“She Bit My Boot — Not Me”: Wyoming Elk Hunter’s Close Call With a Grizzly Near Cody

The original story by Mark Heinz for Cowboy State Daily.

It was the kind of moment every Wyoming hunter dreads and few ever forget. Elk hunter Celia Easton was easing toward a meadow in the Beartooths on a rainy Oct. 15 morning when a grizzly sow with a cub came at her from about 20 yards. The bear clamped down on Easton’s rubber pull-on muck boot, yanked — and came away with just the boot.

“The boot came off, my foot came free, and that bear just swapped ends and ran,” Easton told Cowboy State Daily. “I’m not sure why she ran. Maybe the boot popping off startled her. Maybe it smacked her in the face. I don’t know.”

Luck and gear choice did their part. Easton says she usually wears lace-up hunting boots. That day’s wet weather sent her out in pull-ons. If laces had been cinched tight, she figures she might have been dragged. As it was, the sow broke off, and Easton lived to tell it — barefoot on one side and praying behind a boulder with bear spray in one hand and a .45 on her hip.

Easton, who lives in Thermopolis and hunts alone by choice, says grizzly activity in the area has felt higher than usual this fall. She had a friend stationed in her truck with a two-way radio while she slipped through a quiet, rain-softened timber. Branches cracked behind her — big ones, not squirrel twigs. She stepped toward a narrow opening into a lush meadow, glanced back down the trail and saw the sow closing in, ears pinned, silent and fast.

There was no time for spray or sidearm and little chance to bring the .308 to bear. She also didn’t want to kill a mother with a cub. Years in law enforcement kicked in. She dropped back, legs up to meet the charge, hoping it would buy a second to deploy spray. The bear’s jaws found her boot instead. From there, the odd physics of muck boots and adrenaline took over. The boot slid off; the grizzly turned and bolted with her cub.

“I started repeating, ‘In Jesus’ name, don’t you come back,'” Easton said.

When the woods felt still again, she stood up and found her boot planted upright where the bear had been, puncture marks dimpled across the top. She slipped it back on and hiked out, unbitten but shaken — and with a deep purple half-moon bruise on her big toe to remind her what a full clamp from a grizzly jaw might feel like.

Wyoming Game and Fish’s large carnivore specialist Dan Thompson called it an unusual but fortunate outcome, and said department staff met with Easton after the incident. No one was hurt and, as the sow’s retreat suggests, the charge was likely defensive.

Reports of bears seem to be everywhere in northwest Wyoming this season. State Sen. Larry Hicks says that in one Absaroka basin near Francs Peak he counted 26 grizzlies scattered across three-quarters of a mile, flipping rocks and gorging on sheltering moths, then watched a sow and two cubs amble past on a nearby trail.

“That was 29 grizzlies in one basin,” he said.

Retired federal ecologist Chuck Neal cautions that more sightings don’t necessarily mean more bears. Food is patchy this fall — berries are scarce — so grizzlies are dispersing into new spots and lower elevations to find rose hips, gut piles from hunters, or anything else that will fuel their pre-denning binge. In Easton’s case, he said, the sow most likely charged to defend the cub and left once she realized the human wasn’t a threat.

“I don’t think it was because of the taste of her rubber boot,” he added.

Easton isn’t eager to test that theory again. She’s skipping that particular elk honey hole for the rest of the season and will fill her antelope and cow elk tags in areas where she expects to have company. She’s grateful the outcome was simple: the sow kept her cub, and she got to go home.

“I think I’m going to put that boot on my wall where the head of the bull elk I should have gotten was supposed to go,” she said with a laugh.