87 yr old woman bags 200kg bear
When she suspected a bear was coming around her cabin, Cecilia Smith did what any 87-year-old woman would do: the Hawke’s Bay, N.L. hunter set a trap that snared the 200-kilogram animal.
Smith then shot the beast, climbed a tree and rigged a pulley system to load it into a pickup.
“When I saw him (Tuesday) I said, ‘My God, is that a bear?’ … I thought he was dead first so I went to take the snare off him. Then he moved, so I shot him in the head,” Smith said.
“You can’t play with a bear.”
That was the easy part. The trouble came when she and her husband, Roland, 81, tried to load the huge animal into their pickup truck.
The bear was far too heavy to lift, she said, so they put a rope on the animal, then she climbed three or four metres up a spruce tree and rigged a hoist.
“I went up in the tree and hooked the rope around some limbs and then hauled the bear up about three or four feet. Then (Roland) backed the truck under it and I lowered it down into the truck,” she said.
It was not immediately clear if the kill broke any wildlife regulations. The Newfoundland Department of Natural Resources was looking into the matter.
But Smith stressed that the animal was a threat to anyone who might have run across it in the isolated cabin area 20 kilometres back in the woods near Hawke’s Bay on Newfoundland’s Northern Peninsula.
“I had a licence for to catch a bear, a licence to trap a bear, or shoot a bear. Whatever I wanted to do,” she said. “So I set a snare for him. And when I went back he was in the snare. So I shot him.”
After that, she and her husband took the animal to Hawke’s Bay and showed it off.
“They couldn’t believe I shot him,” she said. “I suppose if I just said I shot him no one would believe me.”
Calvin Perry saw the animal, the biggest bear he’s ever seen.
“I asked her how she got it into the truck. And she said, ‘I got hold of two legs and he got hold of two legs, and I said Roly, give it a heave’, ” Perry said. “Then she told me how she really got it in.”
The bear was disposed of in the town dump. Smith said it was an old animal. Its teeth were worn down and the fur was patchy. She said she wouldn’t eat it.
“Why would I do that in the spring when he’s got no meat on him? You’d do that in the fall.”
Smith, who’s been hunting all her life, said she first went into the woods with her father.
“You had to hunt in them days, or there was nothing to eat. Now I trap foxes, coyotes, beavers, whatever there is. I get a moose licence, too, and caribou,” she said.
“What else am I going to do? Not sit down and watch TV all day,” she said. “Hard work don’t kill you. I worked hard all my life. I worked hard in sawmills, lumber yards. I was a carpenter for 36 years.”
It’s not her first bear — she shot that one as a teenager — and it may not be her last either.
Her husband says there’s another bear hanging around the cabin.
“We want to get him, too. He’s a torment,” said Roland.
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