Kenai fire chief battles bruin with fists, stick.
SCUFFLE: Hunters fight back while grizzly sow decides which one to bite.
By Jon Little, Anchorage Daily News
(Published: September 16, 2001)
Soldotna -- Scott Walden, the city of Kenai's fire chief, rabbit-punched a charging brown bear last weekend and lived to tell about it.
Nobody even got hurt, apart from some minor shock after the fact.
"I never want to see this again. It was probably one of the most unnerving things I've ever seen," said Walden, a 16-year firefighter.
He and two other men stood their ground and made noise, as experts recommend, while a sow bear bluff-charged them. But instead of following the usual script by playing dead when the bruin roared back a second time, two of them shoved and whacked at her for a few seconds until the third man fired his hunting rifle, startling her away.
Wildlife biologists are astonished no one was bitten or killed.
"I am too," Walden said. "That was a real topic of conversation afterwards. One of us should be in the hospital right now."
Walden, 44, was taking his two cousins from rural northern Idaho, Justin and Rocky Sauer, on a morning moose hunt Sept. 8 in the mixed tundra and patchy spruce thickets just east of downtown Kenai.
Justin, 21, and Rocky, 45, had .30-06 rifles. But Walden was unarmed as they set off on foot down a dirt road that leads to the Snowshoe Gun Club, a target range just outside the Kenai city limits.
Near the target-shooting range, they saw a scrawny grizzly sow with one cub cross the road, but they kept hiking along a game trail on a low ridge bordering Beaver Creek, a salmon stream that feeds the Kenai River.
They saw no moose and turned back. About a half mile from the gun range, the three heard the telltale popping of an agitated brown bear snapping her jaws, Walden said.
"I told them, Uh-oh, there's a bear.' She was probably 50 feet up the ridge from us," he said.
Walden said he's no expert on bears but had more experience than either of his cousins, who are accustomed to hunting deer. He told them to bunch together and yell as the sow appeared out of the brush and looked at them.
This one was different from the thin bear they'd seen earlier. She was fat and healthy, about 5 or 6 feet long, and accompanied by two cubs, Walden said.
She charged once but stopped about 20 feet away after the hunters fired warning shots.
She ambled back. With her back to the men, she looked at her cubs, her head bobbed, and she turned to look back over her left shoulder. "She whirled straight at us and came four times faster than she did the first time," Walden said. "She was in a full-bore run straight toward us."
The bear covered the 50 feet at an unimaginably fast pace, Walden said. The men couldn't react.
"I said, She's coming and she's not stopping -- just kill her!' " Walden said. "Justin pulled his gun up, and she skidded to within 18 inches or two feet of us."
The bear was too close for Justin to get a shot off, he said. Besides, she was pawing and mouthing at the younger hunter's thigh, and his rifle butt and scope were the only barriers in her way. He jabbed at her with the gun.
Walden, meanwhile, had grabbed the only weapon at hand, a scrawny birch sapling, which he bent over and waved at the bellowing sow bear.
So there they were. Walden and his cousin Justin were side by side, boot to paw with the roaring, mouth-snapping sow for four or five seconds, Justin shoving at her with his rifle and Walden, to his right, waving the bent-over birch sapling in her face and swinging his right fist at her. Rocky was on Justin's left side.
Several times she appeared poised to bite Justin's leg but would lose focus when Walden swung at her. His blows barely grazed the sow's ear, but she would watch his fist. Her gaze followed his hand the way a retriever watches a ball taken from its mouth, he said.
"I kept yelling, Stand your ground, shoot her, shoot her!' " Walden said.
"She was just kind of going back and forth between Justin and I, him with a gun and me with a little branch," Walden said. "Her head was bobbing. She was mouthing. It was almost as if she couldn't focus on which one of us she wanted to grab. She was making an ungodly roar. It just sent chills up my neck."
Finally, Rocky fired a shot at her head. It missed or maybe grazed an ear.
"She got as bad a look on her face as we had on ours and did a quick U-turn back to her cubs," Walden said.
The hunters reloaded their rifles and slowly backed away until they were out of view. They swung wide around the bear, all the time hearing the popping and rustling in the brush as they skirted her.
Later they called the state Division of Fish and Wildlife Protection to report the incident.
Walden said he has no explanation for why nobody got hurt. His best guess is that the bear hesitated because there were three targets instead of one and none of the men ran, which would have triggered her chase instinct.
"She was more aggressive towards Justin than she was with me, and I was really concerned she was going to get him in the thigh," he said. "The poor kid, he never swears. He's a religious kid. I told him, Justin, for as religious a kid as you are, it sounded like you'd just been discharged from the Navy.' "
Justin's father refused to believe the story at first, and wildlife biologists say the account is highly unusual.
A sow with two cubs would be at least 5 years old, and bears that age usually react swiftly with deadly force rather than dither over where to bite, said Ted Spraker, area management biologist on the Kenai Peninsula.
"I'm clearly baffled that the bear didn't grab him when she was that close, and especially since he fought back. That usually elicits an aggressive response from the bear," Spraker said.
"If he was laying down motionless and the bear sniffed him, stepped on him and turned around and walked away, that would be normal," Spraker added. "But when you stand there toe to toe and duke it out with a bear and she doesn't do anything -- and a young adult sow -- I don't know. That's a new one for the books."
Reporter Jon Little can be reached at
jlittle@adn.com or at 907-260-5248.
