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Now, Noorlander will have to learn how to speak, smile, laugh, chew, and swallow with his new jaw. For the last five weeks, he has communicated with loved ones and medical personnel by writing on a small whiteboard. He dreams of slurping down a root beer float, and tasting a meal from the new Texas Roadhouse that was recently built near his home. He’s been eating through a stomach tube, and will continue to do so until the surgical wounds in his mouth, throat, and neck heal fully and the risk of infection decreases.

“Only by the hands of God am I here,” Noorlander wrote on his whiteboard, which Davis read at the press conference. “I’ve had a lot of inspiration and I felt the need to share my story with others. Believe it or not, I believe this attack was an answer to my prayers and that I could potentially help someone else going through something similar.”

Noorlander hopes to return to Montana on Monday.

Noorlander, 61, owns Alpine Adventures, a snowmobile and ATV rental company in Big Sky. A father-son duo had rented ATVs from him for their deer hunt, Davis tells Outdoor Life. When they returned the ATVs and told Noorlander they couldn’t track down a deer they had shot after searching extensively for it, he insisted on taking them back into the area to help.

“He went up his regular trail that he takes all the time. He knows it like the back of his hand,” Davis says. “My dad is always super prepared. He wants to be on ‘Survivor.’ He’s tried to audition. He had bear spray, had his gun…”

While helping the hunters, Noorlander ended up tracking a different deer in the area—one that two grizzly bears were already on.

“My dad saw a smaller adult grizzly bear from farther away. He started to pull his gun out, just to be safe,” Davis says. “He was behind a tree, and from the time that he looked over at the smaller adult grizzly, a different one that he describes as a 10-foot mega-grizzly bear was on him in a second. He didn’t have time to do anything. He tried to shoot the bear, but his gun misfired. He didn’t have time to play dead. So he punched the bear in the nose.”

What happened next resulted in injuries so severe that Noorlander had to write the story down on a whiteboard in the hospital for Davis to read.

“The bear locked onto his jaw, mouth to mouth, and ripped off his whole lower jaw, and got part of his trachea, too,” Davis says. “That’s the biggest and worst injury. The bear also scratched his chest open, it bit his right leg multiple times and bit his left bicep. He’s a fighter through and through and stayed awake through all of it, and was trying to fight the bear off the whole time.”

The father and son heard Noorlander’s screams. Worried they would hit Noorlander if they tried shooting the bear, the hunters threw rocks to scare the grizzly away and called emergency responders.

“I don’t know how he didn’t pass out immediately from shock or from the pain,” Davis says. “The hunters stayed with him and kept asking him if he was okay, and he just kept giving thumbs up.”

Madison County Dispatch received the call at 1:47 p.m., a press release from Gallatin County Sheriff Search and Rescue reads. GCSSAR, Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks law enforcement, U.S. Forest Service law enforcement, Life Flight, and Gallatin County Sheriff’s deputies all responded to the scene. By the time Noorlander received treatment, he’d been on the ground fully conscious with no lower jaw, a collapsed lung, and severe lacerations all over his body for two hours, Davis says. The duo stayed with him until a helicopter was finally able to land in the area. She described the team that responded to him as “amazing.”

Noorlander eventually made it to Bozeman Health Deaconess Regional Medical Center, where he underwent emergency stabilization surgery. Doctors conducted a tracheostomy and inserted a chest tube. He was then flown to University of Utah hospital in Salt Lake City, where he currently resides in the ICU.

“He’s doing a lot better. He’s off the ventilator now, and his first of many major reconstructive surgeries is tomorrow,” Davis says, noting that she accompanied him on his first walk around the hospital yesterday. “It’s going to be a long road to recovery. They’ll put a plate in tomorrow, but it will take months for full reconstruction. They’ll take a whole fibula from one of his legs and reconstruct his jaw with his leg bone. It’s wild.”

Noorlander is a Navy veteran and has VA insurance, but he’s still unsure how many of the reconstructive surgeries he needs will be covered, Davis says. She set up a GoFundMe page for him and posted it to her Facebook profile.

As a labor and delivery nurse in California, Davis says this has forever changed how she views working in healthcare.

“Everything is immensely different when you’re on the other side of the coin,” she says. “I will be a better nurse now, because you realize how much you crave those details and crave people telling you what’s going on. But everyone here has been so amazing.”

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The attack occurred less than a week after FWP officials euthanized a 10-year-old female grizzly bear for breaking into an occupied home through a kitchen window and stealing dog food in West Yellowstone, 47 miles south of Big Sky. The sow had a cub in tow during the incident, which happened on the morning of Sept. 2. Genetic analysis and identifying characteristics revealed that the sow and cub were also involved in the death of Amie Adamson, a 48-year-old female runner from Kansas. A hiker discovered Adamson’s body near the Buttermilk Trail in West Yellowstone on the morning of July 22.

Friday’s attack also marks the fourth close encounter between outdoorsmen and grizzly bears in the region in less than a month. The attacking grizzlies were shot and killed in the other three encounters, and all three shootings were deemed self-defense.

Editor’s Note: This story was updated on Oct. 13 with new information from Rudy Noorlander, his daughters, and his surgeon.

Weston told Fox News that he was hoping to set a new 12-pound-test record when he booked Kirkland for a week of fishing. They accomplished that feat on Weston’s first day aboard Kirkland’s boat, the Garship Enterprise. The 169-pounder they caught should easily top the current IGFA record of 129 pounds, 13 ounces.

With that record theoretically in hand, Weston sized down to 6-pound test. Kirkland took them to a spot with a sandy bottom and few snags, where Weston’s carp bait was inhaled by yet another giant gator gar. He battled the fish for nearly three hours, letting it run as much as possible and doing everything he could to keep the 6-pound line from breaking. He said he started to get worried around the two-hour mark.

“I was dreading it at this point, as I have fought other fish past the two-hour mark and have had the line just randomly break,” Weston told Fox News, adding that he was fully prepared to lose the fish.

“He yelled out, and was clearly in pain, but still got her secured at the side of the boat, [which took] over 10 minutes and multiple ropes,” Weston explained.

Back on shore, the duo used a large tripod and a certified scale to weigh the gar, which measured 8 feet, 4 inches long, with a 48-inch girth. The scale registered 283 pounds.

If that weight is accepted and confirmed by the IGFA, it will easily replace the current 6-pound test record of 123 pounds, 9 ounces. More importantly, it should also the replace the current all-tackle world record for the species. That record dates back to 1951, when angler Bill Valverde caught a 279-pound alligator gar from the Rio Grande. (The heaviest gar ever recorded in Texas weighed over 300 pounds, according to Texas Parks and Wildlife, but that fish was not eligible for an IGFA record because it was caught on a trotline.)

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“I won’t lie,” Kirkland wrote in a Facebook post. “We both jumped up and down as Art shouted, ‘We just beat a 72-year-old record!’”

Kirkland added that Weston will digitally submit the record application along with photos and weight receipts at the end of his trip. As required, he’ll also send in a piece of the ultra-thin, 6-pound line they used to catch the massive gar.

Sept. 11, 2023. On Aug. 31, a Maine wildlife photographer snapped pictures of a young whitetail buck covered in fluid-filled growths. It had a swollen nose and mouth, along with a giant purple stain on its head and neck. Now, wildlife biologists are trying to figure out what ails the deer.

Tony Gedaro was driving through Cape Elizabeth when he took the photos, according to the Bangor Daily News. He shared them to a Facebook page dedicated to wildlife in Maine, noting that he had sent the photos to the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. Two days later, he posted an update.

“This is going to fall into the ‘we can’t know for sure without doing an exam and collecting samples’ category,” Gedaro wrote on Sept. 2. “The suggestion that came up most commonly … was some sort of seroma, which would be an accumulation of fluid associated most often with trauma or infection. Also suggested were an unusual manifestation of ‘Bullwinkle’ condition, severe bottle jaw, a large abscess, hypoproteinemia, or fluid accumulation associated with conjunctive heart failure.”

“It does look like it has the Bullwinkle condition. That’s a bacterial infection,” Ross says. “It’s an interesting, relatively new ailment that’s been found in deer in the last 10 to 15 years. It’s shown up more frequently lately, in about a dozen states. It doesn’t seem to be environment-related.”

The offending bacteria, Mannheimia granulomatis, has been the culprit in a variety of infections in different species. It causes a skin disease in cattle in Argentina, NDA chief communications officer Lindsay Thomas Jr. writes. The earliest reports of Bullwinkle deer began in 2002, and the condition gets its name from the moose-like appearance that some infected deer take on.

Deer with Bullwinkle condition aren’t automatically doomed. But the swollen jaw and nose could complicate a deer’s ability to eat properly, which is why deer with the condition tend to look scrawny and underfed. In the case of the Maine deer, Ross thinks it’s just a young buck that could be suffering from an additional type of infection. But the swelling isn’t what confuses Ross the most.

“The weird thing about that deer is the color,” Ross says. “There are some birthmarks that infants will have, a few of which involve a dense collection of capillaries or blood vessels near the skin surface. One of them is a hemangioma, like a raised, super pink mark. Another one is port wine stain, which actually gets worse with age. So I don’t know if it’s related to a birthmark or if it’s related to the bacterial infection (causing the growths). My guess is that it’s a bunch of blood being collected or pulled up to the skin surface, and the deer is losing hair, so you’re seeing that skin color.”

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Ross joins the majority of commenters on Facebook in admitting the harsh truth: This deer probably doesn’t have many years left in him, despite its young age.

“This is a pretty lean, long-legged, thin-necked, narrow-antlered deer. It is a stereotypical 1.5-year-old buck to me,” Ross says. “It looks like the deer is eating in some pictures, but it is obviously not in good shape. What’s going on with its nasal passage and jaw is probably making it very difficult for the deer to eat. Its immune system is compromised, so I don’t think this deer is going to live a long life.”

Editor’s note: This article was updated on Oct. 12, 2023 with new information regarding the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife’s decision to euthanize the deer.

I didn’t get to summit Burger Mountain, but I did snag a Big Game Burger from my local Arby’s franchise. (I’ll get to that in a minute.) From a distance, the Colorado experience seems designed to mimic a day in the life of a Colorado big game hunter—breath-taking scenery, a sweaty ascent to 10,371 feet above sea-level, and, if successful, a rewarding meal sourced straight from the woods to help close the loop between human and nature. Except, as any hunter would know, the Arby’s Big Game Burger actually connects consumers to the game-farming industry rather than the wilderness.

Where Does the Meat Come From?

For anyone unfamiliar with how food laws and the North American model of wildlife conservation interact, hunter-harvested wild game is not available for purchase in restaurants or grocery stores in the United States. (There are exceptions for non-native critters like axis deer and feral hogs.) This separation helps bolster the integrity of wild game species as a natural resource held in trust for sustainable public use. It also allows federal agencies like the USDA and the FDA to keep a firm grasp on what meat products enter the consumer market.

This creates a win-win for both wildlife conservation and public health. Hunters aren’t motivated by profits and diners know (or hope) that their bone-in ribeye was handled in compliance with government regulations. (Prefer to know exactly where your meat came from? Befriend a hunter or, better yet, take a hunter’s safety course and learn how to hunt.)

An Annual Tradition

This isn’t the chain’s first foray into game-adjacent offerings. Arby’s sold venison sandwiches in 17 locations in Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Georgia, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania in late October 2016. They re-released the venison sandwich on the same day a year later, and added an elk sandwich to the menu at just three locations in the Mountain West: Thornton, Colorado; Casper, Wyoming; and Billings, Montana. On Oct. 20, 2018, they sold farmed duck sandwiches at 16 locations across each of the four migratory flyways. They even released a promo video featuring a black Labrador retriever bringing an Arby’s bag to its owner after he failed to call in a few ducks.

It’s an indisputably strange concept. Arby’s is marketing farmed fast-food versions of traditional wild game meals to extremely hunter-rich communities during hunting season when, ideally, hunters are bringing home meat of their own. Isn’t that like selling ice to penguins?

And yet, the sandwiches reportedly sell out in minutes every year. Maybe it’s the novelty of getting something other than beef at a drive-thru. Or maybe hunters are entertained by the idea of a global quick-service restaurant brand that seems to understand them. So, for less than $10, hunters swing by Arby’s on their way home from an unfruitful morning sit and chow down on five ounces of farm-raised red deer that was flown across the Pacific from New Zealand. (Oddly enough, the Cabernet steak sauce on the venison sandwich is adapted from a recipe published by Field & Stream.)

This year, as part of its Big Game Burger promo, Arby’s is selling merch that looks lifted straight from the pages of an REI catalog: a banana yellow anorak, socks, a ballcap, a Nalgene water bottle, and a sticker sheet for decorating said water bottle with. The colorful, 70s-themed products are more “National Parks road trip” than “backcountry big game excursion.” This must be the crowd one columnist had in mind when she wrote that “Arby’s sources farmed venison and elk for its menu; the animals are not shot down by hunters out for sport.”

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But maybe Arby’s is creating an opportunity for convergence. If an outdoorsy type from Denver is willing to eat farmed venison and elk from the other side of the world at a fast-food restaurant, maybe they’d be willing to try real venison harvested by a hunter on American soil. I’ll wager a burger made from a whitetail shot in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains has a significantly lower carbon footprint than one flown in from the South Pacific. Maybe some Arby’s customers would even like to try harvesting it themselves one day, if they don’t already.

My Bite of the Big Game Burger

I was the first person to try a Big Game Burger from my local Arby’s franchise, not because I was invited but because I hopped in the drive-thru line at 10:18 a.m., making me their first customer of the day. I brought the sandwich home and took a big bite. It was fine. The meat wasn’t remarkable, neither great nor terrible. I liked the dark cherry sauce and the pickles, and it’s definitely a better fast-food burger than most (as it should be for nine bucks a pop). But my immediate reaction upon taking a bite reveals the Achilles’ heel of the Arby’s game meat model—and also might provide some insight as to why these sandwiches are only available in limited quantities for short periods of time in parts of the country that are overrun by hunters.

Wow, I thought. I can make a better venison burger than this.

“For years, MRIP catch estimates have been a source of contention for anglers, state agencies, and other fishery managers that depend on accurate and precise data for decision-making,” reads the CSP report critiquing the NOAA study, which was released in May.

The Trouble with Recreational Fishing Data

Sportfishing groups throughout the coastal U.S. have expressed their alarm and displeasure at NOAA for years regarding shrinking limits and extremely short or canceled seasons for recreational anglers. Meanwhile many states, which have begun collecting their own catch and trip data, reported populations of fish like red snapper that are able to support harvest beyond what the feds are recommending. According to the Great Red Snapper Count, a 2021 report put out by the Harte Research Institute with help from Southern universities, there are 118 million red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico. NOAA had put that number at 36 million.

“Yet another major revision to the federal recreational data collection system is upon us, and it should bring a realization that NOAA is just not capable of doing this job,” said conservation director of the Coastal Conservation Association Ted Venker in a Tuesday press release about NOAA’s data errors. “At best we are looking at several more years of questionable revisions, recalculations, and recalibrations based on a suspect data system that has never proven it can produce accurate information. This is no way to manage a public resource. It would be irresponsible to continue down this road rather than exploring and supporting state-based options to better manage the recreational sector wherever feasible.”

“Mississippi’s federal data is consistently inconsistent,” says Venker, citing examples of the discrepancies between state and federal numbers. “In September 2019, the state’s private boat recreational red snapper season was open for only five days and yet the federal system says somehow Mississippi produced 2,482 trips per day, harvesting 68,997 pounds of red snapper every day for a total of 344,984 pounds in just those five days … [And] in 2020, the Mississippi season was open for a single day in September and the feds say anglers made 980 trips that day and caught 32,892 pounds of red snapper.”

Venker notes that the most trips the Mississippi state data system has ever logged in a single day is 513, with an average of 95 trips per day over the last four years.

“Like a good federal government agency, NOAA Fisheries believes its data is the only right data,” Venker says. “Rather than continue to insist it is always the smartest entity in the room, NOAA Fisheries should work on being a better partner to the Gulf states as well as the angling public and commit to getting to the bottom of wild data discrepancies [of red snapper catches] before cramming down damaging, punitive measure[s].”

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As NOAA Fisheries points out in its recent pilot study of these errors, the trouble with collecting recreational fishing data is that the Fed’s current system depends entirely on the memories of anglers. The agency gets the majority of its data by mailing out questionnaires to anglers asking how many days they fished over a specific period. When NOAA looked back and analyzed this data, it found that anglers were more likely to over-report their fishing activity than under-report.

“Based upon anecdotal information from cognitive interviews, as well as the effect of question sequence on reporting, we suspect that anglers are so eager to report fishing activity, that they do so at the earliest possible opportunity, even if it means providing inaccurate, out-of-scope information,” the agency writes in the pilot study. “Such a mechanism is similar to satisfying a need to be helpful, but also incorporates the sense of pride and identity that was expressed by anglers during cognitive interviews.”

In other words, fishermen are prone to overestimating how many fish they caught or how much they fish, and NOAA’s methods don’t correct for that.

Potential Solutions

In its discussion about potential solutions to these measurement errors, NOAA explained that changing the order of these survey questions as well as the time frame they’re administered could help lessen the amount of “out-of-scope” information that ends up guiding the decisions of federal fisheries managers.

Along the South Atlantic and Gulf Coast, the over-estimated catch data has often resulted in lower red snapper bag limits and shorter season lengths, which has led to intense backlash from coastal communities that rely heavily on the resource. And if the anecdotal evidence of charter captains and saltwater anglers in the area is to be believed, then it’s possible that many of these federally mandated cuts have been misguided.

“In recent years the snapper have increased so much that in 20 snapper trips I make in a summer it never took an hour to limit out,” says long-time Mississippi coastal angler Nick Strayham of Biloxi. “The average Mississippi red snapper size also has increased substantially in recent years.”

Capt. Josh Swinford, who runs a 36-foot Yellowfin charter out of St. Martin, Mississippi, has noticed some of the same positive changes to the Gulf Coast snapper fishery in recent years.

“NOAA ignores science, our state legislature, and the voice of Mississippi residents and anglers,” he tells Outdoor Life. “Rather than having a plate of delicious snapper, we have been served a heaping spoonful of injustice.”

Swinford notes that NOAA estimates Mississippi runs 1,500 recreational snapper boats per day, while the Mississippi Department of Marine Regulation shows the highest daily tally for state snapper anglers is only 268 boats. In 2021, NOAA Administrator Richard Spinrad reportedly met with U.S. Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) and told Wicker he knew NOAA’s snapper survey data was broken.

“He made a commitment to me that day to fix it,” Wicker reported in a December 2022 statement from his office. NOAA has still not made clear what it intends to do to rectify the situation.

For now, the agency says it plans to tweak its mail-in questionnaires in order to improve its data collection methods. But the CSP and other organizations would rather see a complete overhaul that more closely aligns with some of the states’ own data collection programs.

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Mississippi’s Tails ‘n Scales program is a good example. The app-based electronic reporting system requires anglers to register for an account, which includes their contact and vessel information. They can then login to the program after each fishing trip and log their harvest information through the app. This includes the most relevant data for fisheries managers: the number of red snapper and greater amberjack harvested and released, and the type of habitat the fish were caught from. This provides a smaller margin for error because anglers can log the data right away, instead of responding to a mail-in questionnaire months later.

“Many states have demonstrated the capability of developing survey programs to estimate recreational catch and effort data with more precision,” the CSP writes in another press release that offers more potential solutions to the Fed’s data collection woes. “NOAA needs to work with all states to identify the best steps forward including the opportunity to transition some or all recreational data collection to the states and how to best provide support to states that lead data collection improvements.”

Dac Collins contributed reporting.

Tester, a Democrat, introduced the bill yesterday as an amendment to a key Senate spending package. The bill is co-sponsored by Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Susan Collins (R-Maine), and Bob Casey (D-Penn.), making it a rare piece of bipartisan legislation that addresses firearms.

“In Montana and across rural America, our schools have long offered shooting sport and hunter safety classes that teach our students safety and personal responsibility,” said Tester, who is in one of the most hotly contested re-election campaigns in the nation. “But bureaucrats in Washington who don’t understand our Montana values decided to block funding for these important gun safety programs. I won’t let that decision stand, and neither will the hundreds of students and gun safety teachers who benefit from these resources every year.”

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Tester’s bill would require the Department of Education to restore school districts’ ability to use federal resources for school archery, gun safety, and hunter education programs.

But bureaucrats in the Department of Education determined that a provision of the bill that prohibits funding for school resource officers and for programs that involve “training in the use of a dangerous weapon” would be ineligible for federal funding.

School administrators are worried that, by hosting programs like National Archery in the Schools and state-delivered hunter education classes, their schools could lose federal funding. The Senate bill is intended to preserve the federal funding source for schools that host firearms training and outdoor-skills programs.

“None of us really knew what size [gator] we had hooked, even after fighting it for the first 10 minutes,” Lawhon, a mother of two boys, told Carolina Sportsman. “It would suddenly come up to the surface, just barely giving us a glimpse, and then back down he’d go to roll.”

The four hunters soon got another big treble hook in the gator—this one rigged to a thick rope. The gator fought hard for the next three hours and they couldn’t see what they were up against until they finally got it close to the boat.

“That’s when we all saw that he was what we call ‘a grown man,’” Lawhon said. “That’s when we realized just how big this monster really was.”

A series of videos posted to Lawhon’s Facebook page show the chaos that ensued when they finished off the huge alligator. Using a semi-auto handgun, Lawhon shoots at the gator three times and hits it in the head at least twice. (South Carolina regulations allow hunters to dispatch alligators with handguns or bangsticks, but not rifles.)

With the alligator dead in the water, the trio tried but failed to haul it over the gunnels of the johnboat. So, they tagged it and secured it with rope, and then motored back to the boat ramp where 10 or more people were already waiting to help.

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They took the huge gator to Palmetto Processing. It weighed around 700 pounds and measured 12 feet, 2 inches long. In a photo of Lawhon taken at the processor, she’s wearing a t-shirt that reads: Hunting Mom. Like a Normal Mom But Cooler.

“Shirt says it all,” Lawhon wrote in a Facebook post. “Wish my boys were a part of this special moment but next tag we all in the boat!”

“The menhaden industry likes to talk about how rare these incidents are and how unfortunate they are, but they are simply not rare,” Chris Macaluso, marine fisheries director for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, told NOLA.com. “And to see hundreds of redfish dead on the beach, you can’t help but be concerned.”

The two companies responsible for the most recent fish spill are Omega Protein and Westbank Fishing. During the first incident on Sept. 11, an Omega vessel ripped one of its nets, which spilled around 200,000 fish. Then, on Sept. 14, another Omega boat broke its net and lost another 350,000 fish. Around the same time, a vessel owned by Westbank dumped between 100,000 and 300,000 fish into the Gulf.

In the Westbank incident, NOLA.com reports, the fishermen dumped the fish because they caught an “unmanageable load” and chose to waste part of the catch rather than let the whole load go. In every incident, most of the fish had already died in the gill nets. This included the hundreds of redfish that were scooped up as bycatch.

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One potential solution that’s been floated by groups like the Coastal Conservation Association is to prohibit commercial menhaden netting within a mile of the state’s coastline. This 1-mile buffer zone was proposed formally in 2020, and it would have mirrored similar regulations in neighboring Texas and Louisiana. However, the plan was voted down that year by the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.

After what happened earlier this month, LDWF has launched an investigation into the two companies responsible for the fish spills. LDWF assistant secretary Patrick Banks told reporters that the penalty amount will be determined once the value of the dead fish is calculated. Banks clarified that the violation is for failing to report the wasting of the fish.

“Well, technically, yes,” I answered. “But for the purposes of your survey, no; I didn’t use the aid of dogs.”

I received a confused look from behind the desk.

“My black Lab was with me,” I continued. “But he’s more of a handicap than an aid when it comes to bear hunting.”

She laughed. “I understand. No dogs.”

Leo was a pet more than a hunting dog. But I still threw on his Orange Aglow vest and brought him along on hunts whenever possible. He seldom stopped moving, could never keep quiet, and absolutely lost his mind when a rifle came off the pack or a shotgun was shouldered. But his enthusiasm was just too great to leave at home.

In fact, a motivating factor for this particular spring bear hunt was to get Leo some exercise. My wife Laura and I had welcomed our second kid a few weeks prior, and Leo was getting a little stir crazy. I wouldn’t have convinced Laura to let me out of the house for the afternoon if it hadn’t come with the promise of returning with a sufficiently tired dog.

We adopted Leo shortly after we started living together. It was a big step for us, going in on the shared custody of a puppy. Three years later, the dog walked down the aisle with one of my groomsmen at our wedding. Handmade signs warned people sitting near the aisle that they were in a ‘lick zone,’ which proved to be true. Leo proceeded to chew on his leash and roll around during the ceremony, delivering some comic relief during our tear-filled vows. A few years after that, a chalkboard and a bewildered look on Leo’s face helped us announce to friends and family that we were expecting a baby girl. When we brought home a second baby to pair with our toddler, Leo accepted his role once again as big brother, protector, and cleaner of the floor after meals.

I told my buddy Patrick where I wanted to go for this bear hunt, likely the only day I’d get out this spring season. “It’s about an hour drive, and a 1,500-foot climb up a ridge. I’ve seen a bear there before. And I found some sheds up there.”

Leo loved sheds. It’s the only hunting we trained him for. When he was a puppy, we’d make him sit in one room of the house while we dropped an antler in another room. Then we’d tell him to go find it and watch as he sniffed his way through the hallway, peeping into each bedroom before emerging with an antler in his mouth and a big accomplished smile. From then on, few things made him prouder than happening upon an antler in the woods. He’d bring it to me with not so much a tail wag as a half-body booty sway.

He found four sheds that day. None of them were worth keeping, but I kept a few anyway. I didn’t want to insult him.

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We reached the glassing knob, and Patrick got to work picking apart the drainages to the east with his spotting scope. I glassed to the west, hoping to find a bear on the parallel ridge.

A short attention span is something Leo and I shared. “You ready for a snack, bud?” He always was.

I pulled out my food bag and ripped open the corner of a peanut butter packet. Leo sat expectantly with drool dripping out of the corner of his mouth. His eyes got wide as I squeezed the peanut butter onto his tongue and watched it quickly disappear. I then emptied some of my water into his pack bowl as Patrick walked over with some good news.

“I found a bear.”

Patrick is one of the few people I hunt with these days. Most of my hunts are solo, with just Leo by my side. I like the solitude, the lack of expectations, and the ability to make decisions without debate. Leo was always game.

But there’s certainly no way Leo would have found this bear.

I pulled up my binoculars and looked where Patrick was pointing. Sure enough, a glossy, black bruin lumbered around in a neon green creek bottom, just barely visible from our vantage. With steep hills on all sides littered with thick brush and blowdown, this bear would be a chore to get to.

Patrick doesn’t get caught up much with expectations either; he didn’t even bring his rifle this time. So the decision to go after this bear was mine.

Before I left home, I asked Laura, “So if I have the chance, do you want me to shoot a bear or not?”

Bear meat is delicious, and the fat is baking gold. More than anything though, Leo and I just needed to get out, and Laura knew that.

“Yes, I want you to get a bear,” she said, surprising me a bit. “But mostly so you’ll stop asking if you and Leo can go bear hunting.”

With a newborn and a toddler at home, I was fortunate to get the hall pass, and I knew this was my shot. So we went after him.

The blowdown was rough, even more so for the dog. But he leaped and ducked his way through, without complaint. As we crested the final finger ridge above the feeding bear, Patrick was tasked with sitting back and restraining 85 pounds of determined canine. I took my time to confirm the bear was a shooter and that there were no cubs. As I crept in closer I could hear Leo bellowing behind me with excitement.

“Ugh, he’s gonna spook this bear,” I thought.

But the bear, just 160 yards away, was preoccupied with filling his belly.

It’s never easy to take a life; I’m reminded of that each time I pull the trigger. The challenge ceases. Brutality takes over, albeit briefly.

The bear never left the wet grassy patch where we first spotted him a few hours prior.

I took a deep breath. “You can let him go!” I yelled towards Patrick. “You can let Leo go now!”

Leo sprinted up the hill to me, panting and looking around, wondering where the grouse was that I shot and was now his job to find. “Sorry, buddy. No bird.”

“I could keep him quiet or I could hold him back, but I couldn’t do both,” Patrick said apologetically once he reached me. I shook my head and smiled. Typical Leo.

After skinning and quartering the bear, which Leo showed zero interest in, we loaded up our packs with meat, fat, and hide, and spent the next few hours navigating blowdown, boggy bottoms, and scree fields by headlamp before reaching the dirt road.

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Leo was with us every step of the way, like he had been on countless adventures before. He would have hiked all night if we asked him to. When we finally made it to the truck, he leaped into the backseat and sucked down one last peanut butter packet, his third of the evening. He was asleep on the floor before I put the truck in drive. Little did I know this would be my last hunt with him.

A month later, with seemingly no warning, Leo started limping, and we noticed his ankle was swollen. The next day, his whole front leg was engorged and non-weight bearing.

The vet diagnosed him with osteosarcoma, an aggressive form of bone cancer. The X-rays showed that it had metastasized into his lungs. We were sent home with painkillers and discharge paperwork. It was as if we were watching him age five years in five days.

We said goodbye three weeks later.

Driving home from the vet in tears, I realized that I never had time to fully comprehend this part of the deal. Leo was my first dog, in the prime of his life, and it all happened so fast. This allowed me to love him unburdened by the unavoidable and crushing heartbreak to come.

What a way to love a dog.

With a few rugs already on the walls at home, I wasn’t planning on getting another one made from that tanned bear hide, but I changed my mind. The rug represents my final adventure with my best buddy, a reminder of the fragility of life, and the cruelty of it all.

According to the claims circulating on social media, two teams of anglers tried to give themselves an advantage by trimming the tails of the pike they caught on Sept. 2. While this might seem like a counterintuitive way to cheat in a fishing tournament, the tournament’s rules dictate that three of the five pike caught and measured by a team must be 24 inches or shorter. The anglers shortened their pike to fit within those parameters.

It’s unclear how the teams would have trimmed the pike tails, or if they even did it all. Tournament organizers explained in a social media post on Sept. 5 that the anglers in question denied the accusations, and that there is no definitive proof of cheating. Because of this lack of evidence, they allowed both teams to compete in the second day of the tournament on Sept. 3.

“If these anglers are found to be telling the truth and we denied them fishing on Sunday, it could lead to disastrous repercussions for the Top 50,” they wrote in the Facebook post. “We are actively taking steps in order to appropriately deal with this situation.”

The first step, according to the organizers, was getting the anglers to take a polygraph test. According to tournament regulations, the organizers can administer these lie detector tests at their discretion, and competitors caught cheating “will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

If the cheaters are busted, it would mark the third known cheating scandal to take place in North American fishing tournaments over the last 12 months. The most well-known of these occurred at a professional walleye tournament on Lake Erie, when Chase Cominsky and Jake Runyon were caught red-handed stuffing their fish with lead weights. The video footage and criminal charges that came from that incident rocked the professional fishing world, and both anglers apologized publicly after a judge sentenced each of them to 10 days in jail.

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Then, in August 2022, not three months after that sentence was handed down in Ohio, another walleye-stuffing cheater was caught at an amateur tournament in New York. What’s even worse is that he probably would have won the tournament fair and square had he not decided to stuff his walleyes with smaller fish to increase their weight.