A Reddit user said one of the strangest and most unnerving moments he ever had in the woods happened while he was bear hunting in northern Minnesota. According to his comment in the thread, he was set up at dusk in the middle of a corn field, trying to coax a bear out at last light. From the way he described it, the whole thing still felt normal at first. It was late in the day, the light was fading, and he was using a rabbit-in-distress call in hopes that a bear would hear it and step out.
Then the woods answered him back.
He wrote that before he had even finished blowing the call, a wolf howled from roughly 500 yards north of him. That alone would have been enough to tighten anyone up sitting in a field at dusk. But it did not stop with one howl. According to the post, four more wolves answered the first one, and he said those sounded even closer than the first. So instead of one distant wolf somewhere beyond the edge of the field, he suddenly had multiple wolves calling back and forth in different positions while he was still sitting there in the open where he had just announced his presence with a prey-distress sound.
And then the coyotes joined in too.
He said that while the wolves were still going off, a few coyotes started yipping and layering into the whole mess. The way he told it, the field and timber around him went from a fairly ordinary last-light bear sit into a full-blown wall of predator noise. A rabbit-in-distress call is one thing when you are hoping to pull a bear into view before dark. It is a very different thing once wolves start answering, then more wolves sound off closer, and then coyotes pile in on top of that. At that point it was not just a bear hunt anymore. It was a guy sitting in the middle of a corn field at dusk listening to what sounded like half the local food chain wake up around him.
The comment was short, but the details were enough to make the whole scene easy to picture. He was not walking to the truck yet. He was not tucked safely in camp. He was out there, in the field, with fading light, having just blown a distress call meant to imitate something helpless and injured. Then one wolf answered. Then four more. Then coyotes started yipping too. The sounds were not all way off in the distance either. He specifically said the later wolves seemed even closer than the first one. That is the kind of detail that changes the feeling of the whole story fast, because it means the sound was not just spooky. It was closing in.
He ended the story the way a lot of honest hunters end the really good ones: not with some heroic stand or a dramatic shot, but with a very human decision. He said the chorus went on for a bit, and he decided to “boogie the hell outta there.” That was the whole finish. No waiting to see if a bear would still show. No tough-guy sit until full dark. Just a fast recalculation that whatever might have come to the call, he was no longer interested in being there to sort it out.
So the story he told was simple but vivid. He was bear hunting in northern Minnesota at dusk from the middle of a corn field, using a rabbit-distress call to try to pull a bear out at last light. Before he even finished the call, one wolf howled from the north, then four more answered from even closer, then coyotes joined in, and the whole field turned into a predator choir around him. He listened for a bit, realized exactly how exposed he was sitting there in fading light after ringing the dinner bell, and got out of there.
What do you think — if you were sitting in the middle of a corn field at dusk and your distress call suddenly got answered by wolves and coyotes from all around you, would you stay put and hope the bear still showed, or bail the second the second howl hit?
Original Reddit post: Hunters of Reddit, what was the weirdest thing?
