Humans and bears - Wild encounters

[brotherbear]

Cowboys, Mountain Men, and Grizzly Bears by Matthew P. Mayo:

There was a berry thicket, then a sudden sound. An awful roaring rose up to meet him, eye to eye, and then rose higher yet. An enormous bear looked down at him. Old Ephraim's on me, he remembered thinking, just before the beast's jaws closed about him. No buckskin in the world could stop those gleaming blades of teeth from popping into his chest and taking with them a mouthful of him. The bear swung him around, and that's when he saw cubs. Two of them. Old Eph was a she-bear. The worst kind.

He had little time to raise his trusted rifle. He was shaking so hard, as if gripped with ague, that he felt sure he wouldn't be able to force back the hammer. But he did, and pulled on the trigger without hesitation. Though he heard the report and knew from years of sure shooting that he had shot true, the beast was on him again, rising to its full height and lashing with curved claws as long as a man's fingers. Glass rolled over and made to crawl away. He remembered tasting dirt and thinking of sure death, of being covered with the stuff. This idea did not appeal to him at all.

Another swipe and his back seemed to peel clean off. He felt his scalp rise, heard the pop as it separated and was pulled away. His arms had been raked to the bone and his right hip, too, a glistening, bare ravine of meat and bone. Hugh saw this and heard the shouts and rifle reports of his fellows as he collapsed back to the ground, undone even as the bear charged away, then returned, slower. It swatted and lunged at him again and the last he recalled was the stink of the thing's final breath as it dropped across him, draped like it was sleeping. So familiar and fitting, he remembered thinking, fot they had gone out together. But that was not his end.

...One of two men who left mountain man Hugh Glass for dead, Jim Bridger, later forgiven, went on to become one of the West's most famous frontiersmen. Reply