Ep. 2: The Bear Attack on Afognak and Being Safer in Bear Country

tree nearby, and you went back to camp. Now you're coming back for the last load. What do you do? How do you proceed? What's the way to make sure that you're safe because you are approaching a meat site in the thick of bear country. Now, I've had my fair share of showdowns with both black bears and brown bears. Honestly a few too many stories to recount all in one sitting. But bears are concerned for many hunters, and honestly rightfully so. It's because they can kill you, maim you,

leave your gear and shambles. Now, acting appropriately in bear country can honestly save your life. What I want to cover is the motives for attacks and understanding bare behavior why would a bear attack you in the first place. I also want to go over a few of the best practices for preventing an encounter in bear country, and then I also want to finally get into possible defense options just in case you do one day find yourself

in a really shitty situation. Now, I really want to share a story with you first about a bear encounter that actually went wrong, because I think this is a great example of things to learn. Now, luckily everybody was okay in this particular instance, but it was a good learning experience if you ever have to have a bear learning experience in the way that this one panned out.

One thing, my major takeaway from this entire event was we did right and we did ten percent wrong, and that ten percent wrong is what literally could have bid us in the ass on this trip. So to take you back, now, many of you maybe have heard this story before, but I just have to go through it because we're gonna look at it through the lens of what to learn and what you should do in bear country. We were in a fog knack Island. I was with Steve Ronnella and we're filming one of the episodes for

the Latest Meat Eaters on Netflix. Now. Fog Nack Island is off of the coast of Alaska. It's off of Kodiak and it's just as some of the largest bears brown bears in the world. And you gotta also remember the time of year is later in the fall the salmon run. The salmon is still running, but it's not like it was during the summer. There are not a really good barry crop this time of year, and there

are a lot of large bears. Now. I have hunted this area before, and the first time I hunted with my brother, we were as bear aware as you could get. We were there by ourselves, just the two of us, and we saw large bears daily and it generally was that these bears were around the herd of elk that we were actually hunting. Now, when you're seeing the bears all the time, you're really thinking bear safety, bearware, don't

keep any food near camp. We actually had a bear fence around our tent because we are camped pretty close to the water and what would be almost a natural corridor for movement of the animals. Because of this, the hill came down behind our camp that time, we didn't have a lot. They wouldn't have a lot of room to get around, So you know, we took every precaution that we really could. That trip, we did everything right

right because we did not have a bad encounter. Now, on the follow up trip, at the point where we had shot an elk, we had seen zero brown bears. I told everybody how many bears we were seeing and how bad the bears were here, and heard so many stories from friends of mine, Yet when you don't see anything, it's on the back of your mind. Now we had bad weather and couldn't see much anyways, but bears were not really a concern for us at this point because

we've gone so long without seeing him. So as I tell this story, just keep thinking of if I was doing everything by the book and little things that are chipping away to create that ten percent that could really go wrong. Now, Steven shot a bull elk, and these elk are huge. I mean, you are not going to pack one of these out in one trip, and we're a long ways from camp. We actually had a mountain he had to climb up over the top from camp and then dropped down into the valley. Took about half

a day to get there. So he shot a bull just before dark in the evening, so we quarter it out. The first thing we gotta do get the get the meat away from the carcass. We put it up in a tree uphill where we might have a view from other areas. When we come back, we get the meat hung in a tree up high enough where a bear couldn't reach it. We then load up our packs with

some meat and hike out. We hike out all day or all night, essentially get back the next morning, and by this point we're fairly tired, so we actually gave it a day in between because the meat was fine. It's either hanging there or hanging in camp. And then we go back the following morning. Takes us half a day to get there. We get to where the meat was. Before we go up there, we glass into the area. We don't see any bears. We go in with our bear spray. I had my pistol drawn. We make noise

on our approach. We search around the tree and there did look didn't really look like any bear sign. However, there was like this scat like bear crap that somebody had stepped in. But we thought I actually thought, um, maybe that was something that someone stepped in before I got there. So at this point everything the coast is clear. We looked in there pretty good. We didn't see anything, but it is thick around that area. And then we decide, well,

it's been a half a day hike. Everybody's hungry before we load up our packs and get out here, why don't we just make a quick lunch. So we're sitting in a semi circle making lunch. There's actually six of us and we are sitting in kind of like the semi circle. Everybody's getting ready to have lunch. We decided to make some coffee at this point. For bear protection, I was bow hunting, so I was carrying. I thought, well, I'd like to have a firearm just in case I

needed it. So I had a forty four mag pistol on my belt of my pack, as well as bear spray on the other side. Now, when I took my pack off, what I had been doing was switching my pistol to my holster on my belt and then leaving the bear spray on the pack. Just that way. I always had at least some form of bared trent on me at all times. And I think I may have even had a way to switch the bear spray quick if I wanted as well. So we're everybody, we're deciding

we're gonna have some coffee. So I decided, well, I'm gonna round up water so put into the kiddie so it's not just one guy's water getting boiled for coffee for everyone. So I go around the circle collect water for the pot. When I go back to my pack where my pistol was sitting, I had laid out so when I was sitting on my pack, it was just right there. Someone was sitting there. So I just thought, okay, well I'll just sit down on the bank right here across from it. Now at this point, we're b s

sing as things go. We're you know, joking around, having some sandwiches. One of the guys in the back I heard something. He heard a bear, a brown bear. When I looked up, that bear was already charging. I had a pretty good view of him coming in and it just felt like his eyes were locked. I could see the hair shaking and he was running fast. Now Steve was across from me where my pack was. My thought was I need to get my pistol, and it wasn't

even probably two arms length in front of me. But by the time I got to my pack, it was like the bear was already on me. I did what I consider a football juke, move left right, had no clue which way to run, turned left. My back was now to it. I thought, oh, man, he's gonna grab me. And I turned around to look and he was wheeled around and going the other way. On my mind, of course, I thought my football juke refused to ship out of

this bear and made him run. Little did I know, just as I had done that, Janice, who was sitting just to my right, had grabbed his trekking pole and hit the bear in the face. Now, when I turned around, I now saw somebody with the bear, So I thought I had no clue who he grabbed, but somebody in the bear were going down the mountain. I grabbed the pistol. At this point yelled like who's missing? Count off, and everyone starts like one one, what, no, who, who's not here?

Which it ended up being old dirt myth writing on somehow back to back with this bear. Now the bear ran off into the brush. We all circled up around the tree. The bear kept circling out of range of where we could see, and we could hear him huffing as he moved around. I think he charged in a couple more times, but not to not fully in. You could just hear sticks breaking and other things. Then it got quiet for a while. We assume that he was

still there but had moved off. We then went up the tree, grabbed the meat, made a formation to where we could get into the open and then load up our packs and move on. I think when we talk about bear attacks, we first have to understand bear behavior. You have to know why would a bear attack you in the first place. Well, it can be broken down into a couple of different categories. I think the first category would be a defensive attack. Now, that's the bear

defending itself or something that it cares about. It especially comes into play when it's defending it's young, as far as a sow protecting her cubs or food. Now, if you get between a bear and its food, that's a bad place to be. Another type of defensive attack is a surprise when you surprise a bear, just like a prizing a mule deer. If you if you come over the ridge and you spook a deer out, well, that

deer is probably gonna run. But a bear has fight or flight instincts, so if you surprise it in the wrong scenario, it has the option to run or charge, and it may charge. Now, the other kind of attack would be a predatory one. This one is bad news for you. That a predatory attack can be seen is where the bear is actually hunting or moving in a way that is aggressive as a predator. So it could be something like if you're attacked while in your tent, that would be a predatory attack. If a bear is

following you and then attacks, that's a predatory attack. It's not surprised, it's not protecting, it's young, it's not you messing with something that it's eating. It's seeing you as food. And when that happens, that's a very dangerous situation. I honestly believe that the attack that happened to us in a fog nack was a predatory attack in nature the way that the attack happened, because when a predatory attack happens, it's more that animals coming in to kill something and

it's a full charge. I have surprised bears. I have been bluff charged by both brown bears and grizzly bears, and a lot of those are more defensive in nature, but a lot of those stopped before becoming a full charge, especially with I've had that happen with a bear and cubs, or surprising I actually have surprised a couple of bears on kills and they get aggressive, they wolf, they run in, but they see you, you see them, and a lot

of times that that charge stops. Now when it comes to a predatory charge or attack, that's a little bit different, and those are probably the kind that you have to defend yourself from, or just surprising a bear in a way that it believes I have to fight, not run away. Now that we understand a little bit about the behavior of bears, we have to understand what we can do to avoid inciting that behavior. And I'm just gonna call that, say best practices in bear country. There's certain things you

can do. Now. While it won't work add percent of the time, it will work most of the time because you are preventing yourself from getting into a situation where that bear is going to have to incite that fight mode. A lot of it revolves around let's let's talk about the first thing. Food. Now, when you're in bear country, bears are so food centric. They're about to go into hibernation, especially in the fall. They're just trying to fatten up,

and they are hungry. Now, that doesn't mean that they're hungry and looking to hunt you. That just means that you do not want to put yourself in proximity of a hungry bear. That means you don't want to provide food for that bear. So in your camp, you need to make your camp what I call a clean camp.

What I do is I generally hang. Now this is if you can hang something, I like to hang it ten ft off the ground and then at least four ft away from a tree, because a black if you're in black bear country, bears can climb trees and then get out to your food. You don't want to feed any bear and you don't want to bear to think that this place what was your food is now the bears food, because as soon as a bear eats food, it's his food and he will then defend that food.

So by providing food for a bear, you actually put yourself in a really bad situation. Now, think about when you're hunting, you're gonna have game down. Game meat, once claimed by a bear becomes that bear's food, and he can be very defensive over that food. So you have to do things to prevent a bear from getting the meat that you've just taken. The first thing that I do when I get something down is I will quarter it out and move the meat away from the carcass.

That way, I give the bear the carcass, but I move the meat away and hang it in a tree or place where he can't get it. That just lessens the possibility of that bear trying to claim something that I'm going back to now. Another thing is avoiding surprise. When you know that there is somewhere a bear might be likely to be, say the tree that you've hung meat or your meat or food that you have at camp, you don't want to surprise a bear in that area,

So you want to make noise. You want to let the bear know that a human is coming and give it time to take the option of a flight response as opposed to a fight response. When you surprise a bear, you're going to have a fight response more than you would have a flight response. When you're hunting, obviously you're gonna be quiet. You don't want to be wearing bear bells and talking, so sometimes that's hard. You might just happen, And that's where probably most hunters get attacked is by

surprising a bear in through the course of hunting. That may end up triggering a defensive response. But in times that you do not need to be quiet, like if I'm packing something out, I've got meat on my back, I'm encumbered, things are awkward, I've got heavy weight. I'm gonna actually talk to whoever I'm with. I'll make noise. If I'm by myself, I'm making noise. I'm not walking out because I want the bear to know that someone's coming and give it time option to run away. And

then don't beliebor. Don't mess around and hang around in areas where bears might be, where you could or have a higher percentage of encountering that bear. We did everything right up until the point that we hung around that tree. Now things could have been worse had we been messing with the meat and that bear attacked. It just happened to work out in our instance. But I would say that the thing we did wrong was we dropped our guard. The number one thing you don't want to do in

bear country is drop your guard. Always be on the ready, because the time that you need to defend yourself is the time you're at least prepared for it. So if you're always prepared, you'll always have a slightly better chance of making it out in one piece. Now, let's say that the worst possible thing happens. A bear does attack. It's charging. There's a few things. I mean, I could say you hear these things. Well, if it's a black bear, then you fight it off. If it's a brown bearer,

you play dead. If it's a defensive attack, you don't run. If it's a predatory attack, you fight back. I think a lot of it is going to boil down to the scenario. In the situation, my thought is make noise. Let that bear no. You're a human and you are

going to defend yourself. I think that one of the best ways to survive a bear attack is by having some form of defense, because you really do feel completely helpless when an animal with claws and teeth and muscles that is super fast is bearing down on you you and you have nothing in your hand. It's the worst feeling you can ever feel. I know from experience that

I never want to have that happen again and feel unprepared. Now, whether your defense system works or not, you're gonna feel a health of a lot better if you have it with you. I think it. There's two main two main defenses for bears will go spray and firearms. There are limits to both, and there really isn't a perfect situation or scenario. I think both sides of the fence will argue for which one is better, But I honestly don't know the answer to which one is better because it

might be situational in a lot of in cases. But I'm going to just go over the limits of both. So the bear spray is really good because you don't have to be as precise with it. Bear spray is essentially a large canister of pepper spray that can shoot. Maybe it's high pressure. You can spray it on the grasses even if you miss, or you can spray a barrier the bear will run into that fog of pepper spray or get it coming in. You also don't have to be as precise like you would with a pistol.

A pistol you have to make a kill shot on a running animal. That can be very difficult, and a pistols can be problematic. There's other people around. When ship goes down, you gotta make sure you don't shoot the guy next to you as he's running away from the bear the opposite direction. That's a lot to take in in a short amount of time. Now, the drawback of the bear spray is if the wind is the wrong direction, or that bear gets sprayed and continues to attack, you

have very little way to recover from that. When we did get attacked, the bear actually was running with a very stiff wind. I don't think that bear spray actually would have worked in our scenario, which is a scary thought, but in a lot of scenarios it would have worked. Now a pistol, on the other hand, you have to be a pretty damn good shot. But if the bears on top of you or of friends being attacked, I feel like that that's a good way to deter the

threat by eliminating the threat. When you talk about pistols, I generally carry a light Smith and West and forty four mag but I have also a lot of my friends and other people have moved to a semi automatic UM. I actually just picked up a sig ten millimeter, which it has more rounds, less recoil, and is just more accurate. But if you are going to carry a pistol, I truly believe that you need to practice with it a lot.

I carry a pistol. If I'm bow hunting, I actually carry a pistol and bear spray, but I practice with my pistol a lot. Now. If I'm rifle hunting, I often just carry the rifle and bear spray, So I like to have both options. It just depends on where you are. The type of bears you might encounter. If you're an area that you probably won't encounter a bear, you might be better with just the bear spray and

the rifle. But whatever you have the number one thing, whether it's bear spray, whether it's a pistol, whether a rifle is could be very hard to get off your shoulder or um. Even a shotgun is a pretty good if you aren't if you're just hiking in bear country, A shotguns a great defense. Loaded with slugs or yeah, I would say just slug. Some people put a warning shot in there. I don't know if I would do that.

If you're gonna go lethal force. Use lethal force. That's my that's my theory if it comes down to that. But no matter which method you choose, I've learned that the best thing is it needs to be on you, be ready, and you need to have it at hand at all times, because if you actually are attacked, the time between getting to your defense and that bear being

on you is a matter of seconds. You can never anticipate how fast it actually happens, and so you have to constantly be thinking about that, practice drawing whatever you're using while you're out there, and just know that in the times you're least expecting it is probably the times that it will happen. So be ready. My final takeaway with bear country is just give them the respect that they deserve. Maybe you haven't had an encounter with them, maybe you never will, but as long as you don't,

that's a good thing. So when you're out there, just be cognizant of the threat, constantly try to prevent anything from happening, and if something does happen, have whatever defense you're gonna use at hand. Now, I think that that was a good overview of entering into bear country, and those are just a lot of the things that I think about when I'm out there. Now, that's not everything

that there is to know about hunting amongst bears. However, it's a good start if you want a little bit more information or are going to be hunting in bear country a lot. You really just have to continually think about ways to prevent encounters and then also having the back of your mind, what do I do if it comes down the pipe. There's a lot of great resources on the meat eater dot com. As always, love to hear your feedback. You can email me at Remy at

the meat eater dot com. Let me know any comments or what you like, what you don't like, maybe some things you'd like to learn in the future. Also with love it if you give us a good five star review wherever you're listening, and right in the comment hopefully a positive comment. If you've got bad comments, just email them to me. I'll junk mail. Just kidding, but honestly, I really appreciate you guys listening. Would love to hear

your feedback. And yeah, that's the sign off. I gotta think of a cool sign off one of these days. I'll have one, not today though, until next week. Catch you later. Don't get eaten,