I got mine in ' 96.

I had gone to camp with my brother once before, but this year I decided to skip it. My cousin was hunting grouse with friends on the opening day while I was working. They kicked out this huge bear, it took off, but there was snow on the ground to track it. I found out about this TUESDAY MORNING around 9 am... my brother calls from camp, I tell him to come down and hunt it but he can' t, because he just got his first bear, and the other guys were seeing a lot of sign and wanted to stay there.

After a few hours, I decided to take the rest of the day and the next day off. I left at noon, drove 45 min. to my house to get my hunting stuff, then another 45 min. to get my license at the PGC office in Franklin (you could only get them by mail or at the office at the time). I had bought a new rifle for deer season, but I didn' t even have the scope mounted on it yet! I grabbed my dad' s 30.06, found a bunch of shells that looked to be the same, took 2 shots at a can to make sure it was ' on' , then hit the woods. By the time I got to the track, it was late afternoon and I only had a few hours left to track... I tracked it about a mile and had to go home for the night.

The next morning I had another one of my cousins accompany me, and we picked up the track. That thing made a HUGE circle! Finally, around 3 pm, we followed the track into a hollow filled with blowdowns. We went in but couldn' t find it, then when leaving we saw where WE kicked it out again (Don' t know HOW we missed seeing it!).

It' s getting late again, season' s almost over and my cousin says that he has to take his girlfriend to the dentist, so he goes a different way to get home. I keep on the trail and it circles back towards where they first kicked it up Monday. Finally, just before dark, I crested a hill and it' s sitting there, looking like a black Volkswagen Beetle, looking back at me. Shot it once in the center of the chest at about 150 yards... he takes off running. I put another one behind his shoulder and he goes down, falling into a small stream. I go down to make sure he' s finished then go to get help. It took 9 guys a lot of work to get it out of the valley! He was a 6 1/2 foot bear and weighed in at 434 lbs, one of only two bear killed in Butler County that year. The funny part is that my cousin wasn' t even out of the woods when he heard the shots, and his girlfriend missed the appointment anyways! It was pretty neat though that my brother and I had both shot our first bears in the same year, 75 miles away from each other.