You sit, all alone, in the deep north woods of Manitoba, Canada. The hush of dusk accumulates around your shoulders like a black fog. The sun is going. Shadows stretch and slide silently across the ground like disembodied live things, not quite corporeal.

Gzing upon the athetic wreckage fa full-grown moose surrounded by giant paw prints in the snow, the quotation, "What manner of beast do I pursue?" ran through my thoughts. It was April, springtime in the brooding, eerie, icy Bendeleben Mountains 50 miles north of Nome, Alaska.

Texas Parks & Wildlife magazine recently reported that black bears appear to be recolonizing the Piney Woods of East Texas. That’s interesting news because the patriarch of the Colorado County deer camp in which I grew up told us many a campfire tale of hunting bears in the Big Thicket during the 1890s.

Reprinted for Houston Safari Club Hunter's Horn; Fall 2021 - In the virgin forests of northern Manitoba dwell the kind of black bears dreams are made of. If bears’ eyes are so lousy, why was this one peering up at me in my tree stand, from a distance of 20 yards, as though reading my dog tags? The question rattled through my skull as I instinctively tried...