Journal – Scent, Croatia
We had been tipped off about a baited areas where someone had dragged a carcass to an open spot possibly as bait to lawfully shoot bears. Licensed hunters must cull a quota per year. We noticed the tyre marks around the area. The carcass seemed to be part of a cow. Bears have an incredible sense of smell and would be attracted by the carcass. Having recently come out of hibernation they would also be quite hungry.
It had started to rain quite hard but we couldn’t miss an opportunity to potentially see bears or wolves. There were some old wolf tracks around the area when we carried out a periphery search. We settled down away from the area at the woodland edge and chose a spot opposite to where we thought the wolves or bear might descend from a hill. We considered the smell of the carcass and wind direction. I was quite pleased with myself that we were in the optimum position to observe and not be detected.
After 20 minutes the heavy rain became a deluge. Despite good clothing and equipment including an instantly deployable tarp device (umbrella) we were getting soaked through and chilled. We decided to call it a day and went squelching back to the hut.
After about 15 minutes warming by the fire two guys from another team come in equally drenched. We related where we had been and what we had been doing. It turned out they had walked past the bait site just after we started to return and had seen our prints heading back to the hut.
“You must have seen those fresh bear tracks leading this way then…” one of them said, his voice trailing off as he realised that I was looking at him wide-eyed. We hadn’t come across any bear tracks on the way back.
Despite the rain, all four of us went straight back out again. Low and behold, the trail between the hut rand the bait site revealed our footprints and the footprints of a very, very large bear heading in the same direction clearly made within the 15 minutes between us heading back to the hut and our colleagues following on the trail. The trackers were being tracked and, to the bear, they must have smelled better than an old cow carcass!
extracted from “Master Tracker” – published by Apple Books
