“That bear was just there, all of a sudden, coming hard the whole time, right at me,” said Vic Workman. “If I hadn't had my rifle ready at my hip, he would've got me.
“These people who think that they're safe with bear spray, I'm here to tell them it's a false sense of security. It's too fast. Way too fast.”
“It was a total surprise,” he said. “I didn't want to shoot it. I love grizzly bears, and I feel very fortunate every time I see one out in the woods.”
And over the years he's seen plenty. Workman said he and his wife track hundreds of backcountry miles each summer, most of it on horseback in the Bob Marshall Wilderness and Glacier National Park.
A few years ago, a Glacier grizzly chased his wife and her horse “quite a ways down the trail” before giving it up, he said.
But Workman's never been charged, and until last weekend he'd never actually seen a grizzly in the wilds north of Whitefish Lake, one of his favorite hunting grounds.
He'd seen sign, though, and he'd seen black bears there, too. But this day, bears were the last thing on Workman's mind. He was thinking elk.
He and several friends had packed in Sunday morning, tied their horses, split up and were hunting on foot. Workman was with Eric Paine, and together the men were “stopped, talking, trying to decide where to go next.”
That's when the brush exploded, “and this big grizzly was coming straight at me, 30 yards away. He was full-tilt. I could see his lips flopping.”
Workman said he kept his wits, which fortunately were firing as fast as the bear was running. His first thought was to shout the bear off - “Whoa bear! Whoa bear!”
On Monday, as Workman retold his tale, the sharp edge of adrenaline remained in his voice, shouting “Whoa!” and reliving the rush.
The bear didn't whoa, though, and so Workman pulled up his .300 short-mag hunting rifle.
“I shot from the hip,” he said. “There was no way I had time to get the rifle up to my shoulder.”
He hit the bear square in the chest, but “it's a big chest,” Workman said, and the bear kept coming, rushed by 5 feet to his side and blasted back into the brush.
Shaken, Workman and Paine started digging around, investigating the area, trying to figure out what had happened. That's when he found the antler sticking up out of the dirt.
It was attached to a whole rack, a 5-by-6, which was attached to a white-tailed deer head, which as they dug, they found was attached to the whole deer.
“He must have just finished burying that deer,” Workman said. And he and Paine had unwittingly interrupted.
Workman and FWP officers returned to the site Monday, looking for the injured grizzly. But the bear was nowhere to be seen. The deer, though, had been unearthed, dragged to the opposite side of a small creek, and eaten.
Whether it was the same bear who did the eating, “we'll never know. But I hope he made it. I never wanted to kill him.”
It would not be the first story of a big grizzly shrugging off a high-caliber shot to the chest.
Workman, who's in the state record books with the seventh-largest black bear, knows a bit about big bears. A few years ago, up in Alaska, he shot a 1,200-pound black bear.
“And this bear was really big,” Workman said of the grizzly he met Sunday. “I would guess he was a 700- or 800-pound bear. He was huge.”
But for Workman, the real weight of the bear is its cumulative weight, the weight of his close call combined with other even closer calls, and with what he believes is an increasing number of grizzly encounters.
Paine feels the weight, too, Workman said, and is reconsidering whether to continue bowhunting with his young son. Because Sunday's rush was fast. Too fast. Faster than he could ever unholster his pepper spray.
“He's very concerned,” Workman said of his friend. “There's just been too many stories of bears attacking hunters.”
Part of the problem, he said, is a growing people population. Another part, he said, is a growing bear population.
As commissioner for FWP, Workman said he's been trying for some time now to come up with leverage needed to pressure federal wildlife officials into removing Endangered Species Act protection for grizzlies.
The bears are not only recovered, he said, but are perhaps “over-populated. I hunted hard this fall, and when I was up high in the backcountry, I saw grizzlies or sign of grizzlies virtually every time I went out.”
His is, admittedly, a particularly controversial point of view, and the relative health of grizzly populations continues to be hotly debated. But Workman's convinced the great bear is alive and well, and he for one would like to renew a Montana grizzly hunt - “to educate the bear so he is more afraid of people.”
As for this particular bear, however, the hunt is over. Workman and his FWP colleagues found no sign of him, “and I don't think he's going to be found. The search is over at this point. I'm just hoping that he survived.”
And as for that 5-by-6 buck, well, Workman has brought the head home. He'll have it mounted, he said, as a reminder of his Thanksgiving weekend hunt, for which he has much to give thanks.
Not that he needs the trophy reminder.
“It is a story,” he said, “that I will certainly never forget.”
Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at mjamison@missoulian.com.
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