Braxton Taylor
Everything was going according to plan when Devin Simpson shot a doe on opening day of this year’s rifle season in Arkansas. Two deer had walked into the shooting lane as he and his wife, Daelyn, sat in the tree stand. Daelyn advised him to take the larger one on the left, which he dropped with a single shot.
They watched as the deer died and stopped twitching, and Devin stood up to climb down and claim his venison. But that’s when the day took a strange turn.
He looked to his left and saw a black bear making a beeline for the doe on the ground. He started to record a video of the bruin as it approached the deer, taking about a minute to sniff around the dead animal. Then, almost as suddenly as it appeared, it grabbed the deer by the neck and dragged it into the woods.
Neither Devin nor Daelyn tried to scare the bear away. One of them whispers “Oh no!” as the bear gets closer, but they keep their voices low as they watch the bear steal the deer.
Devin posted the video to his Facebook page, and it’s since received a fair amount of coverage. Some have wondered why the hunters didn’t try harder to scare the bear away, so we caught up with Devin and posed the question to him.
He emphasized that there wasn’t much time between the shot and the bear appearing out of the woods–only about two minutes. That’s why he doesn’t think firing another shot would have done the trick.
“I felt like the bear was somehow attracted to the gunshot,” he explained “It lured her into my shooting lane. I was worried that shooting again would not have scared her away, but rather intensified the situation. Who’s to say that she doesn’t get aggressive?”
No one can say for sure whether a gunshot would have had that effect, and it’s also reasonable to wonder why the pair didn’t try yelling. While the bear might associate gunshots at that time of year with dead deer, human voices might have had the desired effect.
Or maybe not. The pair stayed in the tree in the minutes that followed, and they soon realized why the bear had been especially eager to find easy calories. The sow had a cub hidden in the thicket, so it’s anyone’s guess how she would have responded to a potential threat.
“The risk was not worth the reward,” Devin explained.
Looking back, he doesn’t regret his decision.
“I think we often forget that not every hunt is about the prize or trophy. Some hunts are just meant to able to tell a story about,” he said. “For me, hunting is just as much about getting away from the office and the noise of daily life, as it is about tagging the animal. I think attempting to scare away the bear negates this, and takes away from the true meaning, which is enjoying what God has given us.”
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