needed to cut the distance in half, and decided to go for it, hoping for a little help from our snow camouflage and a lot more from the wind and snow. One step at a time, single file on snowshoes, we started down the open slope directly toward the bear.

In the spring of 1974, on the last day of a grizzly hunt in southern British Columbia's Kootenays, I killed my first grizzly, a beautiful silvertip boar. It was not a big bear, but I didn't care then and I don't much care now; it was a difficult uphill stalk through deep snow, a tough shot and a photo finish to a great hunt. In the three decades since then, I've wanted a big mountain grizzly, but it turned out to be much more difficult than I expected.

Over the years I have taken genuinely huge coastal bears on both the Alaskan and Kamchatka peninsulas. But a big grizzly consistently eluded me, although I was neither consistent nor persistent in my search for one.