One year a couple of my friends and I were camping in one friends trailer tent camper at the end of a Forest Service road near West Yellowstone, Montana. I had my horses in an adjacent meadow with an electric wire around it. We had the quarters of 2 bull elk and a bull moose hanging in the stock rack in the back of my truck.
About 10 o'clock one night I went out to check my horses and to water a bush, and at the top of the road cutbank, not 10 yards from me, a grizzly woofed and clicked his teeth at me. I had my Ruger .44 mag on my hip, and I unholstered it and fired one round over his head. No reaction. Then I fired another round into the trunk of the pine tree next to him. Again, no reaction. So I hollstered my pistol and picked up a golf ball size rock that I threw and hit him. He then ran into the dark, and a few minutes later we heard a bunch of quick (pistol ?) shots from a neighboring camp.
He had a radio collar around his neck and had an ear tag. We reported the incident to FWP and found out that he had been a problem bear near Cooke City and had been trapped and released near where we had camped.
Another time I was driving back to the office on a Friday afternoon and I saw two of my co-workers stopped by the side of the road so I stopped to see if they needed help. They didn't need help, but they said there was talk on their Forest Service radios that a member of one of our trail maintenence crews working on the trail above them had been attacked by bear.
About then our Forest Service Law Enforcement Officer and a Deputy Sheriff drove up. The Forest Service LEO gave me his .223 AR, he and the Deputy both had shotguns with 00 buck loads, and we all started walking up the trail. I don't know why, but I was in the lead.
The trail crew was 3 college students, 2 guys and a girl. When we got up to them, it was at least an hour since they had called for help. The girl and one guy were up in one tree. They had a radio and had called for help. Fifty yards up the trail was the other trail maintenance guy. He was the one that the bear had attacked, and he had climbed almost to the top of a very tall spruce tree. Every hime he had called out to the other crew members, the bear would climb up the tree and had bit him in the foot or his lower leg.
When the LEO, the Deputy and I got to the tree he that was in, a black bear charged us from out of the bushes. We turned and all fired at once, killing the bear.
We then got the injured crew member out of the tree and got him down were the other crew members were. Other help had arrived and they called in an evacuation helicopter from Yellowstone Park.
I went back up to the bear and saw that it was a sow. Then I saw a bear cub of that year running in the brush. I immediately realized what had happened. The lead crew member had got between a mother bear and her cubs and she attacked him to protect her cubs.
I then went after the cub and he climbed up a tree, so I went up the tree after him, caught him and brought him down. He was all teeth and claws. If I didn't hold him tight on the back of his neck he would bite me, and his little teeth felt like nails in the jaws of a vice. And if I didn't hold his back legs with with my other hand the claws on his back feet would scratch me.
I had to tightly hold him for about an hour until the FWP bear biologist brought up a 5 gallon bucket with a lid to carry him in.
FWP brought dogs up the next day and found another cub. They took both cubs to a wildlife rehab center in Helena, and released them in the forest 2 years later.
The injured crew member was treated and released from the Bozeman Hospital. Schnees gave him a new pair of boots. I had to take some antibiotics and get a tetanus shot.
My third wildlife face-to-face story is on a Forest Service road survey project where I was walking through some waist to chest high brush and a bat flew out of a bush and landed on my chest, clinging to my shirt. I just picked him off my shirt and put him in another bush.
