This story, “Which Way Out? Grizzlies in My Path,” appeared in the June 1974 issue of Outdoor Life. The author’s record is now ranked No. 7 in British Columbia and tied for 28 in the world.
About the only conclusion I’ve come to after quite a bit of contact with grizzly bears in British Columbia is that you can’t generalize about them or predict their behavior. After almost 30 years in grizzly country and several hundred sightings and meetings with them, I’ve met with only three unprovoked attacks. One I turned aside with warning shots. Another ended with me killing the bear at a range of six feet with one shot between the eyes. That grizzly, which I told about in “World’s Biggest Grizzly?” in March 1967 issue of OUTDOOR LIFE, scored 26 10/16 and tied with the then-world-record grizzly in the Boone and Crockett Club’s “Records of North American Big Game.” My bear now stands No. 3 in the record book.
There were several other charges, but these came because of a misunderstanding or because I provoked the bear, either accidentally or deliberately — for a specific purpose.
But many times I’ve done something that a grizzly has a right to take offense to, only to have the bear ignore me. I figure bears are like people in that respect. It’s just the occasional one that won’t be peaceable if given the chance. Here’s the story of one of the angrier bears I’ve run into:
Several years ago I was traveling near Knot Lake in the upper Atnarko Valley. At dusk I made my bed on the only nearby level, dry spot, which happened to be the middle of a well-established game trail. After unrolling the groundsheet and sleeping bag and then eating, I let my small fire burn out and turned in.
I’d been asleep for some time when I was abruptly awakened by a loud and very close grizzly grumble, accompanied by a lot of crashing in the brush. I had a rifle, but it was very dark under the heavy timber. Though the bear couldn’t have been much over
20 feet away, I couldn’t see anything.
I felt pretty helpless.
A few tiny embers glowed in the fire. My immediate need was to kindle a flame to provide some shooting light should the animal move in on me.
I got some bigger sticks burning and could see 20 feet around. I was able to slow down enough to look at my watch and find out that it was midnight.
That bear, presumably annoyed by being forced to make what I looked on as a minor detour around my camp, raged around the fire until after 4 a.m. By then I’d completely stripped the ground of everything that could be burned for 15 feet around. I hadn’t been able to get up sufficient nerve to go beyond the edge of the light for better fuel.
The bear finally departed, but since I couldn’t be sure it wouldn’t be back, I stayed up and kept the fire going until daylight.
There’s an example of a bear that didn’t have much to be mad about but was anyway. Here’s the other side of the coin, a situation where I expected trouble.
I was using a log jam to cross a river crowded with spawning salmon in the Skeena River area. I didn’t have a rifle along. About halfway across, I became unhappily aware that on a lower part of the jam to my left were two grizzly cubs eating fish. On my right was the sow, poking a foreleg between two logs.
I was squarely between them, supposedly a cardinal sin. But I kept to my course and hoped for the best while expecting the worst. The cubs stared with interest, and the sow — after a brief, indifferent look — resumed her search between the logs.
In spite of this happy ending, it’s not a good idea to get between a sow and cubs. I just happened to be lucky. I believe that sometimes when a bear bothers someone without being provoked, its bad temper is caused by something unrelated to the person involved. It’s just the human’s bad luck to encounter the bear when it happens to be angry about something else.
To illustrate, a few years ago I was traveling up the west bank of the Atnarko River at a point where it’s about 60 feet wide. I saw a lone grizzly on the east bank in some heavy pine windfall. It was rooting under a boulder. As I watched, the bear tried to dig out the yellow-jacket nest it had found under the rock. But the boulder was too big to move, and other rocks under the surface made digging too hard. The bear finally gave up after paying a high price in work and many stings on its face.
As the animal left the nest, it came to a large fallen pine densely covered with branches of up to l½ inches thick. The trunk was about four feet off the ground, leaving ample room for the bear to walk beneath it. But the bear was mad, so it stood up on its hind legs and lashed out with both powerful front legs in roundhouse swings that snapped the dry branches with the noise of rifle shots. It lopped off branches for about 10 feet along the trunk.
I’m sure that the bear was just venting its irritation. It quite possibly would have swung just as aggressively if it had chanced to meet a person instead of a log.
Sometimes, though, grizzlies will show more tolerance than a person might deserve.
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Once I was traveling in the McGregor River country northeast of Prince George. As the area is flat and heavily timbered, I was using a compass to travel cross-country from my base camp to a creek eight miles away. Because of my big pack and because a rifle makes local attraction for a compass needle, I had left my gun in camp. After several hours, when I was crossing an open glade in the heavy spruce growth, my attention was drawn to a movement about 80 feet to my left. Closer inspection revealed a female grizzly sitting on her rump with three small cubs playing around her. I was young and foolish at the time — I am now older but still foolish — and had a camera in my pocket. I had never before had a chance to photograph a family of three cubs, so I started walking slowly toward them. I figured that as long as the sow didn’t stand up, I’d assume she was unconcerned. When she did stand up, I’d stop.
Walking slowly, I got to within 20 feet of the cubs. All four bears quietly watched me. I took several pictures, turned, and walked away. I’d gone about 20 feet when I heard a heavy thudding behind me. I turned around to see the sow galloping straight at me and looking very annoyed.
I impulsively shouted at her, and she stopped perhaps 10 feet away. I wanted her to know I was leaving, but I didn’t want to turn my back on her again. So I started to walk backward cautiously, hoping that I wouldn’t trip and end up flat on my back. This routine went fine except that for every step I took away she took one ahead.
After we’d gone about 20 feet this way I found myself backed against a fairly thick pile of windfall spruce trunks. She stopped about eight feet from me and growled unpleasantly, probably because she didn’t like my stopping my retreat.
I started working my arms out of the packstraps, hoping that if I dumped the pack she would stop and spend enough time tearing into it to allow me a chance to get over the windfall and up a tree. Before I could loosen the pack, she started forward again. Again I shouted. She stopped, stared at me for a long moment, and then turned and walked back to her cubs.
In retrospect I think she was more tolerant than I deserved.
Earlier on that same trip I had found my way blocked by a very thick slide of alder and devil’s club several hundred feet long and about 80 feet wide. Searching for a way past this almost impenetrable prickly barrier, I found a fallen spruce going across the slide from side to side about five feet off the ground.
Climbing up onto the trunk with some difficulty with my pack, I started across, watching down in front of me to avoid tripping over branches and loose bark. About a third of the way across I sensed a movement ahead of me. I looked up to see an adult grizzly starting across from the other end.
As the bear had just got on, I figured that it would be easier for it to get off than for me. So I started ahead with the hope that it would turn around and get off when it saw me. The grizzly had other ideas and probably didn’t want to get off any more than I did. It kept coming.
When we were about 30 feet apart I stopped, and so did the bear. While I was still pondering the situation, the grizzly started toward me.
As it got closer I rapidly lost my nerve and forgot about pressing my right-of-way. Better a live coward than a dead hero, I thought. I lay belly-down on the log, lowered myself as far toward the ground as possible, and let go to fall the remaining couple of feet. I fought a slow, painful 60 feet to the creek that ran parallel with the log.
With torn pants and many scratches, I jumped into the cold waist-deep water and waded upstream until I reached the far side of the slide. I climbed out and looked back. The bear was still where I’d left it. The animal had turned to watch my progress — with bearish amusement, I’m sure.
Sometimes grizzlies can be bluffed out and sometimes not. Here are two examples:
My family and I homestead in a good grizzly area on a major salmon spawning river, 25 miles by trail from the nearest road. (In the February 1967 issue of OUTDOOR LIFE I explained in “The Man Who Feeds the Trumpeters” how I am paid by the Canadian Wildlife Service for feeding the rare trumpeter swans that winter on Lonesome Lake, which is about 50 miles from the coastal town of Bella Coola.) Each fall we pack in our year’s supplies by horse from the road. The trail we use generally follows the river.
Several years ago my wife Trudy was leading loaded horses and carrying our two-year-old daughter Susan on a backpack. I walked ahead carrying two narrow sheets of 14-foot-long plywood that we were taking in for boat building. I was practically encased in plywood, with two sheets sticking out seven feet behind and seven feet ahead. There was just a one-foot gap for me to see through straight ahead. I could
not see much on either side.
We didn’t have a gun along. Both of us were too encumbered to carry one.
As we passed a good fishing spot on a side channel of the river about 40 feet from the trail, I heard a lot of splashing. At the same time Trudy shouted that a grizzly was coming at us from the river.
I swung toward the river to see through my foot-wide gap. By the time I’d turned a sow with two cubs behind her was just about 15 feet away.
She skidded to a stop. I took a step toward her, moving my shoulders from side to side, jerking the plywood back and forth in front of her.
She’d probably never seen anything like that before. After one startled look, she upended and raced back across the channel, collecting her cubs as she went.
Another time I tried a bluff that didn’t go so well.
I was traveling alone in the west Kootenay section of British Columbia and made camp for the night on a small stream. After pitching my small bell tent and putting my pack inside, I gathered my fishing gear and went a few hundred feet down to the stream. Having seen little bear sign that day, I left my rifle in the tent.
After half an hour I had enough trout for a couple of meals and returned to the tent. As I entered the small meadow where I’d made camp I came to a sudden stop at the sight of a bear’s rump protruding through the tent door. As all my food and equipment was in the tent, I had to do something fast to get the bear out. The only thing I could think of was to startle it and hope that it would run away. I picked up a good-size rock and threw it at the rump, uttering what I thought was a fearful yell.
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This did produce results — though not quite what I’d hoped for. The rock hit just behind the bear and rolled under its belly, scaring it. As it quickly turned to get out, the grizzly hit the tent pole, collapsing the tent on top of the animal. By the time it had torn its way through the tent, the bear was scared and mad. Unfortunately its retreat happened to be in my direction. The bear had no idea that I was in the country. But I was in its way, and as soon as I moved it spotted me and came toward me.
By sheer luck a large boulder about eight feet high was close by. I somehow flew to its top before the bear reached me. I’m sure that if it had really wanted to, the animal could have got up on the rock. But it contented itself with circling around the base several times, looking up and grumbling. It finally returned to the tent, rooted about in the mess for several minutes, and then wandered downstream.
I stayed on the rock for 20 minutes or so. Then I established a new record in running over for the rifle. Thankfully I didn’t have to use it.
I’ve only once had a chance to hear families of bears communicating with each other. That was at Nepah Lagoon, a tidal basin on the British Columbia coast that was full of humpback salmon getting ready to ascend nearby creeks to spawn. The lagoon shore was covered with tracks and other sign of the numerous bears that had gathered for their annual feast on spawning fish. As I quietly paddled a small boat around the shoreline, I scared up a female and two cubs. They ran along a fallen log that sloped uphill. Just as they disappeared in the thick growth at the top, she gave a loud coughing grunt. This was almost immediately answered from a point several hundred feet up the shoreline. Then from two other locations up the hill came similar grunts.
This four-way conversation kept up for several minutes. I could only conclude that the female I’d scared was warning the other bears of an intruder. Some of my encounters with grizzlies had a humorous side, at least when I think of them in retrospect. Here’s one of the best:
I arrived at a cabin in an isolated area near Kootenay where a friend had a base camp he used while prospecting the area. He wasn’t there, so I went in, lit a fire, and started a meal. He arrived at dark. As we ate he mentioned that he’d dropped his rifle that day, knocking the front sight off line. He would have to sight it in the next morning.
The next day as I got breakfast, he took several shots outside. He entered the cabin to announce that the rifle was now shooting so well that he could “shoot the head off a flying duck at thirty yards.”
After eating we climbed nearby Silvertop Mountain. After several hours we reached well above the timberline. We had been poking around for an hour or so when we heard rocks rolling on the far side of a small hill. Going around it, we saw a large grizzly hunting marmots in an area of large loose rocks. The bear was only about 100 feet away, and he saw us moving before we could stop. In this seldom-traveled area there was a good chance we were the first people the bear had ever seen.
The animal stood up on his hind legs to see us better. After a while it dropped down and slowly walked closer. When it was about 60 feet away the grizzly again reared up for another long look and again dropped and shuffled closer.
The third time the bear reared up it was only about 30 feet away. The animal looked pretty tall and quite unafraid so Scotty unslung his rifle and worked the action to chamber a cartridge.
Once more the animal returned to all fours. It walked slowly toward us until it was no more than 20 feet away. Again it reared up to stare down at us, turning its great head side to side. Scotty didn’t want to shoot, but there was a point where we didn’t want the grizzly any closer. So my friend was poised to shoot if necessary.
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However, after one more long look the bear dropped down, turned, and walked away.
Scotty left his gun loaded in case we encountered the animal again that afternoon. But we saw no further sign of it. We reached the cabin just before dark. I went in to make a fire while Scotty stayed outside to unload his gun and bring some firewood into the cabin.
After we’d finished eating I said that seeing as I’d been unarmed, I had felt much better knowing that he had been ready to shoot, with that bear looking down at us from 20 feet. Scotty was silent for a moment. Then he said with a sheepish grin: “I’m glad it made you feel better, and I’m glad he didn’t come any closer.”
Yes, I agreed, it would have been a shame to kill him.
“I didn’t mean that, lad. When I went to unload the musket tonight I found out that I forgot to reload after I sighted-in this morning. It’s been empty all day.”
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