VERMONT STATE RECORD BEAR
By Gary Sanderson
Originally printed in the March 1987 issue of THE VERMONT SPORTSMAN.
The "Volkswagen Bear" is in the freezer. Craig Tanner of Ashfield, Mass., deposited it there. All 514 pounds of it. And what didn't go in the freezer will someday make a great conversation piece on his den floor.
That is of course, if the den is large enough. The monstrous black bear, a boar shot by Tanner on Saturday, Oct. 4, 1986 in Lemington, is the largest on record in the Green Mountain State. It's also the second largest taken since records have been kept in the six New England states. It's estimated live weight was 605 pounds. The only larger bear taken in New England, a Maine boar taken by an archer in Sept. 1985, weighed 610 pounds in the round and an estimated 518 field dressed.
"There was some question about that one because it wasn't dressed when we weighed it," said Robert Boettger, Director of the Maine Inland Fisheries and Wildlife Department's wildlife division. Boettger said a field dressed bear is estimated to weigh 85 percent of its live weight. That's how they arrived at 518 pounds. Tanner's bear was never weighed in the round, so who knows which animal weighed more live?
The previous Vermont record, a 441-pound boar shot in 1985, weighed 73 pounds less than Tanner's. Although there are records of black bears weighing more than 800 pounds, they more commonly range between 150 and 300 pounds. Most females don't break the 200-pound mark, and boars seldom weigh more than 300. Tanner's beast doubled that.
"It was a massive bear," said Robert M. Smith, the State Game Warden from Lunenburg, who registered Tanner's kill. "I've been around for 24 years and I've never seen anything like it. The average bear we see goes about 180 pounds".
Tanner got his bear with the assistance of houndsmen Chip Sprague of Ashfield, Mike Purington of Colrain, Mass., and six of their dogs. By the time the hunt was concluded, there were only three healthy dogs. Two suffered minor injuries, and the third wound up in a Lyndonville veterinarian's office with a ruptured diaphragm, collapsed lung and three broken ribs. The injuries were severe enough to require surgery.
There have been New England bears, other than the one in Maine, which rival Tanner's. But very few.
A 500-pound renegade boar named "Old Spooky" was shot in 1965 by Robert Letourneau in Canaan, N.H., after killing several sheep in that area. But there is much uncertainty pertaining to that animal, which was just recently accepted as a state record. "It's not clear whether it was weighed in the round or dressed," said Pat Locke, a N.H. Fish and Game Department secretary.
The only other New Hampshire bear close in size to that one was shot in Carroll (also known as Twin Mountains) on opening day 1985 by Richmond archer Donald Murdock. It weighed 420 pounds dressed.
In Maine, you have to go all the way back to 1965 to find a bear near the weight of the 610 pounder taken in 1985. That animal weighed 459 pounds dressed, and an estimated 540 live. The next largest bear on record was shot in 1930. It went 465 pounds field dressed.
The Massachusetts record is a 467 pounder with a live weight of 550. It was taken in Puru, Mass., in 1980. No other Bay State bears on record have come close to that size.
Ken Elowe, a University of Massachusetts bear biologist who recently completed a five-year study on Massachusetts's bears, said Tanner's bear was a big one. "But they regularly get them over 600 pounds in Pennsylvania, and occasionally they take one over 700."
Tanner knew better than to attempt to drag his big animal from the woods after shooting it midafternoon Oct. 4. So he gutted it and left a dog's telemetry collar on a nearby tree to simplify the next day's locating process. He and six men returned to the site the next morning and spent nine hours dragging the animal off Monadnock Mountain, located in the northeast corner of The Northeast Kingdom. By the time they got the animal to camp, a large section of fur was missing from its shoulder area.
“It was very mountainous, ledgey terrain,” Tanner recalled, "Dangerous just to be walking. We could have broken a leg at any moment."
The animal was more than 8 feet in length from toe-to-toe, and the layer of fat on it's back was 7 inches thick, according to Tanner.
The bear had quite a legacy near the Sims Hill apple orchards on Monadnock Mountain's lower extremities. It had been in that area for about six years, according to Vermont State Bear Biologist Charles Willey, who said it was a well-known animal to people there and in neighboring Colebrook, N.H.
"They called it The Volkswagen Bear because it was as big as a Volkswagen," said Willey, who lives a short distance from where Tanner shot the animal. In fact, it was Willey who weighed it on his home scales. He estimated the animal was 12 to 14 years old, "but we'll know better this spring, when we get its tooth back from a lab in Montana."
Asked to what age the average bear lives, Willey said, "The oldest one we aged this past spring (of 1985) was 43, but most Vermont bears don't live much beyond their teens. Some reach their 20's, but not many, due mainly to hunting pressure."
Willey had one story he was quite certain could be attributed to The Volkswagen Bear. During a 1979 bear survey he led, researchers tranquilized a 225-pound boar that had an abnormally large head. Upon close inspection of its head, the research team noted marks from canine teeth on both sides of its skull.
"From the placement of the canines, we could see it had been in a helluva battle with a much larger bear. It would have taken a huge bear to do it. We found bear droppings nearby that were the largest I've ever seen. I'd say the Volkswagen Bear had left its calling card."
Willey said there was no question the bear was "obese."
"Just picture a 600-pound man standing on the beach and you can get an idea of how big it was," he said. "When they get that large, they're slow and lumbering. But they also consider themselves king of the forest. The only thing they fear is man. Dogs don't scare them one bit."
Tanner, a 45-year old carpenter and devoted woodsman, is a relative newcomer to bear hunting, having hunted them for only five years. But with four kills in that time, he's no neophyte. Three of the bears he shot were taken with the help of dogs. His other was taken while still-hunting.
At daybreak on Oct. 4, Tanner and five companions set four plott hounds in pursuit of a large bear that had left tracks in a cornfield behind Willey's house. Eight hours later, following an exhausting chase through some of the most rugged terrain New England has to offer, Tanner had The Volkswagen Bear.
He had caught a glimpse of the majestic animal once before during the chase. But for the rest of the day, although nearby, the bear stayed out of sight.
When Tanner finally came upon the bear, it was elevated on a ledge, battling three dogs. One of the dog's yelps had alarmed Tanner and Sprague enough to bring them hurriedly from their station near the mountaintop to the bear at mid-mountain. They feared a dog would be killed if they didn't hurry, and their fears were legitimate.
"When we got there, the bear was sitting on a ledge fighting the dogs," Tanner said. "He could have gotten out of there with no problem, but he didn't want to. He was just resting in a spot where he could easily hold off the dogs."
Tanner said the bear never noticed him overlooking the scene from an adjacent ledge about 15 feet behind it. "He was too busy with the dogs and we were above him so he couldn't smell us." So Tanner raised his .32 Special rifle and drilled the big animal once behind the left ear. He then jumped down and finished the bear off with a second shot to the head.
"It was still moving but it wasn't going anywhere," Tanner said. "When you're hunting with dogs you always have to protect them. You don't want the bear to get up and start batting them around. That's why I shot it again. Just to be safe."
As it was, the dogs were pretty banged up.
"It's funny," Tanner said. "A kid could ride around the house on those dogs' backs. But when they get near a bear it's an altogether different story. They go right after it, and they don't give up easily. ….You take a 200-pound bear, dead, and let one of the dogs get a good bite on it, and you could grab the dog and pull the bear out of the woods."
After chasing the bear and dogs all over Monadnock Mountain most of the day, Tanner wasn't feeling much better than the battered dogs after shooting his bear. "My legs were like spaghetti, I was soaking wet (from sweating) and froze to death," he said. So he and Sprague field dressed the animal, placed the collar on a tree and went back to camp to rest for the following day's drag.
"Two of us had all we could do just to turn the bear over to gut it," Tanner said. "We knew we weren’t dragging it nowhere that night."
When they returned to camp and met up with four other hunters in their party, they made plans to get the bear out of the woods. Two of the men were unable to help, but that problem was resolved when three hunters staying at a neighboring camp volunteered to help.
"That's the last time they'll ever do that," Tanner said. "It was no piece of cake. We started at first light and got out of the woods at 3 in the afternoon. We pulled it. We pushed it. We shoved it. We rolled it. We threw blowdowns out of our way. … I'd say we dragged it a mile. Maybe a mile-and-a-half. It's hard to judge, but it was along ways."
Told he could take pride knowing that not every hunter has experienced dragging a 500-pound bear out of the woods as he did, Tanner smiled and threw up a verbal white flag.
"I've had my fun." he said. "Let someone else do it next time. From now on I'll stick to one about 150 pounds."
Not one the size of a Volkswagen.