This story, “A Nest of Grizzlies,” appeared in the November 1986 issue of Outdoor Life.
When Mark Miner pulled himself out of bed early on the morning of October 20, 1985, he was thinking about pheasants. The thought of bears never crossed his mind.
After getting his hunting gear together, Miner, 25, drove over to pick up hunting partner Willie Reed, 24. The two piled their hunting gear into Willie’s truck and drove off in the first light of the new day. Their destination was the rural farm area around St. Ignatius, 50 miles north of Missoula, Montana, in the Mission Valley.
The two started their day by hunting ducks in an irrigation ditch. Miner got a double on a hen and drake mallard when they flew up out of the ditch. Miner said it was the first double he had made in years. After a short break for breakfast, the two men drove to a nearby ranch and secured permission to hunt pheasants. As they were walking through the rancher’s field, they heard geese; and deciding that a goose in hand was worth two pheasants in the bush, they went to investigate. However, the geese were domestic, and when they spotted a lady standing in her yard, they walked over to talk to her. Miner and Reed asked her about hunting on some adjacent land. She pointed to a house in the distance and suggested they obtain permission there to hunt on the land.
The two shouldered their 12-gauge shotguns and decided to hunt back to the truck and then drive to the ranch house. Reed said he had had enough of the thick brush patch and mud they had just come through. so he was going to walk around it through the open field. Miner volunteered to go into the brush with his Chesapeake Bay retriever, Molly, to flush out any pheasants to Reed. Neither man was aware that this small, brushy area was well known to bear researchers as a prime grizzly bedding site.
As Miner struggled through the brush and deep mud, he saw Molly across a small clearing standing stone still. “Good! We got a bird finally,” Miner thought. He took a couple of steps toward his dog, waiting for the pheasant to flush. Instead of a pheasant, a full-grown sow grizzly came out of the brush with a loud roar. The bear ignored the dog and came straight for Miner.
“I fired the first time when she was 30 feet away,” Miner said. “The shot never slowed the bear a step.” His next shot was at 15 feet. The 1¼-ounce No. 4 shot hit the bear in the jaw on the right side of her head.
“She went down like a ton of bricks,” Miner said, “but before I could pump another shell into the shotgun, she was back up and coming.”
Miner could see that his shot had connectedm but the grizzly lunged toward him. By the time he had the last shell pumped into the chamber, the bear was only a couple of feet away.
“It was too close for me to get the gun in her mouth,” Miner said. “I raised the gun up, pointed it down at her back, and popped her on the back.”
The grizzly raised up and snapped her jaws in an attempt to bite at Miner’s eyes, but she was an inch short and bit the bill of his cap instead. Then she hit Miner on the forehead with her paw. The force of the blow laid open Miner’s forehead and sent him and his shotgun flying.
When Miner landed, he rolled into a ball to protect himself. The bear was all over him in an instant.
“Then she began to have herself a smorgasbord,” Miner said. “She bit my hand, my arms, my shoulder, and the back of my head. While she was biting the back of my head, I let out the only scream I remember. I yelled, ‘Jesus,’ not in a derogatory sense, but meaning ‘I’m coming to see you, Jesus, don’t make me wait at the Pearly Gates.’ Right after I screamed, I could hear bones breaking when she bit into the back of my head,” Miner said, “I thought my skull was caving in.” Fortunately for Miner, the sound was the bear’s jawbone breaking from the shotgun blast. The attack was over.
Just two days earlier, Miner had received his OUTDOOR LIFE magazine. As he lay in the mud and blood, rolled into a protective ball, he thought about a story he had read about a Canadian moose hunter who had been mauled by a bear (“Nightmare Hunt,” November 1985). The moose hunter had gotten up too soon, and the bear had come back and mauled him again. So Miner decided to lie in the mud for a while because he thought the bear might be sitting next to him.
As he lay there, covered with blood and trying to control his emotions, he started to think about his family. Just the day before, his wife had told him she was expecting their second child.
After about five minutes, Miner could not tolerate lying there any longer. “I was absolutely amazed that I could stand up,” he said. The first thing he did upon rising was to find his shotgun and load it for fear that the bear would come back. When the grizzly had swatted the shotgun out of Miner’s hands, the gun had landed in the crotch of a nearby tree, “just as if I had set it there,” Miner said. The shotgun was covered with blood, both Miner’s and the bear’s.
The first pain Miner felt was when he wiped the blood out of his eyes with the wool sweater he was wearing. Miner called his dog. When she came, he grabbed her collar and said, “Let’s get out of here!” His arm and shoulder were beginning to hurt badly because most of the bites had gone to the bone. But Miner held on to the collar and let the dog guide him out of the brush and back to the house where they had just come from.
Miner went up to a window and started banging on it to get the woman’s attention. “I must have looked like a human lawn sprinkler,” Miner said.
Willie Reed, meanwhile, was in a fix of his own. As he was walking around the brush patch, he heard Miner yell about a grizzly and then he heard Miner start shooting. After hearing more shots, Reed then heard screams from Miner. Immediately, Reed, a Missoula policeman, started into the brush to help his partner. Reed saw the brush move 10 yards in front of him and thought it was Molly. He called for the dog, but instead, a big male grizzly came out of the brush. Reed shot at the big boar and started to back up as fast as he could. Then, another grizzly, a fully grown sow, stood up next to the boar. Both of them started for Reed, but not at a charge. Reed ran into the open field he had just come from, and the two bears stopped at the edge of the brush, watching Reed’s every move.
“I was just stuck,” Reed said. “I didn’t know where to go. Mark wouldn’t answer my calls, and I had two grizzlies right in front of me.” Reed decided he could not help his partner, so he ran across the open field and back to the ranch house where he and Miner had started hunting. He told the man inside the house to call the sheriffs office. After the call had been made, Reed asked to borrow a rifle. The man re plied that it was not his house, and he re ally did not know if there were any guns around. Reed ran for his truck, which was just outside. He dug out a box of three inch magnum shells with BBs that he used for geese, loaded his 12-gauge, and started back to the brush where Miner and the grizzlies were.
Because this was on the Flathead Indian Reservation, a Confederated Salish-Kootenai game warden responded to the call for help; however, he drove on by the ranch house, apparently unable to locate the correct location. Reed yelled back to the man at the ranch house, who was now standing on the porch, and told him to call the sheriff’s office again to redirect the game warden. Shortly after, the warden realized his error, turned around, and drove into the ranch house yard. While Reed was explaining the situation to the warden, a call came over the warden’s radio that Miner was at a nearby house and that an ambulance was on its way to take him to the hospital.
As Miner was wheeled into Mission Valley Hospital, doctors and nurses immediately started to work on his wounds. “I looked around, and nobody was smiling,” Miner said. “I asked them if I was going to die, and nobody said anything. Then I asked if they would please smile because I didn’t feel like smiling. Then they started to smile, and everything was better.”
Dr. Yong Park and a number of nurses spent four hours in surgery, cleaning and suturing Miner’s wounds. The wounds on his hands, arms, shoulder, and head required 320 stitches to close. He was listed in stable condition, and spent 4½ days in Mission Valley Hospital and a Missoula hospital.
Because the officers could not pinpoint the exact place of the attack, Reed returned to the mauling site. Reed pointed out the area, and stood by one of the warden’s trucks to watch. The wardens loaded their pump shotguns with slugs and prepared to go into the brush where the grizzlies — nobody knew how many — lay waiting. “People tell me they wouldn’t have my job as a policeman,” Reed said, “but I wouldn’t have wanted the wardens’ jobs for anything.”
Frank Acevedo, head of the Flathead Reservation’s fish and game department, and two of his officers walked into the brush. They found the sow that Miner had hit in the rear of the jaw with a blast from his shotgun. The sow was barely able to move, and the officers shot and killed her. The gunfire and the wardens’ talking brought a boar grizzly out of the brush. The boar made a charge at the three men from 30 yards. “I started to look for a tree to climb,” Acevedo said.
The men emptied their shotguns at the charging bear — a total of 15 shots. Other than their shotguns, Acevedo had a .357 Magnum revolver and one of his men had a .44 Magnum revolver. “We were down to our sidearms,” Acevedo said. After more than 20 shots, the grizzly died. “When that grizzly came at me,” Acevedo said, “I had just a numb feeling. I thought things were going to get out of control.” Acevedo said that he had “some good people” with him, and they handled the situation well.
According to an autopsy, the male grizzly took eight killing shots before it died. The male was the same grizzly that came after Willie Reed when he tried to enter the brush to help Miner. Although Reed shot at the bear as it came at him, he did not hit it. The boar’s live weight was close to 650 pounds.
The sow that mauled Miner had been shot twice by him — in the rear of the jaw and the top of the back. Miner’s first shot missed the bear. The 16-year-old sow had weighed 600 pounds when she was alive. She was seven feet long from nose to tail, and she stood nine feet tall on her hind legs.
The sow was no stranger to wildlife officials. She had been captured twice before. Once she was caught in a culvert-type trap, and the next time she was drugged. The sow was captured by the Border Grizzly Project, a research team studying grizzly bears in Montana, for research purposes only. “She was a good bear. We never had any problems with her,” Acevedo said.
Read Next: A Dozen Times I Should Have Died While Hunting and Fishing
It is thought that the sow believed she was protecting her cubs when she attacked Miner. After the mauling, the two two-year old cubs, estimated to weigh 150 pounds each, ran into the Mission Mountains. The cubs were old enough to survive without their mother. The other bear that confronted Reed was believed to be a full grown sow. She also escaped. Evidence in the area indicated that two other grizzlies may have been in the one small area of brush and mud.
It might be said that Miner and Reed found a beehive of bears. And as Miner put it, “We were the honey pot.”
Read the full article here
