The Daily News
LONGVIEW — When Longview resident Jerry Hause headed out for Monday’s bow hunting opener, he never imagined he would end up in a fight for his life with a black bear.
Hause and his son Jeffrey, 26, drove into a remote, wooded area in the upper Abernathy Creek area about eight miles west of Longview in hopes of bagging deer. Hause, 60, has been hunting for decades, but he’s been a bow-hunter for only four.
Hause was about to start driving game toward his son, who was waiting in a tree, when the unexpected happened.
“I’d already hiked about three miles so I sat down to take a break before I tried to push some (game) back to him. I took my backpack off and sat my bow down and as I was sitting there I started looking around and … I saw a black head which I thought was a bear,” Hause said from his home Thursday. “I’ve hunted this area for 30-plus years and I’ve never seen a bear up there.”
Hause said the bear appeared to be a cub and was 80 to 100 yards away. Knowing knew it’s unwise to come between a cub and its mother, he looked for a way to leave the area.
“I stood up and in one motion that bear jumped out of the creek it was in and was on level ground with me. And as soon as it was on level ground it was on a dead run after me,” he said.
He doesn’t know if the bear was the mother or the same bear he’d thought was a cub.
Hause said he knew he wouldn’t be able to pick and aim his bow, and he wasn’t confident he could drop the 250- to 300-pound animal. His only choice, he said, was to climb the tree he had been resting against.
“I knew the tree was right there, so I headed up that to get far enough up the tree that the bear couldn’t get me,” Hause said.
Hause climbed several feet up into the tree. The bear followed, but Hause said he thought he was out of the bear’s reach until he looked down just as the bear bit into his left leg.
“It totally amazes me how fast that bear got on me. In three seconds it was on me,” he said.
Hause said the bear also tried to grab him with one of its paws and left claw marks on his leg. He said he realized he couldn’t climb any higher, so he grabbed a branch above him and held on.
“I was thinking, ‘If it gets me out of this tree I’m a dead man.’ It was mad, it was growling. It was serious about what it was going to do,” Hause said.
Hause pulled himself and kicked out at the bear with his other foot. Having heard on wildlife shows that sharks will sometimes stop an attack after being hit in the nose, Hause aimed for the bear’s nose. The maneuver seemed to work. The bear let go and dropped to the ground and then moved off.
After waiting 10 minutes, Hause said he got out of the tree and began hiking back to his truck. Once he got to an area where he could make a call on his cell phone, he alerted his son and called his wife, who came and took him to PeaceHealth St. John Medical Center. He was treated and released and is expected to make a full recovery from his puncture and scratch wounds.
Washington Fish and Wildlife Sgt. Bob Weaver said the chances of encountering a bear in the woods, let alone being attacked by one, are very slim.
“This is are very rare incident. It’s happened before, but it’s a very rare thing to happen,” Weaver said.
Statewide, there are an estimated 25,000 to 30,000 black bears. Weaver didn’t know how many bears there are in the Cowlitz County area.
“Typically bears are very afraid of people. If they know people are around, they tend to run the other way. Of course when you get a sow with cubs, the motherly instinct is to protect their cubs, so you have a higher possibility of something like that happening, especially if you get between the sow and the cubs,” Weaver said.
Officials initially planned to track down and euthanize the bear, Hause said. He said he talked them out of it because it’s in a remote area and may have just been protecting its young.
Weaver said wildlife agents plan to evaluate the attack site to see if there is evidence of cubs or a kill in the area that the bear may have been guarding. Hause said he’s willing to go along — if they’re armed. He said he also plans to carry a pistol with him when he goes hunting from now on.
Hause, a retired building analyst for the Cowlitz Indian Tribe, said he doesn’t blame the bear for what happened.
“It either had cubs out there or I was threatening its food. It’s bear country. They live in the woods. I don’t.”
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
