Of Bear, Bow & Buck
by Associate Editor Ray Kennedy
Big Game Hunter Fred Bear remembers the moment clearly. It was 1933, the first day of the Michigan deer hunting season, and he was deep in the wilds of the Porcupine Mountains. "I crept out unto a creek bank," he recalls, "and about 100 yards upstream stood a deer. I raised my rifle and shot it. That was it: the season was just an hour old, and I already had my limit. Right there I decided to give up my gun hunting. It was too darned easy."
"The bow hunter is accurate at only 30 yards or less," explains Bear. "Getting that close to a wild animal is like trying to sneak into Fort Knox. And that's the fun of it. It's not the kill; that's always anticlimatic. It's the tracking, the learning of the way of the woods' creatures." ...
Now 67, Bear is the Natty Bumppo of the bow to 7,500,000 U.S. archers. In his home town of Grayling, Michigan, the chief industry is the Bear Archery Company. ... Though Bear has stopped a four-ton bull elephant with a single arrow, shot polar bear in the Arctic and Bengal tiger in the jungles of India, he claims that the "wariest, craftiest and hardest game of all to hunt is the white-tailed deer of North America."
The story continues with a day by day account of his seven day hunt on St. Martin Island, "an uninhabited, densely wooded patch in Lake Huron that stands as a kind of moated fortress of the white-tail."
A picture of Bear on the hunt, reminiscent of the cover of the original Archer's Bible, has this caption: "It's not the kill, it's the creatures.