The 1966 deer season on the Keweenaw Peninsula, northern Michigan’s Copper Country, opened on November 12 and was due to close on the 27th, the Sunday after Thanksgiving.
Up to Thanksgiving day, our whole family had no luck. My dad, my brother Bruce, and I had hunted hard and had seen deer almost every day, but nothing that we wanted to shoot. Even my mom, who goes along with us on our deer hunts but makes no pretense of hunting hard, had seen deer but had no shooting.
The only family success scored was by my dad’s uncle, Bill Anderson, from Detroit. He drove the 550 miles north to hunt with us, and went home with a good buck.
I had special reasons for feeling disappointed about drawing a blank. I was born and grew up in the Copper Country. I’m now 24, and I’ve hunted deer since I was 14. That year my great-uncle Bill sold me his old rifle, a .32 Special Winchester Model 94. That old gun had killed a lot of deer and a few bears before I got it, and it went right on being lucky for me.
From that fall of 1956 until 1965, I killed a deer with it every year. Then circumstances compelled me to miss the 1965 season. I went into the Navy Reserve three years ago, and was called to active duty in the spring of 1965. When November of 1966 rolled around, I arranged for a leave to coincide with the deer season in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and so I was back again, hunting the woods and swamps where I had been lucky ever since I was a kid, but not doing so well for a change.
To make matters worse, I had to leave for the naval base at Norfolk, Virginia on Saturday morning, November 26. I knew, when we left home right after breakfast on Thanksgiving day, that I had just that day and the next in which to kill a deer, or I’d wind up skunked for the first time in my life.
We’re a Finnish family, all hunters and fishermen. My dad, Ernest Haataja, runs a refrigeration business in the village of Ahmeek, about 20 miles up the Keweenaw Peninsula from Houghton, the biggest city in the Copper Country. The peninsula is wild and rugged, and there are not too many roads. It’s a pretty fair game area, with deer, bears, coyotes, and bobcats.
The Keweenaw juts northeast into Lake Superior like a rough and rocky finger, 50 miles long and 15 to 20 wide. In the small bays along the eastern shore, sheltered from the high winds and pounding seas of the great lake, there is excellent fishing, mostly for lake trout. The whole Haataja family loves to hunt and fish.
My brother Bruce is two years older than I am. He’s married, has four youngsters, works at a local mine, and does some beaver trapping as a sideline. We have three sisters: Vicki, 18; Carolyn, 10; and Mary Beth, 6. Pop, mom, and sister Mary Beth with the bear in Ahmeek, Mich.
One of our favorite summer vacations for years has been to charter a small commercial fishing boat for a week or so and make the 50-mile trip on Lake Superior to Isle Royale National Park, the big, roadless island that lies 20 miles south of the Canadian shore. The fishing for lake trout there is as good as any we know about, and the sea lampreys have made lighter inroads than they have along the south shore of Superior. We have even seen lakers rising for flies in July and August around Gull Rocks, a few miles off the main island.
There is great pike fishing in some of the 30-odd inland lakes on Isle Royale, too, but we don’t care too much for pike and don’t often go after them. We live aboard our chartered boat, cooking our meals, sleeping on cots, and moving around as we choose. Isle Royale is 50 miles long, and there are plenty of sheltered harbors to anchor in. We hike, explore, and fish, and everybody has a fine time.
Bruce and I have had some other very good fishing trips together, too, including one to Lake Nipigon a few years ago that was a real adventure.
The bear didn’t move a muscle. He just kept his eyes riveted on me as though trying to figure out what I was. Or maybe he knew, and tried to stare me down. Except for his head and round ears, he looked like a low-slung black bull, and he was so big he stunned me.
The family also has a cottage on Little Traverse Bay, about 15 miles from home, that we use for fishing headquarters in the summer and hunting in the fall. And from the time Rabbit Bay, nearby, freezes over until it breaks up in the spring, dad spends a fair share of his time fishing through the ice for lake trout. Fishermen are still catching trout out there with live lampreys attached to them, but some heavy stocking has been done, and the fishing continues to be fair.
Until I left home to go into the service, I never missed a chance to go along on those winter trips, and Bruce still goes as often as he can. Dad has built a set of light runners for a small boat, and if a hard wind is blowing offshore and there is danger that the ice may break loose and drift out into the open water of Keweenaw Bay, they take that outfit along. It’s so light that one or two men, going onto the ice on foot the way we do, can drag it easily. In an emergency, the runners can be taken off quickly, and the boat is ready for use in the water.
I’m telling all this to help you understand how I felt about getting shut out on that 1966 deer hunt. I didn’t have any very good alibi, either. The weather was cold and clear, and hunting conditions were not bad although we had only a little snow-hardly enough for tracking_ The Keweenaw Peninsula sometimes gets as much as 20 feet of snow before winter is over. We had 234 inches by the end of March this year. But I had killed deer on bare ground plenty of times before, and thought I should be able to do it again.
Deer, however, are not so plentiful there as they were a few years ago. Many local people blame it on the opening of doe seasons, under special permit, by the Michigan conservation department. Whether or not that is the reason, we don’t see nearly so many deer as we used to, and we don’t see horns so often. But I knew that if I had to go back to Norfolk without filling my license, all that would be pretty cold comfort.
Thanksgiving morning dawned clear and cold with hardly any wind. The leaves would be dry and noisy underfoot, but it promised to be a fairly good day for hunting. We had been putting in most of our time in an area around Mud Lake, not too far from our cottage, but that morning we decided to try another location. We planned to drive out beyond Fort Wilkins State Park almost to the end of the peninsula. That’s as far north as you can go without getting your feet wet in Lake Superior.
Bruce drove our four-wheel-drive vehicle, and I rode up front with him. Dad and mom were in the back seat. Mom had packed lunch for the four of us. We’d stay in the woods until night. We usually start our deer hunting before daylight and hunt until dark.
Beyond Fort Wilkins we took a muddy logging road and then turned back toward Hoar Lake. A second logging road took us into remote, wild country miles from anywhere and near enough to the Superior beach so that we could faintly hear the noise of surf. We knew the place was a good area for deer, and even on Thanksgiving Day, there wasn’t much chance other hunters would find their way so far into back country.
On foot, we skirted a thick cedar swamp that lay between us and Superior, and we split up. Mom stayed behind. She found a spot where she could keep an eye on a runway along the edge of the swamp and announced that she thought she’d have as much chance of killing a deer there as anyplace.
Knowing her habits, we suspected that she’d watch the runway for an hour or so, work around the end of the swamp, hike down to the beach, and look for agates. That was about what she did, too, but the swamp proved too much for her and for once she turned back and joined us for lunch without sighting Lake Superior.
Bruce and dad headed down into the swamp. I turned to the right, into big, fairly open hardwood timber. There were high ridges running all through it with quite a lot of oak on the slopes. That meant acorns, and they are likely to mean deer.
The day had stayed bright and crisp. The ground was bare, and the leaves were really noisy underfoot, so I moved slowly, walking a few steps and then stopping to look in all directions. stepped carefully from one tree to another, trying to be as quiet as a cat and hoping I’d see a deer before me.
I found a little deer sign, but not so much as I had expected, and I was beginning to wonder whether I had picked the right place, after all. Then I cam over a rise, and a strange bare spot just ahead caught my eyes.
All around me in the timber, dead leaves lay in a thick carpet, but in front of me was a bare patch some 75 feet square. ln all the time I had spent in the woods I had never seen anything like that, and I stood there looking it over carefully, trying to puzzle it out. It seemed as though a huge vacuum cleaner had been at work.
Then, on the downhill side of the bare place, I saw a big mound of heaped-up leaves, and squatting in them was a black bear bigger than any I had ever expected to see. He saw me in the same instant, and we stood and stared at each other.
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My eyes must have bugged all the way out of my head. The bear was less than 75 feet from me in open timber, not hidden by anything except his own leaf pile, and that fell far short of concealing him. Why I hadn’t seen him in the first instant after I came over the rise, I still don’t know, but I guess I just wasn’t looking for a bear. It was that bald spot, raked clear of leaves, that caught my attention and held it those first few seconds.
The bear didn’t move a muscle. He just kept his eyes riveted on me as though trying to figure out what I was. Or maybe he knew, and tried to stare me down. Except for his head and round ears, he looked like a low-slung black bull, and he was so big he stunned me.
For a moment I didn’t know whether to shoot or try to sneak away, but I made up my mind on that score in a hurry. I had seen bears in the woods once or twice during previous hunting seasons, but nothing like this one. I had never expected to have such luck, and I wasn’t going to pass it up.
I don’t know how long we looked at each other. It was probably only 10 or 15 seconds, but it seemed like a full minute. I’ll say one thing: I didn’t get buck fever.
I didn’t move a muscle either, until I raised my gun. The old rifle was not scoped, but at that short range, I didn’t need a scope. I brought my rifle up slowly and took careful aim. The bear standing partly sideways to me, I clouted him just below his left ear. The 170-grain softpoint knocked him as flat as a flapjack. He didn’t kick much, but he was an awful lot of bear, and he looked even bigger lying on the ground than when he was on his feet. So I walked close to him and put another shot into his shoulder to make sure.
Then I started looking things over. The bear had raked all the leaves downhill into one big pile, and only eight feet farther down the slope, I found a hole dug under a big cedar windfall. It was about four feet across and three feet deep and seemed freshly dug. If it had been used before, he had enlarged it and cleaned it out. Sand and gravel had been thrown in every direction.
Without much question, the bear had intended to use the pile of leaves for his winter bed. If I hadn’t come along, he probably would have dragged enough of them into the hole to line it before crawling in, raking the rest over himself, and curling up until spring. He would have had dry, snug quarters. The slope of the hill provided good drainage, and the windfall would have kept the worst of the snow off him. The leaves he had gathered would have been enough to cover three or four bears.
He was a lot too big for me to dress without help, so I headed back to the car. Dad and Bruce were there when I arrived, and mom came along a little later. They had heard my two shots, and their first question was whether I had killed a deer. I said no, and tried to string them along, but I guess my excitement must have shown.
“Well,” Bruce said right away, “maybe you didn’t get your buck, but from the way you look you sure got something. What was it?”
“It was a bear,” I blurted. “It’s the biggest bear I’ve ever seen. It’s so darned big it looks like a grizzly!”
“Did you kill it?” dad demanded.
“Deader than a salt herring,” I assured him.
We hurried through chow, and then started back to the bear. When we got there, it was all the three of us could do to roll him over for dressing.
As we worked, we debated whether we could drag him out to the nearest logging road. It didn’t seem very likely, for we had almost three miles to go on bare ground. It was plain that this bear was a huge thing for three men to handle, but we agreed to try.
That turned out to be a big joke. We took hold of his head and forefeet, but we found that by tugging and grunting for all we were worth we could move him only a few inches at a time. We couldn’t have dragged him out of the woods in a month of Sundays.
I hated to leave him, but it was getting late in the afternoon, and there was no choice. We were sure no animal would molest him, and the area was remote enough so that there was very little chance other hunters would find him. Even if they did, he was so big that nobody would make off with him. We hiked out to the car, laying plans to retrieve my bear in the morning.
We did some phoning that night and early the next day and learned that a logging outfit, the Kilpela Brothers from the town of Mohawk, was operating not far from where I had killed the bear. We contacted them, and to our great relief they said they’d hitch a dray behind one of their tractors and go in with us and bring him out. It was after dark before the job was done.
I had taken a fine trophy. My bear was not only a record-setter for size, but also he had a thick, shiny, black pelt in perfect condition. There wasn’t a rubbed spot or blemish on it anywhere. It made as beautiful a rug as any hunter ever took. There wasn’t even one claw missing from the feet. That’s probably because there is no bear trapping in Michigan anymore. If there had been traps in the woods, he would almost certainly have blundered into one during his long life.
We took him to Rinne’s Fuel Company in Ahmeek and weighed him on certified scales there in the presence of witnesses. We were all a little surprised at what the scales revealed. I had killed a black bear that weighed 570 pounds field dressed, the heaviest ever recorded in Michigan. He was 15 pounds over the previous state record holder. That one was shot in the 1950’s near Newberry farther east on the Upper Peninsula by Dean Loveless, a bowhunter from the downstate city of Hamtramck.
Michigan game men estimated that my bear had weighed not less than 650 pounds alive. His dressed weight was 82 pounds below that of the giant black killed in Wisconsin in 1963 by Otto Hedbany of suburban Milwaukee. That one dressed 652, and its live weight must have been around 725. Hedbany’s bear was described in “Biggest Black Ever Killed,” OUTDOOR LIFE, May 1964.
Although I shot mine in the head, I did not damage the skull. My shot went in at the butt of an ear, and the bullet from the .32 Special opened up enough to kill him in his tracks. But it lodged somewhere in the brain cavity and did not come out. As a result, the skull was intact for measuring. I intend to enter it in the current Boone and Crockett Club competition, and the state game men tell me there is very little doubt that it will go into the record book, maybe not too far from the top. The Hedbany bear, by the way, was not eligible for entry, because the skull was shattered when it was killed.
A photographer for the Houghton Mining Gazette came to Ahmeek that night, Friday, and took a picture of me with my bear. That was the only one I got of myself with the bear. It was too dark that night for us to use our camera, and I boarded a plane to go back to Norfolk early Saturday, so there was no time to think about more pictures. There were plenty taken after I left, but I wasn’t in them. That’s not too unusual for me. I’m the one in our family who takes the pictures most of the time, so I don’t appear in many.
I’ve promised myself one thing: If I should ever take another bear as good as that one, I’ll get some color pictures of myself with it, just to remind myself of my luck.
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After we had gotten my bear into town and had weighed him, I had a chance to think the whole thing over. I couldn’t help feeling almost sorry I had shot him, but if I were doing it over again, I’d do the same thing. He was too much trophy to pass up. and I’m sure I’ll never in my life see another bear like him. Yet I did realize how long he had lived there in that wild country. He wasn’t doing any harm, and it seemed almost too bad that I came along that Thanksgiving morning when he was making his winter bed. He was my first bear, and much as I like hunting, if he should also turn out to be my last, I don’t believe I’d be disappointed.
On the other hand, shooting him was the most exciting thing that ever happened to me. I went back to the naval base without getting a deer, but I didn’t mind. That bear was all the Thanksgiving present any hunter could ask for.
This story, “Bear to Be Thankful For,” appeared in the Sept. 1967 issue of Outdoor Life. The current Michigan state-record black bear, according to Boone and Crockett Club, is bear whose skull measured 22 11/16 inches and was killed in Newaygo County in 2009 by Donald R. Corrigan. Haataja’s bear is not listed in the B&C records.
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