Humans and bears - Wild encounters

[brotherbear]

Lewis and Clark continued...

But the speed with which the bear recovered and charged astonished them all. Their single shots spent, they threw aside their rifles and pouches and jumped straight off the shaggy rim of a twenty-foot embankment and into the swirling Missouri River below. They thrashed into the water, swimming toward the far shore in an attempt to put even more distance between them and the unstoppable beast they had angered. But it was almost all for naught. The lunging jaws, snarling, shaking head, and great rippling body of the savage creature did not break stride but burst straight after the second shooter, plunging off the same grass knob less than a man's-length behind the shrieking hunter.

A great and rending roar accompanied this impressive action, and the bear pitched forward into the water and lay still, waves pulsing outward from the now-sopping form of the great beast.

For long seconds, no one said anything, so astonished were they that the great bear's roaring and slavering had ceased. The men in the river snorted and wiped at their wet faces with their sleeves. They cautiously strode through the shallows to the bear, dark clouds in the water indicated its bleeding leaks. A rope was retrieved from a canoe and the bear was dragged ashore. All hands participated in the butchering. It was found that the bear took no less than eight lead balls, two in the lungs alone, before it had expired.

The last shot, fired from on shore by Sergeant Ordway, had blazed straight into the bear's head, stopping its rampage for all time. The men who'd scrambled off the embankment slapped Ordway's great buckskin clad shoulders and thanked him heartily. Reply