Earlier this month, a 200-pound black bear attacked a hunter while he was tracking it through dense woods in northern Wisconsin. Ryan Beierman survived the mauling. But only after his 12-year-old son Owen—who’d shot the bear earlier that evening—fired again while it was on top of his father biting his head and face. In a phone interview, Beierman tells Field & Stream that Owen saved his life during the attack, which left him with a gash on his face requiring more than 20 stitches.
Beierman says he pulled Owen out of school around 12 p.m. on Friday, September 6. The father-son duo then drove to Beierman’s cabin, north of their hometown of River Falls, Wisconsin, for a weekend of hunting and fishing. They spent the morning of September 7 catching pike and smallmouth bass in a nearby lake, and got in the stand to hunt bears around 3 p.m. that afternoon.
Three hours later, a black bear approached from the southwest, Beierman recalls, and stood broadside near the bait pile. “Owen shot, and it looked good,” Beierman says. “In my experience, they always bite right where you hit them, and he was biting right behind the shoulder. It was a money shot.”
Beierman and his son stayed in their hang-on stands for 20 minutes after the shot then climbed down to look for blood. “We looked and looked but couldn’t find anything,” he says, “so I called in some neighbors to help grid search the area.”
When the grid search failed to turn up any blood, one of Beierman’s neighbors offered to loan out his chocolate lab Jake to aid in the recovery. “Jake got on a scent pretty quick,” he says. “By then, it was starting to get dark. I had Jake on a 6-foot tether, and Owen was behind me shining two flashlights. Suddenly, the dog yelped and took off. It either slipped the collar or yanked the leash out of my hand, but it took off running behind us.”
Shots in The Dark
That’s when Beierman saw the boar black bear just a few feet away, sitting next to the base of a large oak tree. “ I said, 'There he is, Owen,' and an instant later, he was on me,” he says. “I emptied my 10mm pistol, but it all happened too fast. None of the shots hit.”
The bear knocked Beierman to the ground and grabbed hold of his knee, jerking him around like a dog with a chew toy, he says. At one point, he heard a loud pop in his arm. Then the bear began biting and clawing his face.
“After that, I could see my left cheek sticking out, and I thought it was all over. Then I saw a muzzle flash and heard the report of Owen’s rifle,” he says. “I felt the weight of the bear shift from my right to my left side. I knew I had to get out from underneath it.”
It took Beierman a moment to realize what had happened. He pushed up off the ground, and the bear slumped off to one side, he says. He could barely see without his glasses, which were lying beneath the bear.
"Owen was standing about three feet away from me and the bear when he shot it," Beierman says. “He was completely solid in that moment, and his gun even jammed at one point during the attack.”
With the bear lying dead on the ground, Owen walked his dad back to their cabin where a neighbor picked them up and drove them to an awaiting ambulance in the nearby town of Siren. At the hospital, X-rays and CT scans showed the bear hadn’t broken an of Beierman’s bones during the attack. “I was so impressed with the doctors and nurses,” he says. “They put 23 stitches in my cheek and released me around 1:30 a.m.”
Related: How to Survive a Bear Attack
Beierman says he’ll have the bear mounted in the attack position with the claws out front and the canine teeth exposed. It's Owen's second bear since he started hunting just a few years ago. “I used to make fun of that attack pose when I’d see it in taxidermy shops,” he says, “but not anymore.”
