It is normal practice for a hunter to crawl into a bear den, covered withtracks, to see if a bear is inside??????
Nothing about this encounter was "normal", and my brother in law admitted how foolish they were to assume that the den was un-occupied. They normally hunt these bears as they are coming out of thier dens, and thrucaution to the wind assumingthis den was abandon. It was a mistake they'll never make again.