The Pakistani Spectator

Dear reader, as you read I hope you enjoy.  I share my experiences with you because I  love the wild places with a great passion.  Please leave a comment telling me about the birds, animals and reptiles that live in the wild places of your country.  Also please let me know what you would like to read about.   Thank you so very much, sincerely yours, Charles Towne

 

www.chaz-writersheart.blogspot.com

 

            There are those that hold the black bear in contempt, considering him little more than a scavenger, even cowardly.

           

            The following incident featured two large adult black bears and a very large grizzly bear.  It took place in the Shoshone River country of Western Wyoming sometime in the summer of 1954.   This story powerfully illustrates the black bear’s apparent unwillingness to surrender a kill even against incredible odds.

 

            The region where the encounter took place remains one of the most primitive areas in the United States, unspoiled and almost inaccessible to the average person.  It was in this wilderness sometime in 1948 that several hunters came upon the spoor of an enormous grizzly.  The tracks measured over sixteen inches in length.

 

            This grizzly of grizzlies would more than likely weigh in excess of a thousand pounds, perhaps half again as much.

 

            This particular bear was a stock killer extraordinary.  One rancher discovered seven of his purebred steers dead, all with their necks broken with a single swipe of a grizzlies paw.

 

            A professional hunter was hired.  His orders?  “Kill that grizzly, no matter the cost!”

 

            The hunter failed miserably as did everyone else that went up against, “Old Scoria.”   This he was named after the Scoria creek that flows through the area where most of his depredations took place.

 

            Others attempted to kill the king grizzly all to no avail.

 

            Dogs were bought in to track the big bear and they failed as did baited traps.  Men rode throughout the area rifle in hand hoping to claim the large bounty that had been placed on Scoria’s head but none of them were up to the task.

 

            Les Bowman, a Cody Wyoming outfitter, put out his first bait in 1948 hoping to entice this bear of bears within rifle shot.

 

            For a week the bait, a dead horse, lay ripening.  It wasn’t touched.  Then, one night when it was darker than your Mother-in-Law’s heart, the entire rear end of of the bait was clawed out and eaten.

            The next night the bear didn’t show but on the next two nights the rotting carcass was depredated until all that remained were pieces of hide and bits of bone fragments.

 

            Old Scoria had gorged himself without ever being seen.

 

            Bowman baited the area for the next six years without ever getting a glimpse of the Scoria creek grizzly.

 

            As far as is known three men did see the big bear but always at such great distances they were unable to get a decent shot.

 

            By 1954 Bowman had racked up such an expense to the bear’s account that he determined that if it was his last earthly act he was going to bring the big boy down.  But what’s that old saying about “the best laid plans of mice and men?”

 

            Bowman set up his next bait some two hundred yards from a natural logjam on Scoria creek.  The spring flood had cast huge piles of large pine and cottonwood trees in a jackstraw heap and it was here that he would wait for the grizzly

.

            On the third day, Bowman and another hunter cautiously approached the sight and began glassing the area for bears.  They were disappointed to discover that the bait, a horse weighing nearly a thousand pounds, had been dragged nearly one hundred and fifty yards farther away making any shot more difficult.

 

            As the two hunters settled in to watch the distant carcass they were not two happy when two large black bears showed up at the bait.

 

            Bowman was not after blacks so the two men just watched.

 

            The black bears didn’t fight over the carcass, they just gorged on it.  The way those two were scarfing down that bait it would be gone in two or three nights and another year would be gone before Bowman would have another chance at what he had come to regard as ‘his’ grizzly.

 

            Dusk was rapidly approaching making any shot iffy when suddenly both black bears suddenly shot to attention.  Their focus was up the creek in the deep timber.

 

            Through his binoculars Bowman could see the muscles of each of the bears stiffen and their ears point as they stood tense and immobile.

 

            Bowman later said, “I knew just as surely as we lay there what was happening.  The blacks had detected a grizzly coming to the kill.  I knew, without knowing why that it was Old Scoria.”

 

In heart stopping fascination the hunters watched as suddenly, from the edge of the timber lumbered the biggest bear either of them had ever seen.  He was enormous to the point of being incredible.

 

            The immense bear headed straight for the kill.

 

            The grizzly had only gone a short distance when he detected the blacks at what he considered ‘his’ kill.  He reared up to his full height and let out an awesome bellow that seemed to shake the earth.

 

            An interesting phenomenon occurs at times like this causing lord man to shrink to insignificant proportions.

 

            With that blood chilling roar hardly out of his mouth the great bear dropped down to all fours and charged down on the two blacks.

 

            It should be remembered that grizzly bears frequently kill black bears and devour them.

 

            In awesome rage and fury Old Scoria attacked, his intent nothing less than murder.

 

            It is also a well known and documented fact that black bears invariably run away from grizzlies.  They know they are outmatched in every way, tooth, claw, and size, and so they run for their lives.

 

            But, as the two men watched an incredible thing happened.  At the grizzlies first bounding leaps the black bears were also moving, but not away!

 

            With ears laid back flat against their heads, a sure sign of attack in and of itself and snouts curled in menacing anger they ran directly toward the more horrible bear, not from him.

 

            The three bears met at the edge of the timber and viciously tore into each other with tooth and claw.

 

            The air seemed to vibrate with the sound of roaring, snarling and heavy bodies smashing into trees.  It was savage, fast and obviously to the death.

 

            The bears moved into the timber in this fight of all fights.  All the two men could see was the tops of trees swaying as the bears crashed into them. The trees, largely jack pines along with smaller junipers were knocked down and shattered in the ensuing battle.

 

            The men watched in spellbound fascination as trees, four and five inches in diameter, their tops suddenly jerking as in a raging storm as the bears collided with them, were violently crushed to the ground.

            Terrifying sounds continued as the battle raged over an area roughly an acre in extent.

 

            The fight continued for what seemed like hours to the two men but probably lasted about thirty minutes.

 

            Then, suddenly it was over.  All sound ceased.

 

            Then through their binoculars the two hunters saw the great grizzly climbing up the nearby cliffs.

 

            Those cliffs are hundreds of feet high and almost impossible to climb, very much like the walls of the Grand Canyon but the grizzly dragged himself upward.

 

            Bit by bit he climbed, sometimes sliding backward, and then after a brief rest he would continue.  Foot by foot he moved upward.  Occasionally the bear would turn his great head and gaze downward in the direction of the fight, and then he would proceed.

 

            ‘Old Scoria’, impossible as it may seem, dragged himself nearly straight up that cliff before he lumbered over a ledge and crawled out of sight.

 

            The next day the two hunters visited the location of the fight.  The ground looked like it had been plowed.

 

            All the brush and trees had been leveled. Bushes had been ripped out of the ground.  Blood and chunks of hide were scattered all over the place.  The black bears had quit the area, perhaps to recover, but who knows?

 

            Was this the cattle killing grizzly?  Was this in actuality the king grizzly?   Was this ‘Old Scoria?

 

The greatest evidence lies in the fact that the cattle depredations ceased and the Scoria Creek grizzly was never seen again.

 

            Men visited the site and tried to climb the cliff to retrieve the body of the gigantic bear but all to no avail.

 

Perhaps his bones are still moldering there, maybe in a cave somewhere high up on that cliff face, a fitting resting place for a king.

 

            The fact remains that ‘Old Scoria’, the king grizzly, had been bested, remarkably he had been completely fought out by two black bears.

 

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