Hunting was, pretty much, a way of life for me. I started out settin snares for birds and rabbits and used slingshots for squirrels and finally traded a mess of skins for a 30-30 Winchester and used that rifle for many years. I know a lot of guys opt for the high-powered rifles nowadays, like the semi-automatic 30-06 and the 7mm's. Those are well and good, but with a good 30-30 (we pronounce that thuty-thuty), you can put the balls in a 1-inch circle at 150 yards all day long. In the swamps, if you get a shot much over 20 or 30 yards, it will be because a tree has fallen down. It is some kind of thick in there. After several years of hunting with the thuty-thuty, I finally gave it up for a black powder rifle I made and finally gave up guns all together and hunted only with a bow and arrow.
My favorite hunting area was just in the edge of the Dismal Swamps. This is in Beaufort County, North Carolina and is home to deer, bear, alligators and every kind of poisonous snake on the North American Continent. Including water moccasins, cottonmouths, coral snakes, and diamond back rattlers. I don't kill the snakes. I figure God put them here to do a job and their business ain't none of mine. I didn't worry about the gators, cause unless you got real dumb, they were no problem.
Over the years I had been seeing and hunting for this one particular black bear, but rarely, if ever saw him during hunting season. This bear had a track about 6-1/2 inches across and claws about 4 inches long and I followed that track enough miles to recognize it anyplace in the swamps. Bear season is about a month after deer season starts and is only 1 week long. When I would go deer/bear hunting, I would generally stay out in the swamps until dark and then come on back to the cabin. The part of the Dismal Swamps I hunted in was about 15 miles across and a little over 30 miles long. So it would be pitch dark by the time I would walk the 2 or 3 miles out of the swamps. When I was too far out and there was much quicksand in the area I would climb up a Live Oak and spend the night in the fork of a limb. No need to bother with a light, cause you would just get confused and lost if you tried to actually see your way. I never did get lost in the swamps, but once I was mighty confused for a day. It took me most of the next day to walk back from where I finally came out.
Once, I was in the swamps and a hurricane blew through. When I had walked in I was on dry land. When I came out I was wading in water up to my waist and from the edge of the swamps out to the first land that was not under water was over a mile away. My pocket watch in my bib overalls was a quarter of the way filled with water. That was a lot of rain. Just to give you an idea of how much rain can fall in a hurricane, we had a big one about 3 years ago and it flooded a lot of eastern North Carolina up to a depth of 8 feet. Over 38,000 homes were destroyed.
Anyway, back to the bear. One night I had finally worked my way out of the Dismals to where the trail forked off to the left to my cabin. It was a moonlight night and I could see this big ole hound dog walking down the trail towards me. We keep getting closer and closer to each other, until he was about 10 feet from me and then he turned off the trail going up into the trees alongside the trail going to my cabin. When he made the turn I could see that it wasn't a hound at all, but it was that big ole black bear. That was a lonesome walk up that half-mile long trail. Another time I was up in a homemade tree stand out in back of the cornfield and about a mile back in the woods. Dusk is about the best time for deer hunting and it was just starting to get kinda dark when I heard a low grunt. Sometimes a deer will grunt and I got my bow and arrow ready and was peering out into the trees and brush looking as hard as I could. Couldn't see a dang thing. Kept hearing that low grunt though.
About that time my tree stand kinda jumped and I looked down. There was that dang ole black bear with his paws on my tree stand looking up at me. It was not bear season and I could not legally shoot; I'm not saying that I ran out of the woods, but if that bear had managed to claw me, he would have done serious damage to my butt. Just to let me know that he was boss of the woods, the bear got to where he would either claw up the trees I had stands in or he would claw and chew up my tree stands. On two separate occasions, he drug up deer he had gotten from someplace and ate them within sight of my tree stand. That bear and I had many run ins over the years and I kinda got to where I halfway expected him to be someplace close by. I'm not going to tell about killing him. I can't think of any humorous way to tell it and to be quite truthful, I miss that bear something bad. I don’t hunt anymore.
- Bob Gurkin
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