I had four elk hunters out that day, the last day of the 1979 bow season. The country I hunt is one of the most remote regions in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. Fourteen years ago, I decided to go into outfitting and I’ve been at it ever since. I was raised in Colorado and live in Crestone, near Alamosa. I’m 46, a full-time outfitter, and I make my living taking people hunting and fishing. In two more leaps, the bear would be all over me. When I realized it meant business, I shouted at the top of my lungs, but it was no use. This bear kept coming, growling and snapping its teeth with each terrifying bound. I’d had close confrontations with black bears before, and even had them approach me, but they all eventually backed off, giving me nothing more than a good scare. For a brief moment I thought the bear would go around me. The grizzly’s attack started about 30 yards away, and I had no time to raise my bow and arrow. I’ve seen a couple of hundred black bears in the woods, enough to know that this one was entirely different from the rest. There was no mistaking the hump on its back, the broad face and the guard hairs. I saw its flashing teeth as it came, and I knew in an instant it was a grizzly, although I’d never seen one in the wild before.
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Ears flattened, neck hairs stiffly erect, it growled fiercely as it charged, full bore, right at me. One of them was killed just a dozen miles or so from the place where Wiseman was attacked. Two were killed in 1951, before the bears were declared an endangered species. Until this attack in September 1979, grizzlies were thought to be extinct in Colorado.
This story, “Bear Attack,” originally ran in the January 1980 issue.
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