Let’s just say you move the meat couple hundred yards away from your kill site…
Would you still feel comfortable knowing there’s a grizzly in the area on your kill site, but still going back for the meet a couple hundred yards away with the grizzly still in the area?
Yes. Like I posted above, in the past 45+ years I've packed between two and three dozen elk, bighorn sheep, and moose out of grilzzly country on my horses. Some of those pack outs were up to two days after the animals were killed. Many times, and especially if I had packed a camp into the wilderness, I packed the animals from the kill site to my camp, than later packed everything out to my truck.
In the case where I hit the grizzly with a rock, there was another hunter camp about 1/4 mile from ours on a different logging road and they also had an elk hanging. After the bear left our camp he went to that other camp and we heard six or so quick shots, lilke forn a pistol, then about an hour later we saw the headlights of those hunters leaving.
The next morning, I saddled one of my horses and tracked the grizzly. He went from our camp to the other camp where I then saw drops of blood in the snow by his tracks, then he ran up to the end of the timber clear cut there, and went back near our camp. We never saw him again and we went home a day or so later.
FYI that grizzly wore a radio collar and ear tag as he had been trapped in the Cooke City area and re-located to the area we were hunting near West Yellowstone. I reported the incident to FWP when we came back to Bozeman.
I worked for almost 40 years for the US Forest Service on forests in Colorado, northern and southern Montana. One of my jobs while working on the Gallatin NF was to remove dead horses from the backcountry where they would attract grizzlies and possibly result in conflicts with people there. That resulted in me blowing up 12 horses and one elk carcass.
One of those horse cases was a horse that had broken his leg the previous fall and had to be put down just off the trail on the divide between the Main Boulder River and Hellroaring Cr in the Absaroka Wilderness. The next spring when the horse thawed out a grizzly found it and he would charge outfitter pack trains on the trail there. The Big Timber District Ranger then called me to get rid of the horse. One or two of the District personnel went in with me, and when we got the the dead horse the grizzly was on it. As soon as he saw us he ran off into the surrounding timber.
After I would blow up a horse, there was usually nothing left larger than a Big Mac and any birds, coyotes and bears in the area would finish off that in a day or two. We never saw or heard from that grizzly again.
Since 1978 I've lived off a county road outside of Bozeman and less than 100 miles from Yellowstone NP. I've had deer, elk, moose, and black bears go through my property. A coulpe of years ago, one of my neighbors let a bow hunter hunt elk on their land. He put up a tree stand along a hayfield about 1/4 mile below my house. While he was hunting, he filmed a grizzly walking by his tree stand. I saw the film. A couple of days later, my neighbor on the other side saw grizzly tracks in the snow on the hill about 300 yards above our houses. The grizzlies are here, I respect them, but I don't live in fear of them.
