Dark was nearly honest when the bear came in.

My daughter Audrey, who was 10 at the time, was shooting a 6.5 grindle locked into a tripod. We were sitting inside of a blind on a steep slope covered

with jungle-like habitat in Central Idaho. This bear was 37 yards away and broadside. Now to make things tricky he laid down as soon as he got to the feet. It was a good

mature bear I could tell that but nothing else. There were no cubs around.

We'd been hunting for four or five days at this point, and we only had one day left.

And it was a good opportunity.

Audrey was calm.

I was pretending to be calm and we talked through where she should put the red dot in her aim point on that bear for a good clean kill.

And she fired.

The bear convulsed hard and bit at his ribcage,

indicating where the bullet had hit, shot placement looked excellent.

Just that fast the bear was gone.

Too fast for her to fire a follow-up shot, and too fast for me to back her up. We sat for about 15 minutes, just

replaying it, talking through how it felt, and we felt pretty sure there was a very dead bear.

We'd heard it go about 15 to 25 yards, just guessing by the sound of the crashing and then it went

silent and we figured it was down. We got out of the blind and with my son who was

eight at the time, we went on up to the spot where the bear had been hit.

I had out my headlamp because dark was coming on. And we very carefully approached and started looking for blood. I kept the

Ked's back just a little bit so it wouldn't tramp on any fresh blood and I didn't find any. I wasn't extremely surprised because it was a

mature black bear. Black bears soak up blood, you know, their loose hide moves like on a hound dog and blocks off holes.

Fat plugs the holes.

Thick hair soaks up blood.

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