“That's what my friends are saying, anyway,” Workman laughed. “So I'm changing my story. I was just firing a warning shot at that grizzly.”
Workman can joke about it now, but for a few furiously fast seconds late last November Workman's encounter with a grizzly bear was deadly serious.
Other facts, however, do not remain. Namely, the fact that Workman actually shot the bear.
“There's a very, very good chance that he didn't hit that grizzly,” said state bear management officer Tim Manley. “We've found no evidence whatsoever of an injured bear.”
“Yep,” Workman agreed, “that appears to be the case. The muzzle blast from 10 feet was enough to send the bear veering off to the left.”
A day after the incident, Manley and other investigators visited the site with Workman. They found it much as the longtime hunter had described: thick forest and undergrowth all around, a small clearing by a creek, freshly turned earth where a bear had buried a whitetail deer.
It was here, Workman said, north of Whitefish Lake, where the grizzly had burst from the brush at 30 feet, full steam ahead.
“He was full-tilt,” Workman said immediately after the November 2007 encounter. “I could see his lips flopping.”
By 20 yards, Workman was shouting. At 10, he was shooting. A .300 short-mag round, fired from the hip.
Workman is a member of Montana's Fish, Wildlife and Parks Commission, an avid hunter who has seen his share of bears in the wild. He, for one, believes there may be too many grizzlies, in fact, and has argued for removing Endangered Species Act protections.
Workman even proposes a grizzly bear hunt for Montana; but last November, he became the hunted.
“It was a total surprise,” he said at the time. “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.”
When Manley arrived on the scene, he put his dogs on the scent, hoping they'd pick up the trail of an injured bear, maybe even track down the carcass.
“But the dogs got nothing,” Manley said.
The deer, by then, had been dug up and moved, dragged to the other side of the creek and eaten to the bone.
That was the first hint Workman might have missed. Bears slugged point-blank don't usually come back for dinner, just a few hours after having been shot.
“We wondered,” Manley said. “But we didn't know for sure.”
The clincher, though, came only recently, almost a year after the incident.
“We gathered as much blood as we could from the area,” Manley said of the investigation. “We sampled every spot of fresh blood we could find.”
And when the lab tests finally came back late this summer, “it was all deer blood. We didn't find any bear blood at all. Not a drop.”
Which is why Workman's friends are teasing him about his aim.
Thing is, the hunter was shooting from the hip, a notoriously inaccurate way to go about things. Usually, Manley and Workman agreed, a hip shot goes high as the barrel swings upward.
But the shot that really got this story going came later, when Workman took aim at pepper spray as an inadequate defense against a charging bear.
“These people who think that they're safe with bear spray, I'm here to tell them it's a false sense of security,” he said after the encounter. “It's too fast. Way too fast.”
But it turns out he didn't need a bullet, or bear spray for that matter. All he needed was a loud noise.
Or perhaps not even that. Some bear researchers have suggested what Workman experienced was a classic bluff charge, where the bear comes on full-tilt, only to veer away at the last second.
Either way, Workman agrees he apparently didn't need the bullet to turn the trick.
“The key,” he said, “was having the trigger right there in hand. Whether it's a rifle or pepper spray, there's no way I could have gotten off a shot if I hadn't had the trigger at the ready.”
And there's a second key, too.
“You have to have the ability to keep it together enough to pull the trigger. My friend who was two feet behind me, he was white as a ghost and mumbling. He said he didn't think he could even pull the trigger, let alone get the gun up and into position.”
Workman's shot at pepper spray's accepted effectiveness was heard around the region, with many interpreting it as an endorsement of firearms over nonlethal spray.
“We carry bear spray all the time,” Manley said of bear managers like himself. “We wouldn't carry it if we didn't think it worked. With a gun, people miss all the time. Or else they end up wounding the bear, and then I have to go in and deal with that. Our position is the bear spray is a very effective tool.”
And Workman isn't disagreeing. He just thinks it has to be at the ready, right there in hand, because when a bear encounter happens, it happens with remarkable speed.
“But these are incredibly rare events,” Workman added. “I don't want people to think the only way to enter the woods is armed and on guard at all times. That's not it at all.”
Instead, he wants people to go in eyes - and ears and nose - wide open, alert for danger signs and prepared to grab for their defense, whether gun or canister.
And the fact that it did not, apparently, require a bullet to drive off a grizzly is not a problem for Workman.
“That's a good thing,” he said. “I absolutely didn't want to hurt that bear.”
And anyway, it's a much better story this way, with the intrepid hunter standing his ground to the last, firing a warning shot over the bear's head even as it closed to within a few feet.
“I think I'll stick with that one,” Workman said. “It gets everyone off my back - both the bear lovers and my friends, who keep on giving me grief about what a lousy shot I must be.”
Reach reporter Michael Jamison at 1-800-366-7186 or by e-mail at mjamison@missoulian.com
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