Michigan teenager shoots 600-pound black bear

Marquette, Mich. — Fifteen-year-old Lilly Scott from Croswell, Mich., got off to an amazing start as a hunter. Her first big game kill was a black bear with a live weight over 600 pounds that she shot on Sept. 11, 2024, which was the first day of bear season in the Upper Peninsula.

She was hunting with her grandfather, Arthur Krajenke, when she shot the huge bear that had a dressed weight of 583 pounds.

“She’s been deer hunting before,” Krajenke explained, “but she hasn’t gotten a deer yet. She sits with me every year on opening day of gun deer season. When a buck shows up she gets a case of buck fever and her rifle starts shaking. She won’t take a shot if she doesn’t think she can make it.

“She held it together on this bear. I’m proud of her. She made a great shot on the bear with the .450 Bushmaster that we built together. He didn’t go far. We saw him go down.”

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Krajenke and Scott were sitting together in a double ladder stand 25 to 30 yards from a bait maintained by guide Denno Husar in Ontonagon County when the big bear showed up at 6:25 p.m. A trail camera at the bait captured a photo of the monster bear just before Scott shot it.

“She did awesome,” Krajenke said. “As the bear approached, she moved a little bit to get ready every time the bear went behind a tree. When he got to the bait, he turned broadside and put his head down to eat and she let him have it.”

Krajenke said there was a second bear coming in to the bait behind the one she shot.

“I think it would have weighed 250 to 300 pounds. I also had a tag and would have shot that one, if he would have come closer, but he left after Lilly shot and he saw us,” Krajenke said.

“We knew the bear Lilly shot was big, but we never imagined it was as big as it was. We figured it might weigh 350 to 400 pounds.”

The bear Lilly shot weighed more than four times as much as her. That bear had not been captured on camera at that bait previously.

“Denno had been sending us trail camera photos of bears visiting that bait before our hunt,” Krajenke explained. “Those photos were of three or four bears weighing between 150 and 300 pounds. The big one was not one of them.”

It took five years for Scott and her grandfather to draw bear permits for the first hunt in the Bergland bear management unit. There are three separate hunts, with different starting dates for all Upper Peninsula BMUs, except Drummond Island. There’s more competition for the first hunt and that hunt has the lowest license quota.

Krajenke’s son, Arthur Jr., was the third member of the party that applied for Michigan bear tags as a group. Junior also shot a bear on opening day that had a dressed weight of 171 pounds. The temperature was 85 degrees that day, so they gutted the bears and packed the carcasses with ice until they could be skinned.

“Lilly’s bear had eight inches of fat on his body,” Krajenke said. “The butcher told us that after all of the fat was trimmed from the carcass, the remaining meat and bones only weighed 270 pounds.”

Scott’s grandfather didn’t end up filling his tag during the hunt. He said he has hunted bear with Husar as his guide each time he was successful in the drawing for a license. Krajenke hunts bear with a .500 Smith & Wesson handgun. A number of years ago, he shot a bear with that pistol that dressed out at 198 pounds.

The skull from Scott’s bear is expected to qualify for state and national records and should measure more than 21 inches. The minimum score for state records maintained by Commemorative Bucks of Michigan is 18 inches and 21 for listing in all-time national records kept by the Boone and Crockett Club.