A Reddit user said his closest call while hunting happened during a spring bear hunt in Hells Canyon, Oregon. According to his comment in the thread, they shot a nice cinnamon-phase bear at a pretty good distance late in the day. Looking back, he admitted the very next decision was probably the bad one that turned the whole thing into a nightmare: instead of backing out and waiting for first light, they went after the wounded bear right then, at dusk, into the brush. He even called it ill-advised in hindsight, but at the time they kept pushing in.
He wrote that they trailed the bear into thick cover and eventually got to the point where they knew it had to be close. The problem was visibility. In brush like that, especially at dusk, there is a huge difference between “the bear should be right here” and “I can actually see the bear clearly enough to know what it’s doing.” From the way he told it, they were already in that bad zone where they had gone far enough in that backing out felt complicated, but not far enough in that they had anything under control.
Then it happened.
According to his comment, the bear exploded out of the brush and came at them. He did not describe it like some long dramatic charge from a hundred yards off. The whole thing sounded sudden and close, the kind of burst where one second you are peering into cover and the next second the animal is already on top of the moment. He said he ended up firing at extremely close range, close enough that this was not really about marksmanship anymore. It was about reacting fast enough before the gap vanished completely.
He said they killed the bear, but the part that stayed with him was how bad the setup had been from the start. It was dusk. The bear was wounded. The cover was thick. And instead of clean terrain with a visible approach, they were in the kind of brush where a big animal can come out of nowhere at a distance that gives you almost no time to think. He told the story like someone who already knew exactly where the bad decision had been made and how lucky they were that the outcome was only a story afterward instead of something much worse.
The story he told was simple and rough. He and his group shot a good cinnamon-phase bear near dusk in Hells Canyon, followed it into thick brush instead of waiting until morning, and then got exactly the kind of close-range charge people warn about when dealing with a wounded bear in failing light. The bear came out fast, the shot had to happen fast, and afterward the hunter was left with a very clear opinion on just how bad an idea it had been to go into that brush before daylight.
What do you think — if you wounded a bear near dusk in thick country, would you force the track right then like they did, or back out and wait for daylight no matter how badly you wanted to finish it?
Original Reddit post: What was your closest to death experience while hunting?
