A hunter from Sedgwick, Maine found himself a bonus buck last weekend when he shot a hefty black bear that was working over a whitetail carcass. He didn\u2019t realize his luck until he approached the downed bear, which he killed with one shot from his .308.<\/p>\n
Sam Allen had been deer hunting on Nov. 4 when he kicked up a buck in the area. He took a shot but missed, which he confirmed after two hours of searching for a blood trail, he tells Outdoor Life<\/em>. He left the area hoping the buck was still nearby and decided to return the following Saturday to hunt. As he worked down the same steep draw, he saw a large black bear.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI was trying to go the same route I went before, so I was stopping and listening and seeing if that deer would mess up again,\u201d Allen says. \u201cI came around a corner and saw black, and I wasn\u2019t sure if it was a bear or not. Then I saw it moving, and I knew it wasn\u2019t a cub. I love bear meat, and I\u2019d take that over a deer any day.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Allen shouldered his .308 Thompson and fired a 150-grain bullet. The bear dropped where it stood.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI was surprised, because that was the first bear I\u2019ve ever shot that just dropped in his tracks,\u201d Allen says. \u201cUsually they run off, but I don\u2019t know if this one was so heavy that he just was done, or if I hit something good enough to end him right there.\u201d<\/p>\n Allen waited a few minutes before approaching the boar. He messaged his friend Tyler and said he\u2019d need help packing it out. When Allen eventually walked down to the bear, he realized it had been pawing at a whitetail carcass. Looking closer, he saw it wasn\u2019t just a young buck with a few spindly tines. The big 8-point had solid main beams that palmated into thick tips on the ends. <\/p>\n Allen wondered if it might have been the buck he shot at the week prior, but after further investigation he concluded it wasn\u2019t. After hiking back out to collect some gear and a four-wheeler, Allen and three friends began the long extraction process. Allen wanted to haul the monstrous bear carcass out intact, but his friends assured him that such a move wasn\u2019t physically possible. They would have to dress the bear out and forfeit getting a live weight.<\/p>\n Allen\u2019s one razor blade on his replaceable knife snapped in half when he tried to cut into the hide, and none of the other guys brought another knife. One friend had a boxcutter, which Allen used to dress out the bear. The foursome hauled the bear up the hill on a sled, which required multiple breaks. Eventually, they got it to a four-wheeler, which Allen had hauled to the area on a 12-foot trailer hooked up to his Toyota Prius.\u00a0<\/p>\n The dressed black bear tipped the scale at 332 pounds. It\u2019s not unheard of for adult boars to reach 400-plus pounds, and the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife says<\/a> bears in the state can even reach 600 pounds. (Average-sized black bears are closer to 200 to 300 pounds.) A 350-pound black bear dresses out at roughly 210 pounds and produces 140-plus pounds of gut pile, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game<\/a>. That means Allen\u2019s bear likely weighed upwards of 480 pounds before they dressed it.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Once Allen and his friends had extracted and weighed the black bear, Allen went back down to the scene with a game warden to investigate the deer kill. He concluded the carcass had been there for less than a week and didn\u2019t have any bullet holes, which alleviated Allen\u2019s stress that he might have killed that buck after all. The warden gave him a carcass tag and Allen took only the head out. He says he\u2019s taking it to Cassida\u2019s Taxidermy<\/a> to get it mounted with the bear in a design that replicates the scene he stumbled upon.<\/p>\n![\"prius](\"https:\/\/www.outdoorlife.com\/uploads\/2023\/11\/17\/prius_hauling_four-wheeler.jpg\")