Idaho Hunters Survive Grizzly Attack

 Dangling from the jaws of a 530-pound grizzly, 20-year-old Riley Hill’s body flung from side-to-side as his hunting buddy Braxton Meyers fired round after round into the bear’s hulking frame. The grizzly’s ferocious teeth sunk deep into his arm, puncturing the skin to the bone, as he screamed and fought back during the longest 30 seconds of his life. 

“It was lifting me off the ground and then slamming me back on the ground,” Hill said. “… It was like playing tug of war with your dog, but he was playing it with my arm and ripping it apart.”

Moments earlier, the bear had charged out of nowhere, dramatically altering a peaceful morning as the two hunters from Rexburg and Menan faced one of the fiercest predators in North America. 

Hill dropped his archery bow, pulled a 10mm Springfield from the holster on his hip and shot the bear once in the right side.

“Grizzly bears don’t usually get off their target, but this one did,” Hill said. “This one turned looked right at me, and he’s charging, charging fast.”

The two friends were only about twelve feet apart from each other, and Meyers tripped and fell on the ground.

Hill had time to shoot the bear with three more bullets in the face and shoulder region before its iron jaws clamped down on his arm.

Immediately, the grizzly began to fling Hill around. 

Meyers stood up and saw the bear attacking Hill.

He “fumbled around,” pulled out his Taurus 1911 .45 ACP pistol and fired four to five shots at the bear before the gun jammed.

Taurus. Jammed.

“(The bear) just kind of looked up at me, and I saw its eyes, and I just started (shooting),” Meyers said. “It put its head back down, and I shot some more (in the spine), and (that) did the trick.”

During one shot in the barrage, Hill felt the bear’s grip on his arm loosen slightly.

With his one free hand, Hill said he “ripped open that jaw, ripped my arm out, and then I remember I stood up, and I was freaking out. I didn’t know if the bear was coming after me again.”

He grabbed his gun off the ground and fired three more rounds at the grizzly’s head. 

In total, the hunters shot 24 bear bullets at the grizzly to bring it down.

Idaho Fish and Game officers conducted a thorough investigation and determined that Hill and Braxton Meyer’s actions were justified.

The two friends learned later that local ranchers had long called that bear the “King of the Hill.”

“This bear has always been a problem up there of cattle, and there’s a lot of farmers that … (are) pretty happy with us because we took out the bear that was eating their cattle,” Hill said.

The bear was 20-years-old, an extraordinarily long life for a grizzly in the wild.

“It was a fighting bear,” Braxton Meyers said. “Another bear or some animal had torn one of its ears off. That was the ear that was facing up the hill, and so it didn’t hear us coming down until we were on the side that had the good ear, and that’s when it got up and come at us.”

The bear had been surprised while it was burrowing in a day bed.

“They’ll dig a hole, and they’ll pull brushes and scrub and whenever to hide them,” Hill said. “So we spooked it, and we weren’t trying to.”