By Sept. 14, Milton Miller had been hunting black bears hard for several days in Michigan without taking a bruin. But his luck changed the following evening.
“My grandson Ryan had been helping me get to and from my ground blind for three and a half days,” Miller tells Outdoor Life. “We’d hunt from 6 a.m. to 11 a.m., then we’d go back to the blind from 3 p.m. until dusk … But he had to go back to work, and I was on my own that Monday afternoon.”
Miller’s blind was set up on private land owned by his friend Joel Blohm, who has property next to Milton’s 80 acres in northeast Michigan’s Alcona County. That Monday afternoon, Miller headed back into the woods alone, driving an ATV a half-mile from his cabin to the blind. He parked and walked the last few hundred yards, and settled into the blind about 3 p.m.
“Nothing happened all afternoon,” says Miller, a retired bridge construction inspector from Macomb. “But just as I was packing up my gear to leave the blind, I spotted a black bear come out of thick woods and head to a bait we had out in front of my blind.
“I got my rifle up and was getting ready to shoot, when another much bigger bear stepped out of the woods following the first bear.”
Miller says the first bruin walked right by his blind to hit the bait as he waited for the second and larger bear to walk closer. When the bigger bear was just 12 yards from Miller’s blind, he put the crosshairs of his .270 Mannlicher rifle behind the animal’s shoulder.
“He was looking at me eye to eye just 12 yards from my blind when I pulled the trigger,” says Miller. “The bear was so close I didn’t see much as he turned and ran back into the woods from where he came from. I thought I might have even missed him.”
After the shot, Miller texted a friend, Anne Christman, who lives in the area. She told Miller to stay in the blind until she got there. It took Christman an hour to get to Miller and they both began tracking the bear together.
“There was no blood where I’d shot him near the blind,” Miller says. “But when we got to the woods line there were a few drops of blood. Anne had a headlamp and some other lights, and we went about 40 yards into the woods and found my bear.”
Miller says without Anne it would have nearly impossible to find the bear and get it out of the woods. Anne even helped field dress the bruin for Miller.
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They loaded the bear into Miller’s ATV, and he drove back to his hunting cabin a half-mile away. The bear was covered in ice, and Miller finally got to bed that night in his cabin around 2 a.m.
“So many people helped me get that bear, and I’m grateful to all of them,” Miller explained. “I’d been putting in to draw a bear tag to hunt my 80 acres for nine years, and it finally happened this year.”
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