Here is an chunk from a longer article of an interesting few minutes... After a week or two over on the west side without getting any shot opportunities on big bulls I retreated to my base camp in less scenic surroundings. The west had been stunningly beautiful with the Tetons towering off to the west every sunrise. I went back to a large basin where there had been moose spotted every day I had hunted it. I parked at the closed gate, told my dog to stay and headed up to get to the flat swampy basin at first light, about a 4 mile hike in the dark. I got to the lower edge with a half hour to spare and took a wheeze break then gingerly edged up the road glassing as I went as daylight dawned over the willow flats. I was about in the middle of the large swampy basin and there was some crunching/snapping in the timber beside me. I snuggled up to a six foot tall pine tree as I was in the midst of second growth clear cuttings. The snapping got louder and I just knew it was a huge bull headed right for me, I knocked an arrow and got ready, as whatever it was, was going to come out into the open at close range. Then at 30 yards it was in the open and broadside, a mama grizzly with a tiny cub under her belly… Oh SHIT… She was moving slowly and then I saw as bad as things appeared they could always get worse, a coyote pup was circling her and lunging at her cub. He was just being a puppy, being obnoxious just for the sheer joy of it. She wasn’t seeing it quite that way, it turns out that the brush popping I had heard was her clicking her teeth together, I had read about it but it is much more impressive when up close and personal. She was swatting at the pup with her front paws as he dodged and nipped at her flanks and dove under to nip the cub, the cub was getting nipped and stepped on by mom and was squealing and squalling up a storm from underneath her. She had great goobers of drool hanging out of her mouth dripping down maybe a foot or more, swinging back and forth as she spun to meet the pup’s lunges.
And through this all there I was thirty yards away trying to melt into a 6 foot tall sapling holding a suddenly very puny looking bow with an arrow knocked… I figured she had to have seen me, I had almost no cover at all and it was beside me, not between us. The fight raged on for what seemed like hours but was most likely a minute or so and I decided to back out of there as they were edging closer with each swat and a miss. I slowly backed up a step and it was immediately apparent that she had not seen me yet as the entire circus froze and stared at me. The pup was 5 feet beyond the bear and stopped cold and looked at me, the cub was crying terribly from under her belly and Mama spun her tiny pig eyes to pierce right to my core. To steal a phrase from a much better writer than I, she looked at me like I owed her money… As she spun her head to stare a big glop of goo from her mouth on a tether of more goo spun up and over and landed smack on the top middle of her short snout making a wet splat noise. As she fixed me in her glare I knew one thing with perfect clarity, she was coming, her eyes told me that as clearly as if she spoke perfect English, she was frustrated, mad and there I was in range and not nearly as fast as that puppy. I was dead meat and we both knew it with zero doubt.
Now I have been known to say bad things about Wile E. Coyote on occasion, after he poaches ducks or chickens from my yard for instance, but on that flat, on that morning, I came to realize all God’s creatures have their place, and they can sometimes be man’s best friend. After everyone but the cub freezing for several seconds the pup decided I was a harmless spectator to his recreation and lunged right in between her front paws and nipped the cub in the ass, making it squeal in pain, Mama Grizz spun to swat him dead and I was instantly on the back burner, and with her back turned I reversed marched faster than a Frenchman at a Panzer reunion. Upon reaching a shallow gully completely shielding me from her view, an objective observer might have referred to it as “fleeing in headlong terrified flight” but there were no objective observers there that I could see. I will refer to it as carefully skirting the area to find more suitable hunting terrain elsewhere…
I could hear the puppy yipping and playing his silly game of chicken for the next hour or so, from high on the opposing ridge, where I stopped to clean out my under drawers… err … I mean glass for moose.
