Up in Alaska part 3

My brain was in warp drive, and I'm sure the bear's was too. Telling the story takes much longer than actual real time happenings, I imagine maybe 1/2 second elapsed from the time the bear stood up and woofed at me until I had my 44 magnum out of the holster and put 6 special Alaska bear loads in the bear. Now remembering that prudence was the better part of valor, I quickly scurried up the closest tree to reload my pistol. Bears are really hard to kill, especially with a handgun, the short barrel does not build up a lot of muzzle velocity. The long barrel of a rifle puts a lot more punch in the bullet. The bears skull is shaped much like a football, and bullets tend to glance off the thick skull bones, the only real place you have of stopping these giants with a pistol is aim for the heart / lung area and hope one or more of the slugs hit the area between the ribs and penetrates inside where enough damage will be done to stop him in his tracks ( the bears rib bones are very thick and a bullet hitting them dead on may not penetrate far enough to do anything more than piss him off ). He may die in a few hours or days but in the meantime he will do serious damage, probably fatal, to you!

Any time you enter an area inhabited by large predators, you must know enough about their habits to have a good idea about how they respond to different sets of circumstances and what your response should be in order to have the best chance of survival. In this case I had unknowingly snuck up on the bear and startled him / her, if it was a male it would attack me because I was intruding on his turf which he would defend from all intruders. If a female and she had cubs nearby, she would attack to protect the cubs, in either case I was going to be attacked. I had to shoot the bear in self defense, if I saw the bear 40 yds away, a shot fired in the air will usually frighten them away, farther than that, you just quietly go in the opposite direction.