Champlain Islander

I guess seeing the picture I better tell the story. Rob, Dave and I were on a combo elk and deer hunt. It was really warm and we decided to try to fill Dave and my deer tags first. We had seen a brown color phase bear around the cabin earlier but that wasn't a rare sight in those parts of South Central Colorado. On the first day or two of our hunt I shot a decent Mule deer buck. We quartered him up into 4 game bags and hung them about 8 to 10 feet up from the beams of Rob's lower porch. There was another porch directly above but that was only accessible through the second story hall where the bedrooms were. That afternoon we all went out to look for a deer so Dave could fill his tag. When we swung into the driveway after dark there were only 3 bags hanging. We knew a bear had been there so we took the remaining quarters and brought them into the cabin and put them up on the upper porch. All was well and we had a great supper with a few adult beverages and then went to bed. Sometime after midnight I was awakened by a heck of a loud noise right outside my bedroom. It sounded like a grinding through the wall. I jumped up only clad in my tighty whiteys and flipped on the outside light and opened the door to the porch. There about 8 feet from me was a huge brown head coming up over the porch railing. He wanted my deer and I wasn't going to let him have anymore of it. I yelled and he looked at me in my UW and just knew he was far outclassed and jumped the 20 feet down to the ground running for his life. We brought the quarters inside and put them in a cooler. The next day Rob and Dave went hunting and I figured I better butcher up the deer while I still had some left. It was a warm Colorado day with a clear blue sky and not much wind. I used the picnic table on the first floor porch as my work table and finished up cutting up and packaging the deer. After everything was put away and washed down I decided to have a beer and relax so I was sitting in the kitchen with the door open and just a screen door separating me from the porch. All of a sudden I looked through the window and could see a big brown head coming up the 3 or 4 steps to the porch. Yup he was back and I grabbed my camera and snapped a couple of pictures of him as he got up on the table and was looking up at the rafters where the quarters had been the night before. A short time later I opened the door and when he saw me he ran away looking back over his shoulder as he went into the woods. Dave got his deer a day or two later and we strung a cable up between 2 trees and hung his deer about 15 feet off the ground. Fast forward to the blizzard and we were trying to fill an elk tag or two. We were on the final day of hunting and that's when Rob got that big cow. We got up early and as a team butchered the cow and got it into coolers for the 3 day trip back to Vermont. We were in the process of cleaning and closing down the cabin when we looked out in the yard and here came the bear down the driveway and headed right up to my truck which had held that cow elk just the day before. The bear was about to climb up on my rear bumper and smash the cap looking for whatever smelled so good in the back of the truck. We scared him off and the last time we saw him he was plodding back down the driveway headed back into the woods. Later that day we left for home.