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Another attacking grizzly stopped with firearm
Josey1
Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
Hairy encounter cures trio of fishing bug
FULL-BORE FURY: Surprise turns to shock as grizzly charges men on Kenai River.
By Craig Medred
Anchorage Daily News
(Published: August 21, 2002)
Matt Pennington and Galen Brenner, along with Galen's brother Kalen, learned how to skin a bear the hard way afer Galen and Kalen killed a sow that charged Pennington and the brothers early Saturday morning. (Photo courtesy of Kalen Brenner)
Click on photo to enlarge
Kenai River -- When a brown bear poked its head over the bluff behind the state's most popular fishing hole just after midnight Friday, 20-year-old Matt Pennington was surprised.
When it came full-bore for Pennington, the surprise turned to shock.
"The speed," he said this week, "that's the part that gets me."
Nervous about bears, Pennington had carried a shotgun on a sling across his back as he and fishing buddies Garen and Kalen Brenner hiked down along the Russian River to near the Kenai ferry crossing earlier that evening.
The shotgun was still there as Pennington stood knee-deep in the water about 100 feet upstream from the ferry landing on the river's south bank. When the salmon run peaks, hundreds of anglers line up shoulder-to-shoulder along this stretch of river.
On this night, though, there was only Pennington, his longtime friends the Brenners and three others.
"I was casting," Pennington said, "and I just happened to turn to the left. I saw (the bear) right there, coming up over the hill. It came right at me at a full run. I yelled, 'Bear, bear, and he's charging.' "
Pennington threw down his fishing rod and began wrestling the pistol-gripped Mossberg, pump-action 12-gauge off his back. He was unsure whether he'd been able to chamber a shell when he realized the bear was almost on him.
With the grizzly at three feet away, Pennington knew he had to do something. But what? He was deadly afraid of pulling the trigger on the shotgun only to hear the thunk of a firing pin falling on an empty chamber.
So he threw the gun in the bear's face and dove for the deep water of the fast-flowing river.
"I tried to stay underwater as long as I could," Pennington said. "It got real deep."
As Pennington submerged, the Brenners were drawing their guns.
Kalen had heard, "Bear, bear," before seeing a blur as Pennington disappeared into the river with the dark shape of the bear close behind.
"It was fast," 21-year-old Garen said. "We didn't hear any footsteps or anything."
"By the time I saw (Pennington) hit the water," Garen said, "I just started shooting.
"Usually I keep the gun in my chest waders, not loaded."
On this night, though, he had decided to fasten the holster to a strap holding up his waders, and the gun was where he needed it.
"We've fished there for years," Garen said. "We've seen bears. They've just never been a problem. They don't usually come over the hill and charge you."
Still, the men knew there was danger. When people in the Grayling Parking Lot at the Russian River Campground asked why they carried firearms, Kalen told them it seemed better to play it safe.
"Me and my brother, we're always looking out for something that's not normal," he said.
This was far from normal.
"(The bear) was five feet away when (Garen) got that first shot off," Kalen said. "That's how fast it was coming."
That Garen hit the fast-moving bear with his handgun was fortunate, he admits. That one of the 9 mm, full-metal-jacket bullets -- woefully inadequate for stopping a charging brown bear -- happened to slam into the socket of the bear's front shoulder might almost be considered a miracle.
That bullet blew up the shoulder. The bear went down, rolled over and spun.
Garen kept shooting, now joined by Kalen. They estimated they fired at least seven shots.
"I pointed my gun at its head and shot three or more times," Garen said. "And we're yelling, 'Matt! Matt! Where are you,' because we didn't know where he was."
"I thought he was drowning," Kalen said.
Pennington wasn't drowning. He was just coming up from his Kenai dive in chest-high neoprene waders, hoping the bear was gone.
It wasn't, or so Pennington thought.
"I saw the second bear, and I thought it was the first one," he said. "I thought it was coming down the river after me."
"I heard him yell, 'Shoot, shoot,' " Kalen said.
Only then did the Brenners realize there even was a second bear.
"It was so dark you could barely see," Garen said. "We saw the bear because it was blacker than the dark, and because it moved."
The second bear ran as Pennington screamed.
"We honestly thought it was a baby we had killed," Garen said.
Larry Lewis, an Alaska Department of Fish and Game wildlife technician, later estimated the weight of the dead bear at 400 to 450 pounds. The Brenners admitted they don't know much about the size of bears, having only seen them at a distance.
"Neither of us have ever hunted or anything," Garen said.
Now, they found themselves with one dead bear they thought was a cub and another growling bear they thought was the sow roaming the area.
Kalen fired several warning shots. The grizzly went back up the bluff, but wouldn't go away.
"It sat there and looked at us," Kalen said. "It was a very angry bear."
Wildlife biologist Bill Shuster with the Chugach National Forest said the other bear was a yearling cub about ready to go off on its own. He estimated its weight at 150 to 200 pounds. Biologists tranquilized that animal and relocated it on Saturday. They now believe there may be a sibling in the area, although the Brenners and Pennington saw only two bears.
Biologists also wonder whether the sow could be the bear that attacked tourist Justin Dunagan of Arizona and his mother, Kathy, along the Resurrection Pass Trail only 11 hours earlier.
The straight-line distance between the two attack sites is only about four miles. Lewis noted it's a coincidence to have two grizzly bear attacks so close together in such a short time.
The Resurrection Pass Trail bear grabbed Justin Dunagan by the arm. He managed to drive it off by kicking at it. The animal then went after his mother. It didn't leave until Justin Dunagan attacked it again with his camera tripod.
The dead bear, Lewis said, has teeth that are 71/4 inches apart, while the tooth marks on Dunagan's arm span 81/2 inches. But biologists aren't sure how much skin distorts when someone is bitten by a bear.
Teeth 71/4 inches apart could compress muscle before puncturing skin, leading to bite marks that appear wider, Lewis said.
Both he and Shuster also note that the size of bears -- adults and cubs -- is hard to judge, which might account for the Dunagans reporting a sow with a small cub while the Brenners and Pennington thought they had a big dead cub and a huge, angry sow threatening them in the darkness early Saturday.
The group started screaming for help. The three other anglers on the bank came to their aid with a flashlight.
"Hats off to them," Kalen said. "They came over to help right away."
"They heard us yelling for help," Garen said. "They didn't even second guess running over there."
He is uncertain of the names of the men, but believes they were G.I.s from Fort Richardson.
"We asked them if they were ready to go (back) up with us," Garen said, "and they didn't hesitate. I know we never walked back to camp as fast as we did that night."
They left a catch of three sockeye salmon on the bank of the Kenai near the bear carcass. They hiked the boardwalk trail along the Russian back to the Grayling Parking Lot, nervously stopping every five or 10 feet to shine the flashlight around.
"I didn't have any adrenaline rush. I didn't have any scared feelings until about five minutes after I shot the bear," Garen said. From then on, he was in a near panic.
"I just wanted to get out of there," he said.
His brother and fishing buddy weren't doing much better.
Pennington, who said he never noticed the cold of the glacial Kenai, started shaking when the group got back to their car and couldn't stop despite getting into clean, dry clothes.
Then they went to report the shooting, which didn't turn out to be easy. The gatekeeper at the Russian River Campground told them he couldn't do anything, and sent them up the road to a Copper Landing business. They had trouble getting a phone to call Alaska State Troopers. Troopers took a report and told them they'd have to be back at the river in the morning to meet a state wildlife official.
"None of us had slept since Thursday," Garen said. "We all worked Friday, and then we did our suicide run down there. We were just exhausted."
Still, they drove back to Anchorage, told the Brenners' mother, Eileen, what had happened, changed clothes, and turned around to drive back to the Russian. Near the Hope Cutoff, a wheel came off their Bronco and the drive came to a skidding halt, but they managed to get that vehicle towed back to Girdwood and find another in order to make it to the river to meet Lewis.
Then they got the big surprise.
"They asked us, 'Do you have your knives?' " Kalen said.
State law requires that anyone who shoots a bear in defense of life and property must skin the animal and deliver the hide, head and paws to the nearest Fish and Game office. The hides are usually tanned and sold at auction.
The Brenners and Pennington had dull knives and no idea of how to skin a bear. It took them hours to get the hide off.
"We had no idea of what we were doing," Garen said. "Knowing what we know now, I don't ever want to go bear hunting."
Then they spent hours searching the river for Pennington's shotgun, but never found it.
The gun didn't show up until Saturday night when a 14-year-old girl fishing with her father snagged it. She pulled it to shore. The father, who knew nothing about guns, picked it up, pointed the barrel in the air and pulled the trigger.
The shotgun went off with a boom. The sound was heard at the ferry landing across the river, leading to fears of another bear shooting. Once it was discovered that was not the case, the ferry staff explained how the gun came to be in the river.
It was returned to Pennington, along with the information that he had, indeed, chambered a shell before the bear got to him and might have been able to shoot instead of throwing and diving.
But then, all added, there's a lot of things they might have done differently.
"We all agreed we're not going to be doing any suicide runs or night fishing anymore," Garen said.
"We escaped with our lives. If we do any more fishing, it's going to be in-town fishing."
Their mother is suggesting angling in downtown Anchorage.
"Ship Creek is fine," Eileen Brenner said.
http://www.adn.com/front/story/1633810p-1751603c.html
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
FULL-BORE FURY: Surprise turns to shock as grizzly charges men on Kenai River.
By Craig Medred
Anchorage Daily News
(Published: August 21, 2002)
Matt Pennington and Galen Brenner, along with Galen's brother Kalen, learned how to skin a bear the hard way afer Galen and Kalen killed a sow that charged Pennington and the brothers early Saturday morning. (Photo courtesy of Kalen Brenner)
Click on photo to enlarge
Kenai River -- When a brown bear poked its head over the bluff behind the state's most popular fishing hole just after midnight Friday, 20-year-old Matt Pennington was surprised.
When it came full-bore for Pennington, the surprise turned to shock.
"The speed," he said this week, "that's the part that gets me."
Nervous about bears, Pennington had carried a shotgun on a sling across his back as he and fishing buddies Garen and Kalen Brenner hiked down along the Russian River to near the Kenai ferry crossing earlier that evening.
The shotgun was still there as Pennington stood knee-deep in the water about 100 feet upstream from the ferry landing on the river's south bank. When the salmon run peaks, hundreds of anglers line up shoulder-to-shoulder along this stretch of river.
On this night, though, there was only Pennington, his longtime friends the Brenners and three others.
"I was casting," Pennington said, "and I just happened to turn to the left. I saw (the bear) right there, coming up over the hill. It came right at me at a full run. I yelled, 'Bear, bear, and he's charging.' "
Pennington threw down his fishing rod and began wrestling the pistol-gripped Mossberg, pump-action 12-gauge off his back. He was unsure whether he'd been able to chamber a shell when he realized the bear was almost on him.
With the grizzly at three feet away, Pennington knew he had to do something. But what? He was deadly afraid of pulling the trigger on the shotgun only to hear the thunk of a firing pin falling on an empty chamber.
So he threw the gun in the bear's face and dove for the deep water of the fast-flowing river.
"I tried to stay underwater as long as I could," Pennington said. "It got real deep."
As Pennington submerged, the Brenners were drawing their guns.
Kalen had heard, "Bear, bear," before seeing a blur as Pennington disappeared into the river with the dark shape of the bear close behind.
"It was fast," 21-year-old Garen said. "We didn't hear any footsteps or anything."
"By the time I saw (Pennington) hit the water," Garen said, "I just started shooting.
"Usually I keep the gun in my chest waders, not loaded."
On this night, though, he had decided to fasten the holster to a strap holding up his waders, and the gun was where he needed it.
"We've fished there for years," Garen said. "We've seen bears. They've just never been a problem. They don't usually come over the hill and charge you."
Still, the men knew there was danger. When people in the Grayling Parking Lot at the Russian River Campground asked why they carried firearms, Kalen told them it seemed better to play it safe.
"Me and my brother, we're always looking out for something that's not normal," he said.
This was far from normal.
"(The bear) was five feet away when (Garen) got that first shot off," Kalen said. "That's how fast it was coming."
That Garen hit the fast-moving bear with his handgun was fortunate, he admits. That one of the 9 mm, full-metal-jacket bullets -- woefully inadequate for stopping a charging brown bear -- happened to slam into the socket of the bear's front shoulder might almost be considered a miracle.
That bullet blew up the shoulder. The bear went down, rolled over and spun.
Garen kept shooting, now joined by Kalen. They estimated they fired at least seven shots.
"I pointed my gun at its head and shot three or more times," Garen said. "And we're yelling, 'Matt! Matt! Where are you,' because we didn't know where he was."
"I thought he was drowning," Kalen said.
Pennington wasn't drowning. He was just coming up from his Kenai dive in chest-high neoprene waders, hoping the bear was gone.
It wasn't, or so Pennington thought.
"I saw the second bear, and I thought it was the first one," he said. "I thought it was coming down the river after me."
"I heard him yell, 'Shoot, shoot,' " Kalen said.
Only then did the Brenners realize there even was a second bear.
"It was so dark you could barely see," Garen said. "We saw the bear because it was blacker than the dark, and because it moved."
The second bear ran as Pennington screamed.
"We honestly thought it was a baby we had killed," Garen said.
Larry Lewis, an Alaska Department of Fish and Game wildlife technician, later estimated the weight of the dead bear at 400 to 450 pounds. The Brenners admitted they don't know much about the size of bears, having only seen them at a distance.
"Neither of us have ever hunted or anything," Garen said.
Now, they found themselves with one dead bear they thought was a cub and another growling bear they thought was the sow roaming the area.
Kalen fired several warning shots. The grizzly went back up the bluff, but wouldn't go away.
"It sat there and looked at us," Kalen said. "It was a very angry bear."
Wildlife biologist Bill Shuster with the Chugach National Forest said the other bear was a yearling cub about ready to go off on its own. He estimated its weight at 150 to 200 pounds. Biologists tranquilized that animal and relocated it on Saturday. They now believe there may be a sibling in the area, although the Brenners and Pennington saw only two bears.
Biologists also wonder whether the sow could be the bear that attacked tourist Justin Dunagan of Arizona and his mother, Kathy, along the Resurrection Pass Trail only 11 hours earlier.
The straight-line distance between the two attack sites is only about four miles. Lewis noted it's a coincidence to have two grizzly bear attacks so close together in such a short time.
The Resurrection Pass Trail bear grabbed Justin Dunagan by the arm. He managed to drive it off by kicking at it. The animal then went after his mother. It didn't leave until Justin Dunagan attacked it again with his camera tripod.
The dead bear, Lewis said, has teeth that are 71/4 inches apart, while the tooth marks on Dunagan's arm span 81/2 inches. But biologists aren't sure how much skin distorts when someone is bitten by a bear.
Teeth 71/4 inches apart could compress muscle before puncturing skin, leading to bite marks that appear wider, Lewis said.
Both he and Shuster also note that the size of bears -- adults and cubs -- is hard to judge, which might account for the Dunagans reporting a sow with a small cub while the Brenners and Pennington thought they had a big dead cub and a huge, angry sow threatening them in the darkness early Saturday.
The group started screaming for help. The three other anglers on the bank came to their aid with a flashlight.
"Hats off to them," Kalen said. "They came over to help right away."
"They heard us yelling for help," Garen said. "They didn't even second guess running over there."
He is uncertain of the names of the men, but believes they were G.I.s from Fort Richardson.
"We asked them if they were ready to go (back) up with us," Garen said, "and they didn't hesitate. I know we never walked back to camp as fast as we did that night."
They left a catch of three sockeye salmon on the bank of the Kenai near the bear carcass. They hiked the boardwalk trail along the Russian back to the Grayling Parking Lot, nervously stopping every five or 10 feet to shine the flashlight around.
"I didn't have any adrenaline rush. I didn't have any scared feelings until about five minutes after I shot the bear," Garen said. From then on, he was in a near panic.
"I just wanted to get out of there," he said.
His brother and fishing buddy weren't doing much better.
Pennington, who said he never noticed the cold of the glacial Kenai, started shaking when the group got back to their car and couldn't stop despite getting into clean, dry clothes.
Then they went to report the shooting, which didn't turn out to be easy. The gatekeeper at the Russian River Campground told them he couldn't do anything, and sent them up the road to a Copper Landing business. They had trouble getting a phone to call Alaska State Troopers. Troopers took a report and told them they'd have to be back at the river in the morning to meet a state wildlife official.
"None of us had slept since Thursday," Garen said. "We all worked Friday, and then we did our suicide run down there. We were just exhausted."
Still, they drove back to Anchorage, told the Brenners' mother, Eileen, what had happened, changed clothes, and turned around to drive back to the Russian. Near the Hope Cutoff, a wheel came off their Bronco and the drive came to a skidding halt, but they managed to get that vehicle towed back to Girdwood and find another in order to make it to the river to meet Lewis.
Then they got the big surprise.
"They asked us, 'Do you have your knives?' " Kalen said.
State law requires that anyone who shoots a bear in defense of life and property must skin the animal and deliver the hide, head and paws to the nearest Fish and Game office. The hides are usually tanned and sold at auction.
The Brenners and Pennington had dull knives and no idea of how to skin a bear. It took them hours to get the hide off.
"We had no idea of what we were doing," Garen said. "Knowing what we know now, I don't ever want to go bear hunting."
Then they spent hours searching the river for Pennington's shotgun, but never found it.
The gun didn't show up until Saturday night when a 14-year-old girl fishing with her father snagged it. She pulled it to shore. The father, who knew nothing about guns, picked it up, pointed the barrel in the air and pulled the trigger.
The shotgun went off with a boom. The sound was heard at the ferry landing across the river, leading to fears of another bear shooting. Once it was discovered that was not the case, the ferry staff explained how the gun came to be in the river.
It was returned to Pennington, along with the information that he had, indeed, chambered a shell before the bear got to him and might have been able to shoot instead of throwing and diving.
But then, all added, there's a lot of things they might have done differently.
"We all agreed we're not going to be doing any suicide runs or night fishing anymore," Garen said.
"We escaped with our lives. If we do any more fishing, it's going to be in-town fishing."
Their mother is suggesting angling in downtown Anchorage.
"Ship Creek is fine," Eileen Brenner said.
http://www.adn.com/front/story/1633810p-1751603c.html
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878