Photo by Mark S. Werner.

Last autumn, as is true every year, I receive calls from Virginia sportsmen who have been fortunate or skilled enough to kill a big-game animal. In the past, the vast majority of those calls have been from deer hunters, with the occasional call from a turkey hunter who has managed to tag a fall longbeard (a major accomplishment, of course). But this past year, two of the calls came from bear hunters who were absolutely euphoric over their encounters with the state’s largest big-game animal.

One of those individuals was Lynn Blankenship, a 49-year-old electronics technician from Troutville. This past Oct. 14, Blankenship experienced a day he will never forget — but actually, the story begins on a Saturday in October of 2004. On that day, Blankenship was afield on a Roanoke County wood lot that borders the George Washington and Jefferson National Forest.

“I’ve been a hunter for 38 years and only twice have I seen a bear while I’ve been hunting,” Blankenship recalled. “The first time was on that day in 2004 when I saw a pretty decent bear come by my bow stand at 15 yards. I couldn’t remember whether bear season was in or not, so I let the bear walk. When I went back to camp and checked the regulations, I learned that bear season was in and that I had just passed on a shot at a bear standing broadside to me. That goof on my part has weighed on my mind ever since.”

Flash forward two years and Blankenship is aloft in the same wood lot and hoping that a deer will meander past his stand. With him is good friend Kevin Taylor of Roanoke. The two sportsmen have positioned stands on opposite sides of a thicket, Blankenship on the upper side, Taylor on the lower.

Unknown to Blankenship, Taylor experienced a rendezvous with a massive bruin on his way to the latter’s tree stand. Some 20 minutes before shooting light, Taylor and the animal blundered across each other and had a standoff at just 10 yards. The human froze and twice the bear reared on its hind legs in an attempt to make some sense of what kind of creature is on the same path it is on and likewise standing on hind legs. Finally, the Homo sapiens picked up a stick and hurled it at the Ursus americanus, hitting the bear in the side. Thereupon the animal scudded away up the hillside in the general direction of Blankenship’s position. The rosy fingers of dawn begin to creep across the sky.

“I was in my tree stand well before Kevin was in his, so I had no idea what had been going on below me,” Blankenship remembered. “I hear something walking behind me and I think that a deer is on its way. I peek around the tree and see only the hindquarters of a bear. The animal keeps coming, moves around to the other side of the tree, and then stops broadside at 32 yards.

“I release an arrow and hear it make a good, solid hit. Then I just go to pieces, shaking and trembling. The bear runs up the hillside above me, stops for a minute, and then continues on out of sight. I climb down from the stand, go to where I hit the bear, and there’s blood just everywhere.”

One way or the other, Blankenship knew that he would need help either trailing or hauling out the bruin, so he headed for Taylor’s stand where his buddy was in the process of calling a flock of turkeys toward him. Lynn’s arrival ended his friend’s chance of arrowing a turkey and Taylor calmly asked a question.

“I know what you’ve just done, you’ve just shot a big bear, haven’t you?”

The duo then went to where the bear was arrowed and the trail was very easy to follow. As the trail continued to develop, however, the blood became less and less — but the bear’s gait was obviously labored as the animal’s progress (as evidenced by the upturned leaves) became ever easier to follow.

At last, the two friends came to where just a single drop of blood dappled the forest duff. They scanned the surrounding mountainside, and, there, just 10 yards away in a mountain laurel copse laid the dead animal — which led to the classic “good news, bad news” scenario. Lynn Blankenship had just killed a trophy bruin, but how does one haul out of the woods a creature that appears to weigh more than a quarter of a ton?