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HUNTING & FISHING 2013
August 2013
day, then hiked out as the light left the eve-
ning sky.
“Come to find out I’d been followed out by
a herd of elk,” said said.
But come Thursday afternoon, events
were about to unfold that caught just about
everybody by surprise, most of all, Sarah,
who was about to greet that visitor that was
mentioned earlier.
“I had gone in that afternoon and just fin-
ished my book and I was getting real antsy,”
she said. “So I decided to start using my cow
call, but still nothing was happening. I was
just amusing myself.
“At one point I looked down, and when I
looked up, there was a bear about 45 yards
from me. I think he came in to my cow call.
Best we can figure he came in looking for an
injured elk.”
At 45 yards across the wallow, the big
boar was too far out to risk a shot, but that
would quickly change. Within moments he
would cut that distance in half.
Sarah eased out of her chair and into a
shooting position and connected the trigger
release to the bow string.
The bear headed to her left and circled
the wallow, eventually stopping within 22
yards. (With her rangefinder she had prede-
termined distances at different points of ref-
erence.)
“I waited for him to go behind a bush, and
that’s when I drew the string,” she said. “As
soon as he cleared the bush, I released.”
The arrow from her Hoyt Carbon Element
— custom made to fit her short draw — dis-
appeared.
And the bear took off like a rocket.
“The way he was quartered away from
me I was sure the arrow had gone right
through his lungs,” Sarah said. “I got real
quiet and I listened and thought I heard him
go down.”
That’s when an intense moment became
absolutely unnerving.
Reality check
Let’s put this scenario into clear perspec-
tive: Sarah was inside a ground blind with
daylight fading; she had just killed — or
possibly wounded — a large black bear; she
was alone; her father-in-law had left camp
to return to work in Sandy; and her hus-
band was out-and-about somewhere with
their 2-year-old toddler.
“I got on the walkie-talkie and was calling
and calling,” she said. “But they couldn’t
hear me.”
Sarah decided to step out of the ground
blind and was no more than three steps
away when she heard a nearby crunch on
the forest floor. It was all the motivation she
needed to dive back into the relative non-
safety of the ground blind.
Turns out it was a cow — the bovine kind,
not the elk kind.
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CONTRIBUTED PHOTO: SARAH FELDHACKER
Sarah Feldhacker shows off the size of the paws of the black bear she harvested during the 2012 fall
archery season in the Heppner Unit.
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