I’ve Lived Among Bears My Whole Life. Here’s What Happens When They Don’t Back Down

In three previous articles the author, a 68-year-old wilderness trapper from northern Saskatchewan, told of his life as a boy on the prairie, of his adventures in 25 trapline years, and of what he has learned about moose and other game in close to a half-century of hunting. Here, in the last of his four-part series, Updike tells of a lifetime of encounters that he has had with quarrelsome bears. This story, “Bears Don’t Always Run,” appeared in the August 1970 issue of Outdoor Life.

HAROLD ASTROPE was walking home from town shortly before dark one day last August when he saw a bear in the road, only 20 or 30 steps ahead.

Astrope lives on a lonely brush-bordered farm 18 miles northwest of the little town of Love in northern Saskatchewan, where my home is located. He farms and runs a few cattle. His place is on the outer edge of settlement, the farthest north in our area. He has lived there since the 30’s.

Once or twice a week he comes into town for sup­plies. In good weather he can drive all the way with a truck. But when the dirt roads get muddy he has to walk the first six miles to the nearest good road and then walk or hitch a ride the rest of the way. He was walking that evening last summer.

In his years on the farm Astrope had encountered too many bears for this one to scare him. He clapped his hands and yelled, and the bear ran off into the brush. The man went on, hardly giving the encounter another thought.

But half a mile farther on he saw another bear. This one was rounding a bend in the road 50 or 60 feet ahead, running pell-mell at him. A cub was fol­lowing, and Astrope realized that he was in for some trouble.

The road is crooked, hardly more than two wheel ruts, and has brush on either side. Astrope yelled again, and the cub disappeared.  But the old bear didn’t break stride or slow down. It was all over in a minute, but that was a terrifying minute for Harold Astrope. He stepped inside the sow’s first swipe and belted her on the side of the head with his fist. She smashed into him, knocked him down, grabbed him by an upper arm, and started to maul him. His only weapon was a small grocery pack-sack that he was carrying in one hand. He swatted her in the face with it, and she loosened her grip. He wrenched free, rolled to his feet, and then ran.

For some reason she let him go. He got off with bad bruises and some tooth cuts.

That run-in proved something that every experienced woodsman in our part of Canada knows: bears some­ times pick a fight with a man, unprovoked and for no reason.

I’ve heard more than one armchair outdoorsman make the statement that all black bears run like rabbits at sight or scent of a man. If you have lived among them most of your life, as I have, and if your family and neighbors have had as much to do with them as mine have, you know better. I’m talking only about blacks, for I have never lived in griz­zly country.

I haven’t killed so many bears as you might think. When I was on my trapline it was winter and they were denned, not walking around. But I’ve had enough experience with bears to know what I’m talking about, and my 32-year-old son Merv, who lives across the street from me in Love, has had even more.

Merv, who stands six feet four and weighs upwards of 230 pounds, has been a fire-towerman for the last 12 years, manning a tower 20 miles east of town for the Saskatchewan Department of Natural Resources. In that capacity he has had to de­stroy a number of bears that were raiding farms or doing other dam­age. On top of that he has done his share of bear hunting for sport, for blacks are plentiful in our area.

Merv has killed around 50 bears.

Two of them he shot when it was clearly a case of him or the bear. A third was killed when it was closing in on him, growling and popping its teeth and leaving little doubt about its intentions.

Of all bear combinations, a female with cubs is most likely to prove bad medicine. Two of those groups gave Merv’s hair cause to stand up.

In July 1966 he and I were cutting trail in the Narrow Hills country about 28 miles northwest of Love so that we could get in with a tractor when moose season opened.

We rounded a thick stand of sec­ond-growth jackpine, and a bear was standing and looking at us 50 yards away. She ran off a short distance. and then three cubs scratched their way up a nearby tree. We knew we could expect trouble.

She started a low, moaning growl and began to pop her teeth. We fig­ured out afterward that the only reason she didn’t rush us instantly was that two men were a little more than she wanted to take on. If Merv or I had been alone, we’d likely have had a bear fight on our hands right then.

She started to circle us, moving through thick willows and young pines. Halfway around she pivoted and circled back, inching in a little closer and keeping up that strange moaning noise.

“She means to come for us,” Merv said. “The cubs are big enough to make out on their own, and we’ll have to roll her.”

I had no rifle, but my son was carrying a Marlin Model 336 in .35 Remington caliber. He squatted, caught a glimpse of her through the willows, and shot. He missed.

That shot seemed to make the sow madder than ever. She made a full circle around us, never more than 40 or 50 yards away, and we could hear her teeth pop without letup. She was working herself into a wicked rage.

Merv shot and missed again.

“There’s something wrong with your rifle,” I told him. “She can’t be that hard to hit.”

He took a quick look at his sights. Somebody, fooling with the gun at his home, had elevated the rear sight to its fourth notch, and his shots were going over the bear’s back.

Merv didn’t even take time to change the sight. The next time the sow came into an open place, fuming and growling, he held six inches be­ low her shoulder and let her have it.

She wheeled and took off at a dead run, but she was hit in the lungs and heart and running blind. She went less than 50 feet, banged headlong into a tree, and went down dead.

Two years before that, in the fall of 1964, Merv and a partner, Oak Nowlin, walked back into the bush three miles from the road to look at a stand of timber. Merv took his Marlin; Nowlin was carrying only a .22.

In an open stand of pine they climbed a low rise. In a depression beyond, a 500-pound bear was facing them just 25 feet off.

The second the men came into sight she reared up on her hind legs and ripped out a spine-chilling roar, and out of the corner of their eyes the men saw two cubs go up a tree and a third one run off through the timber, bouncing uphill like a black football. In the same instant the sow started for them, walking erect like a man, still roaring and growl­ing.

Had she heard them coming and waited for them, ready to attack the moment they came over the rise? Or did they take her by surprise, and did she simply go for them when she saw them, without thinking about it? The men never knew.

It all happened faster than the story can be told. Merv whipped his rifle up and, without aiming, slammed a shot into the bear’s chest. She was close enough by then that he couldn’t miss. It knocked her on her back. He put a second into her head to make sure, and she was dead in seconds.

There had been no time to wonder about the size of the cubs and no choice about leaving them orphans, but it turned out that they weighed 50 to 60 pounds apiece and were old enough to take care of themselves.

Merv figures that incident was about as close a call as he’s ever had. He killed one other bear that was coming at him. It happened in the spring of 1956 while Merv was trapping beaver along the White Fox River. He noticed a fresh bear track headed toward an oat­ field that had not been harvested the previous fall, and he surmised that the bear had gone there to feed. Such a field is a favorite of bears. They’ll sit on their rumps or lie flat on their bellies and rake in and pull down all the grain they can reach, a handful at a time.

Merv took a look at the field, and sure enough, the bear was busy har­ vesting oats. But he didn’t have a gun, and there were a couple of beavers to skin, so he went on about his business.

The best time to waylay a bear is just before dark, so that evening Merv went back to where the riverbank over­ looked the field. He was carrying an old .303 Ross, and when it was almost too dark to shoot, the bear came sauntering out of the brush just as he had expected.

The light was poor, and Merv was shooting at a bad angle. He made a poor shot. The bullet hit in the upper part of a hind leg, and the bear bawled and dived back into thick willows and poplars. Merv followed for half a mile, until it was too dark to see blood.

Right after daylight the next morn­ing he went back and jumped the bear from the bed in which it had lain all night. The brush was so thick that there was no hope of getting up close enough for a shot, so Merv fell back on an old deer-hunting tactic — making a circle downwind in the hope of getting ahead of the animal and ambushing it. He next saw the bear 75 yards away across a slough. It saw him in the same instant, ripped out a rumbling growl, and came for him headlong. One shot in the chest ended the affair, but there was no question that the charge had been a real one.

That was the scruffiest-looking bear I have ever seen, gaunt and starved, his pelt matted with dirt. His frame was big enough that if he had been fat he’d have weighed around 250 pounds, but he was at least 100 pounds lighter than that. We never did learn what ac­ counted for his poor condition.

Once in my trapping years and once on a moose hunt I looked a bear in the face at 10 paces. Both times I knew the bear was mad, and to put it mildly I was uncomfortable. I’m not an ex­ citable person, but, staring into. those piglike eyes, I did some very fast think­ing about the best thing to do. To make matters worse, during my first close-range encounter with a bear I didn’t even have a gun in my hands.

I had gone in to one of my trapline cabins that fall and found that a prowl­ing bear had broken in, eaten most of my grub, scattered and cuffed around what he couldn’t eat, and left the place looking like a garbage dump.

I’d have to make a trip to another cabin eight miles south for sup­ plies. I cleaned up the mess, fastened the door back in place, and hiked away. I got back the next forenoon and saw that the bear had returned, torn the door down again, and left his tracks all over mine on the dirt floor.

I knew I’d have no peace until I got rid of him.

The equipment for doing it was at hand. When my partner, Elwood Fra­ ser, and I had pulled out of that cabin the spring before, at the end of the trapping season, we had left behind a heavy double-spring bear trap, a New­ house No. 50. It was still hanging on the wall.

I made it a point to keep my rifle, a .35 Remington, within reach. Even when I went to get a clog to chain the trap to, I took the rifle along.

The Newhouse 50 is a powerful trap. To compress the springs I had to use four stout poles, each about four feet long, as levers. I leaned the Reming­ ton against a stump while I cut them. By wiring the poles together in pairs at one end and using them like scissors over a spring, then putting my weight on the other end, I was able to com­ press the spring. A few wraps of wire around one pair of poles held the spring down while I compressed the other one.

I decided that the best place to set the trap was in front of the cabin door. The bear would be sure to walk there. When the trap was in place and cov­ered, and all sign of it brushed out, I decided to put up a warning sign. I had never had a human visitor at that cabin and didn’t expect one, but I didn’t want to take any chance of a man’s stepping into that bone-crushing New­ house.

I nailed an apple box over the door and printed BEAR TRAP on it in heavy letters. I didn’t know it then, but an amusing bit of irony was connected with that chore — the bear was watch­ing me do the lettering. I suppose it was a good thing he couldn’t read.

When I turned from the door, he was there, 30 feet away, giving me a very hard look. His head was hanging low and swinging from side to side, and the hair on his neck and shoulders was standing the wrong way. I guess he thought the cabin belonged to him and I was trespassing.

I reached slowly behind me for my rifle. It wasn’t there. Suddenly I realized that I had left it leaning against a stump on the woodpile when I set the trap springs.

The cabin stood only 10 feet from the edge of a small lake. The bear, in order to get where he was, had walked between cabin and shore. Clearly he had no fear of me. What would he do next? He had water on three sides, and I was square in his only avenue of escape. Whether he elected to attack or run, he and I were going to collide.

There was a small lean-to about six feet square to the left of the cabin door. I’d have to walk around it to get my rifle.

I moved one foot ahead very slowly, then the other. The bear stayed where he was, swinging his head and eyeing me balefully. When I reached the corner of the lean-to I decided to make a run for it. I’d be angling away from him, and if he’d give me about two seconds I’d be ready for anything he might try. 

Many people think of a bear as clumsy, but I have known a full-grown one to clear 15 feet in one jump from a standing start. This one left the ground the same instant I did, coming straight for me. But when he saw that I had left a lane open around the cabin, he swerved and took it.

By the time I grabbed the rifle and got him in sight again he was 60 feet off, going in short jumps up a hillside so steep that a man would have had to hang onto trees to climb it.

My first shot stopped him, but he got back on his feet in a hurry. The next one shattered his spine just behind the shoulders and left a two-inch exit hole in his chest. He came tumbling and sliding back down the hill, ending up in a patch of alders. I walked over and gave him another bullet through the head to finish him.

I trapped out of that cabin for the rest of the winter and had no more bear troubles.

The next time I faced a bear at 10 yards was the fall of 1967. Merv and I had driven up the Narrow Hills road into country I had trapped for many years. I had been back there only once since giving up bush trapping in 1947, but everything still had a familiar look.

We got there the day before the moose season opened, put up a tent, and a big tarp to cover our supplies and camp stove, and were all set for our hunt. But the tent, borrowed and old, was far from waterproof.

We were awakened in the night by the sound of rain pouring down on it. Much of the rain was coming through, and by the time a cold and cheerless dawn broke, our beds were soaked and so were we.

We built a whopping big fire, but after breakfast we agreed to go home and dry out. First, however, Merv wanted to hunt for a couple of hours. He exchanged his leather boots for rubber ones and walked off into the bush.

By that time the temperature had dropped low enough that the leaves on the ground were frozen stiff, so the woods were too noisy for good hunting. I picked up my rifle, a .303 Enfield, and took the truck trail, where I could walk silently.

I mooched along for a couple of miles, saw no moose, and headed back. I was almost to the tent when I noticed a dead branch that hung low enough to scratch the truck. I broke it off, and when it cracked some heavy animal went crashing away through the under­ brush close to camp. When I got to the tent I found that a bear had sampled our bar of soap — but apparently didn’t like the taste — and then had sunk its teeth through one of Merv’s boots.

I leaned my rifle against a block of wood and lit the camp stove to make coffee. Then I heard something crash through the willows again. The bear had come back, but I had scared him off.

I decided that if he was bent on raid­ing us I’d give him a welcome he didn’t expect. I picked up the rifle and walked behind a corner of the tent where I could watch the underbrush for movement.

A man who has spent as much time in the bush as I develops the hab­it of keeping watch on all sides and behind him. After a few seconds I turned my head slowly to the right. A bear was watching me from behind a clump of scrubby birch just 10 yards away. I knew it was not the one I had heard run off, for there was no way that one could have reached the birches unheard and unseen.

I was dealing with two bears, and this one was not afraid of me. He was staring me in the face, and his hair was standing up.

I couldn’t get a good shot at his head, but his neck showed in a narrow gap between two birches. I drove my bullet in there, as near the shoulder as I could.

It hit no heavy bone and didn’t jar him much, but it took all desire for an argument out of him. He made a cou­ ple of jumps and went tearing down­ hill through thick brush.

I found blood on the leaves but couldn’t see more than six feet ahead, and I decided that trailing a wounded bear in that place was too risky. I knew I had got in a good hit. I’d wait and look for him later.

Merv came in shortly, and together we followed the blood and broken brush for 80 yards. We found the black dead, shot through the lungs. The first bear never showed up around that camp again.

The most-fantastic bear encounter I’ve ever heard of happened eight or nine years ago on the road that leads north from the settlements west of Love to Upper Fishing Lake. If I had not been personally acquainted with two of the people involved and known them to be truthful, I would not have be­lieved the story.

Four men were driving that road in an old pickup truck when a bear with two cubs crossed the road ahead of them. One of the quartet was Gene Madliner, an old-time trapper who at that time lived all year in a cabin on a small lake about 40 miles from the settlements. Another was Billy Mat­ thews, a fire-towerman whom Merv has known for years and who told him what happened. I don’t know the names of the other two men.

The cubs scrambled up a tree 50 yards from the road. One of the men had never seen a bear before, and Mad­ liner proposed that they walk to the tree and try to get a better look. They had no gun along, but he got a single­ bitted ax out of the truck and led the way.

The men had no trouble finding the sow. She was standing 30 feet from the tree the cubs had climbed, watch­ing. Three of the men didn’t altogether like the situation, and they held back behind Madliner, but he kept going.

He was almost to the tree when the bear stood up on her hind legs, began to growl and mutter, and started to walk toward him, still erect. He brought the ax back over his shoulder and waited, as unruffled as a porcupine under a stump.

The sow didn’t come fast, but she didn’t stop either. When she was with­ in arm’s length, standing almost as tall as the man, slobbering and growl­ing and popping her teeth. Madliner moved-and moved fast.

Before she could take a swipe at him he brought the flat side of the ax down on top of her skull with all his strength.

She dropped like a sack of rocks, got up, shook her head, and fell down again. After a minute or so she regained her footing and kept it. But there was no fight left in her. She staggered away. Nearly 50 years in the northern-Sas­katchewan bush and on its fringes as a wilderness trapper and homesteader have convinced me that every mature bear has a superiority complex.

ears have no natural enemies apart from man, and in the right circum­stances they soon lose their dread of him. A big one cuffs smaller bears around if they come near, and he gets to believing that he is king of the woods. The instant something doesn’t go his way he flies into a red-eyed rage.

He is definitely an animal to avoid if possible.

Two kinds of bears are especially likely to be dangerous. One is the clown that hangs around a garbage dump or begs handouts in a park or at a campground, and becomes so famil­iar with humans that he has no fear.

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The other is the true wilderness bear, living in remote bush, that has never run across a man and so has never learned to respect him. My area has a good many of that kind. North of the settlements, where there are no roads and the only human inhabitants are scattered Indians and an occasional trapper, more than half the bears, I sus­pect, have never seen a human.

I don’t mean, however, that bears of those two kinds are the only ones like­ly to make an unprovoked attack if circumstances are right. Every bear is a potential powder keg. Maybe 99 out of 100 will run at a hint of man smell. But the one that doesn’t may be the first one you meet.