One Tough Bastard

[Updates below.]

Dude, think you're hardcore? Turn down your angsty rap-rock, spin your baseball hat around the right way, and read this:

Man Armed With Knife Kills Hungry Bear

John Hirsch went toe-to-claw with a black bear and won.

Hirsch had only a 3 1/2-inch knife blade when he came across the bear in his backyard in Williams Lake, about 190 miles northeast of Vancouver.

"He came out of nowhere," said Hirsch, 61, an avid hunter and outdoorsman.

"I can remember thinking that he's not stopping he's coming," said Hirsch. "I just didn't feel I had any place to go."

The Ursus americanus has:

1. Thick nonretractable claws, curved and numbering 20. The fronts are often 1.25" long.
   
2. 42 teeth designed for tearing and chewing meat attached to a mouth elevated more than 2 feet above the ground.
   
3. Many dozens of pounds of muscle devoted more to strength and attacking prey.

The Homo sapiens has:

1. Puny, flexible, and thin fingernails that break under a few pounds of tension.
   
2. 32 teeth for mixed application, none suited for (in my opinion) offensive use or effective defense.
   
3. Dozens of pounds of muscle for mixed application; devoted more to dexterity and speed.

Giving a man a small pocketnknife doesn't really even this out. Gimme something more substantial, like a Browning Hi-Power or a good rifle. And hollowpoints. Nasty ones.

As the bear began to circle him, Hirsch faced it like a wrestler in a ring.

"It was like a knife fight that you'd see in an old-time Western," he said. The bear swatted out at him, but each time it lunged, he managed to stab it.

"I couldn't tell you if the fight lasted three seconds or three minutes," Hirsch said.

Three stabs to the bear's chest and one to its neck finally did the bruin in.

It stood about 5 foot 7 inches to Hirsch's 5 feet 9 inches and weighed 200 pounds, according to conservation officers who inspected it.

"I can say it sure looked smaller the next morning than it did during the fight," said Hirsch.

Good lord. I'm not sure if my heart would be able to hold up under that kind of stress. I'm roughly 6 feet tall and weigh about 160 pounds. Not a matchup I'd ask for. I'd prefer fighting an unarmed human than a large hungry mammal.

It's that very kind of utterly unreasonable and unknown intelligence that scares me the most. You know the bear wants something and it wants it badly enough to take the risk of confronting something it'd just as rather leave alone. You know the stories, stereotypes, and horrors of bear attacks and you wonder what you've heard is bullshit, true, and unreported.

And you know you can't not do something. Not when the bear initiates and presses the hostilities.

The bear was in poor shape, suffering from a severed tongue and broken jaw, the conservation officer said. Its stomach was empty and the bear had little fat on it.

It literally fought to the death because it couldn't think of any other way to feed itself. I'm not certain this was that much of an advantage to Mr. Hirsch. On one hand, it's unhealthy and weakened. On the other, it's desperate. Any fighter can tell you a desperate opponent takes risky chances and becomes consumed with it's goal rather than it's well-being.

Hirsch, a retired electrical foreman at B.C. Hydro, suffered a scratch to the top of his head and scratches to his back and a shredded T-shirt.

As for the battle itself, Hirsch said it never occurred to him that he would lose to the bear.

"I just felt that however long this took, I was going to come out OK," he said. "I always felt that I was at least his equal."

Copyright 2003 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

I salute you, Sir. Cutting and running is an instinct I'd be fighting almost as hard as the 200 pound mass of hungry black bear facing off against me.

UPDATE 10/8/2004 10:01am
Here's a guy who wasn't so good at defending himself: Mauled Hunter to Avoid Grizzly Country:

Weston Scott crept through the dense forest looking to flush out an elk. He got excited when he heard rustling about 10 feet ahead, in some bushes.

What Scott saw in those first seconds last Sunday was a bear's head coming right at him. He drew up his rifle but managed only to get a shot off from about his hip before the 600-pound grizzly was on top of him.

"I think it went right over his head," Scott said Wednesday from his hospital room in Idaho Falls, Idaho, about 175 miles from Bridger-Teton National Forest, where the attack occurred. "That was all I had time to do. He was on me after that."

As Scott, 32, fell to the ground, the bear bit him in the face. It took out four teeth on Scott's lower jaw and a 1-inch portion of jawbone.

[...]

Tammy Scott said after the bear bit her husband's face, it continued to knock him around.

"He's got surface wounds kind of everywhere" on his knees, side and back, she said. "Looking at him, you know he got rolled around by a bear."

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Posted by Drizzten at November 17, 2003 09:09 PM