For most of us as hunters there are few circumstances that we become the prey and extremely rare that we’ll face a life and death struggle with a predator but that was the situation the Leming’s faced this past September on a Wyoming elk hunt.
During the morning hunt they were working two bulls when they encountered the grizzly bear.
This time, though, something different happened. The bull elk that had been shredding the tree bolted away.
Leming stood up to walk down to his father when again he heard a sound behind him. Turning, he found himself 15 feet away from a full-grown, 11-year-old male grizzly. The Lemings often encounter bears in the backcountry. It’s a huge area that ties into Yellowstone and Teton national parks and the Washakie Wilderness. Last year, a six-point bull elk that Leming shot had been partially consumed by a bear when he returned to pack it out.
“I hollered at him,” Leming said. “I said, ‘Get out of here.’ He waited about a half-second, laid his ears back and came at me full speed.”
Initially, Leming thought about hooking his bow release, a triggerlike device, onto his bowstring and taking a shot. But as he fumbled to hook the release, he quickly discarded that idea. He ran around a tree and sprinted downhill, the big bear hot on his tail.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Leming recalled. “We always talk about what we would do if we ran into a bear. But you never think it’s going to happen to you.”
Leming said he considered standing his ground, but there was no way he was going to drop and play dead. If he dropped, he said, he wasn’t sure if the bear would maul him or just start eating him.
“I’m not going to lay there and let something eat on me,” he said.
Leming, a fence builder, is no small fellow. At 37, he stands 6 feet tall and weighs 230 pounds.
As he blazed past his father, he saw an arrow fly within a foot of his leg.
“The bear was two feet behind me at that point,” Leming said. “I just kept running. I made it three more steps and the bear knocked me down.”
As he was falling, Leming pivoted onto his back. As the bear bore down on him, he fought back, throwing punches and kicking to keep the bear away from his head.
“I wouldn’t have wanted to be on the other end of those,” his father said. “He definitely fought for all he was worth. That kid’s Ford tough.”
But the bear seemed undeterred. Chomping down, the bear bit into Leming’s right arm, just below the elbow.
“I couldn’t believe the force,” he said.
Somehow, Leming managed to get back up and tried to escape again, this time getting tangled in the branches between two trees as he ran. The bear attacked from behind, biting into his shoulder and then pulling him down. This time, the bear bit through his gloved left hand. At the same time, his father was beating the bear on the back with his bow.
“The bear took a couple of steps toward my dad, then he just slowly turned and walked away from us,” Leming said. “Dad put another arrow in his bow, but he didn’t want to shoot.”
The grizzly staggered down the hill about 80 yards and fell over dead. With his first shot at the running bear, the elder Leming had likely nicked the bear’s aorta, causing it to quickly bleed out.
“I was covered in blood,” Leming said. “I didn’t know if it was my blood or the bear’s.
“My dad pretty much saved my life there,” he said. “That’s the thing I cannot believe in this whole story. He stood there with a bow and made that shot at a charging grizzly bear. That’s amazing. You could take that shot a thousand more times and never do it.”
“I’m just glad it ended the way it did,” his father said “The only thing that went through my head was that bear was going to maul my boy.
“I just knew I had one shot. I never thought it would do what it did.”
The elder Leming said he was exceptionally unruffled during the whole incident.
“I was just calm as can be, and I don’t know why,” he said.
He said he prays often. He prays for his family’s safety. And that morning, before hunting, he prayed that God would guide his arrow, although he had a big bull elk in mind.
He figured the bear was about 10 feet from him when he shot, although he can’t remember using the bow’s sight to aim. He also had to wait until his son passed, so his target window was short and his target was moving.
“I knew I was going to hit him, but I didn’t know where,” the father said. “When you’re in a situation like that, it all happens so fast.”
According to Mark Bruscino, bear specialist for Wyoming Game and Fish Department who examined the fight site and the bear the following day, the bear was hit with the arrow in the upper right chest and the arrow continued horizontally into the bear’s body.
“He’s lucky the shot was as lethal as it was, because a wounded bear would’ve done more damage,” Bruscino said. “He lost a large amount of blood in a short period of time.”
Bruscino said the bear, which was in good condition, probably mistook the two for elk because they were calling. The two were also masking their scent with wafers that smell like cow elk urine.
On this hunt they will not go alone, a cameraman from Reel Outdoor TV will accompany father and son on the elk hunt. They plan to try to recover the broadhead from the bear remains if possible. This time their weapons will be firearms and they do not plan to ever allow a bear to get that close to them again.
