OK, here's a little different bear story.

I used to work for the US Forest Service as an engineer. One Friday afternoon I was driving back to the office from a project when I saw two other engineers parked at a trailhead parking lot, so I stopped to see why they were stopped.

They said that there had been several calls on the radio that one of our trail maintenance crews had been attacked by a black bear, and they were waiting for our Law Enforcement Officer to arrive. A few minutes later our LEO and a Deputy Sheriff arrived. The other engineers and I volunteered to help. The LEO knew that I did a lot of hunting and shooting and he asked me if I wanted to carry a gun. I said yes and he gave me his AR-15. He and the Deputy each carried 12 gauge shotguns.

The trail crew was about 1 1/2 miles up the trail from the parking lot. When the LEO, the Deputy and I got to the first two members of the trail maintenance crew it was a little over an hour after they had made the first radio call for help. They had the radio, and they were both up in trees. They said the third crew member was the one who was attacked by the bear, and he was also up a tree about 50 yards further up the trail.

They also said that every time the 3rd crewman yelled for help, the bear climbed up the tree and bit him. These two crew members would not come down from their trees.

So the LEO, the Deputy and I hurried up to the 3rd crewman. We found him in the top of a very tall spruce tree. As soon as we got to his tree I saw the bear coming at us from about 40 yards away. I yelled "There's the bear!" and the three of us shot in unison, killing the bear.

As soon as we verified that the bear was dead, we started to help the injured crewman down out of the tree. He had scratches and bites on both legs his feet through his boots. We got him down, administered first aid, and moved him down the trail to a clearing where a helicopter from Yellowstone Park was coming to pick him up and take him to the hospital.

While we were waiting for the helicopter, I went back up to the bear and saw that it was a female. Then I saw a little black cub running through the brush. My heart sank! We had killed a mother bear (in self defense) and now there was an orphaned cub that was too young to survive by himself. So I decided to catch it.

I chased it through the brush, and it climbed a tree, so I went up the tree after it. After several attempts, I was finally able to grab it and pull it out of the tree. He was about 18" long and had very sharp teeth and claws. I had to hold the back of his neck in one hand and his two back legs in the other. If I let go of his neck, he would bite me. His bites felt like I had put my hand in a vice that had nails in the jaws. If I let go of his back legs, he would scratch me with both back feet.

I tried to put him in a backpack, but it wouldn't hold him, so I carried him down the trail to my truck where I had a 5 gallon bucket that I put him in.

We had notified the Fish and Game Department that we had killed a sow and captured a cub, so they sent their bear biologist to investigate the shooting and he brought a culvert trap to put the cub in. He ruled the shooting justified, I gave him the cub, and the next day he went back to the site with dogs and a couple of other biologists, and they caught another cub.

They took both of the cubs to a wild animal re-hab facility in Helena where they took care of the cubs for two years then released them back into the forest.

So Davey Crockett said he grinned down a bear, and I can say that I caught a bear!