Justin Lee likes a good steak. And what completes a good steak, in Lee’s opinion, is fresh-picked morels. On Wednesday, during his first foraging outting of the spring, Lee and his brother-in-law were looking for morel mushrooms on Lee’s property north of Choteau, Montana. They were charged by a grizzly sow, and they shot and killed the bear at close range.
“There was no time to be nervous,” Lee tells Outdoor Life in an exclusive phone interview six days after he was charged. “No time for calculation whatsoever.”
Lee explains that he and his brother-in-law, John Long, had gone out walking on his property the evening of May 21. They drove his side-by-side down to Spring Creek, thinking it was a good spot to look for morels. Both men are from the area, and they know how to hike in grizzly country. They each carried sidearms: Lee had his 10mm Glock, and Long carried his 1911 chambered in .45 ACP.
“We weren’t hunting bear,” says Lee, a 53-year-old retired attorney. “We just carry these guns when we’re down there in case. It just happened to be the ‘in case’ day that day.”
After parking their rig in the cottonwoods near the creek, they started searching for mushrooms on foot. Lee walked toward the water. Long went about 50 yards ahead of him but returned quickly.
“He came running back saying, ‘There’s a bear. There’s a bear.’ Then I saw the bear and she had a cub. We started yelling and jumping up and down trying to scare her off. She just kept coming our way. Not charging but coming.”
Lee says he suspects the sow was curious and trying to figure out what the ruckus was about. After closing the distance from 100 to 50 yards, the sow stood up on its hind legs, sniffing the air.
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“She got our wind — she scented us,” Lee says. “Then she got down on all fours and started jogging toward us instead of away from us. At 30 yards, she put her ears back and she was charging, so we started shooting.”
It took eight bullets to put the sow down. Lee fired three rounds; Long shot five. They called a local game warden immediately to report the incident.
Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks investigated the shooting and ruled it a case of self-defense. Wildlife officials tried searching for the cub but couldn’t find it. They also removed the grizzly carcass from Lee’s property, which is marked with “Be Bear Aware” signs.
“They were very good,” Lee says. “I’m sorry to have to kill a bear, especially a female with a cub. But there wasn’t a choice. I’ve seen many bears and [have] been close to many bears. In all my encounters, they see me and they run away. But [this bear] just wasn’t afraid of humans.”
A few hours later, Lee was at the local bar. It was poker night. He played a few hands, carried on, and went home. It wasn’t until he climbed into bed that the events of the day caught up with him.
“I was lying in bed when it finally dawned on me what had happened. I was a little restless. I don’t have any desire to kill a grizzly, but I wish I had [been able to keep] a grizzly claw. You just can’t believe them until you see them.”
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Lee has a few cabins on his mostly undeveloped property near Choteau, which lies in Central Montana along the Rocky Mountain Front and southeast of Glacier National Park. The area falls within the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem, which is home to more than 1,000 grizzly bears and has seen an uptick in the number of grizzly conflicts in recent years. In April, a shed hunter shot and killed a charging grizzly bear near Dupuyer, which lies roughly 30 miles north of Choteau.
“It doesn’t change the way I behave, but it makes me wonder about having guests,” Lee says. “The grizzly bear recovery program in North-Central Montana has been wildly successful. When I was a kid, they were rare and in the mountains. It was a really big deal to see them. Over the years, it’s become less odd. Now it’s just standard.”
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