A Reddit user said one of the closest calls he ever had happened when he was younger and out bear hunting with his dad. According to his comment in the thread, his father had just shot one black bear when the situation blew up in a completely different direction. Instead of the danger being over once that first bear was hit, a bigger black bear came charging out of the brush at them. From the way he told it, there was no comfortable pause to settle in, talk through the shot, or even catch their breath. One bear was down or going down, and then a second, bigger one was suddenly coming hard.
He wrote that his dad fired a round behind the charging bear first, apparently trying to turn or stop it without hitting it. Instead of backing off, the bear ran even faster. That was when his father used the last round in his rifle and put it in front of the animal. According to the comment, that finally stopped the charge. But the whole thing was still far from over. The poster said his dad then took the .450 Marlin he had been carrying — a rifle he had only been given to get used to carrying for hunting — and left him standing there with the now-empty gun.
Then his father went down into the brush after the bear he had originally shot.
That was where the story got even crazier. According to the post, while he was down there dealing with the first bear, his dad got charged by a completely different black bear. So the sequence, as the commenter laid it out, was not just one sketchy bear encounter. It was a chain reaction. First bear shot. Second, bigger bear charges. Warning shot behind it. Bear runs faster. Final round fired in front of it. Dad hands off the empty gun situation to his son, takes the heavier rifle, and goes into the brush. Then a third bear charge comes from a completely different animal.
He said his father dealt with that second charge by putting a bullet in front of the bear, and the animal went up a tree. That was the final image he left in the thread, and it is a wild one: a bear shot, another bigger one charging out of the brush, a young hunter standing there with an empty rifle after his dad grabs the .450 Marlin, and then yet another black bear coming in while his father is down in the brush before finally taking a bullet in front of it and climbing a tree.
The way he told it, the whole ordeal was the kind of hunting story that sounds almost made up until you picture how messy bear country can get when blood, brush, and bad timing all collide at once. What should have been one bear recovery turned into a rolling chain of charges, near-charges, and split-second decisions, with a kid standing there in the middle of it carrying a rifle he had mostly brought along just to get used to carrying one in the first place.
What do you think — if one bear was already down and a bigger one suddenly charged out of the brush, would you trust yourself to keep making good decisions once the whole scene started stacking up like that?
Original Reddit post: What were some of your most intense and possibly life-threatening “close call” moments?
