Da U.P. — For the past month, I’ve been baiting bears in Michigan’s U.P., watching trail-cam photos of bears hitting my granola and sweet treats almost nightly. I thought this was going to be easy.
“I should only be gone a day or two,” I told my wife as I walked out the door for the six-hour drive north. She rolled her eyes and told me I should know better. She was right.
When I got to the U.P., everything seemed to fall apart. It was hot, the wind was wrong, and it kept raining at the worst possible times. To make matters worse, I was hunting right on the Eastern/Central time zone line, and my phone kept switching back and forth without me noticing.
On the first morning, I woke up thinking I had plenty of time before sunrise. I didn’t realize my phone had switched an hour ahead until I checked my trail cam and saw my bear had walked through 20 yards from my stand—right when I should have been sitting in it.
On day two, a bear showed up right at last light. I tried to sneak closer, but he kept moving behind dips in the landscape. With fading light, I took a marginal shot and missed. The bear came back out two hours later, well after dark.
The third morning, I climbed into a tree well before dawn. After a few hours of watching, I heard a snap behind me. I turned and found myself staring into the eyes of a bear 10 yards away. It took off. I’d blown it again.
That night, I made friends in town who had hounds. They’d filled their tags and offered to run their dogs after bears with me. I was elated. Every hound hunt I’d been on had ended in success. This felt like a slam dunk.
We turned the dogs loose on fresh tracks. They immediately went nuts, tearing through the swamp. Soon their collars indicated they had one treed, but when we fought through some of the nastiest woods in the country to reach them, we found the dogs barking at a deadfall. The bear had slipped out without the dogs noticing.
I sat over bait that evening where a bear had been visiting nightly. Nothing showed up. With no traffic, no airplanes overhead (and no animal movement) it was one of the quietest nights I’d had in a long time.
The pattern continued. On day five, I had one final morning hunt. We let the dogs loose right after daybreak. Four hours later, we called it quits. The dogs backtracked, then, when they found the right track, the bear lost them in a swamp. Just as the dogs picked up the scent again, it started pouring and washed everything away.
I was going home empty-handed.
Hunting is a funny thing that way. You want and plan for all the success you’ll have. But the reality is that most of the time when you’re hunting, you’re unsuccessful. That’s just the nature of it.
It’s not a pleasant lesson, but dealing with failure has taught me more about life than any successful hunt ever could. I’ve learned that failure makes success sweeter when it finally comes.
Much of our modern world is designed to eliminate uncomfortable feelings. The stuff we eat and drink and smoke and look at on the Internet; it’s all aimed at numbing bad feelings. The beautiful thing about hunting is that you can’t really numb out disappointments like that. You have to face them.
I’d have rather shot a giant bear. I’d have rather been writing about rendering bear fat and smoking bear shoulders. Instead, I found myself driving home over the Mackinac Bridge, reflecting on mistakes and tough breaks.
It’s painful, but it’s good. And it’s what I love about hunting.
Every failed hunt teaches you something about patience and accepting things beyond your control. Every missed opportunity shows you where you need to improve. Every long drive home gives you time to think about what really matters.
The bears are still out there, and I’ll be back. But next time, I won’t tell my wife it’ll only be a day or two.
James Zandstra is an experienced outdoorsman with a passion for the Mitten State. Follow his work on X @TheFairChase1.
