For many years I carried my Ruger SBH 7 1/2" .44 mag or my 1911 .45 acp on my hip. A few years ago I bought a S&W 629 4" .44 mag and I carry it in a shoulder holster.
Not in any way denigrating the importance of H20 in that setting, mind, but hunting (alone? ) in big bear country with I presume from this post, nothing but a bow and arrow? You`ve got bigger stones than I have either had or currently possess! A tip of the sombrero, amigo!
Night time, deep in the back country, sitting next to the fire with just a bow? No, especially after watching The Revenant!
I've lived, worked, and hunted n grizzly country since I moved to Montana in 1975. My home for the last 47 years is less than 100 miles from Yellowstone NP. A few years ago, a bowhunter on the hayfield below my house filmed a grizzly there, and my next door neighbor saw grizzly tracks in the snow on the hill 300 yds above our houses.
I've done much of my big game hunting alone, including multiple solo hunts for elk, bighorn sheep, moose, and mountain goats within a few miles of the Yellowstone NP boundary. On all of those hunts I've only actually seen one grizzly bear.
Does anyone here have firsthand experience where a sidearm saved their life while hunting?
The grizzly that I mentioned above was on a hunt in the mid '80s when two friends and I were camping at the end of a Forest Service logging road just north of West Yellowstone, Montana. We had the quarters of two bull elk and a bull moose hanging in the stock rack in the back of my pickup.
One night just before going to bed, I went outside of our tent camper to check my horses, and a grizzly bear was on top of the road cut bank by our camp. He woofed and was clicking his teeth at me. I had my Ruger .44 on my hip so I fired one shot over his head, no reaction, so I fired another into the pine tree next to him, and again, no reaction.
So I holstered my .44, picked up a golf ball size rock and threw it and hit him. He then ran off into the forest. He had an ear tag and a radio collar, and I later found out that he had been a problem bear near Cooke City, MT where he had been trapped then released in the area that we were hunting.
