'A griz swiped my elk'

Zach Urness / Leader Staff

How would you feel if you drove all the way to southwest Montana, worked your butt off hunting to bag a nice-sized elk, only to have it stolen out of your truck bed in the middle of the night?

You'd probably be pretty ticked off. What kind of Grinch would do that?

What if you even caught up with the low down dirty thief, who had reached over the gate of your truck, and was dragging your hard-earned prize away through the woods?

How might you react? Chase them down with a two-by-four? Report them to the authorities? Yell until you were blue in the face?

Now imagine the thief happened to be a full grown grizzly bear.

Not much you can do about that.

And that's what happened to Polson resident Ben Knipe last week. After hunting all day in Southwest Montana, Knipe and his wife Deana killed an elk and spent the rest of the day packing it out of the woods. The two then drove to the Swan later in the day, with the idea of getting a deer, and they parked their camper in a campground near Lion Creek.

"We'd been out all day and were pretty tired," said Knipe. "It was getting dark and we still had the elk carcass in the bed of the truck."

Than something very strange happened.

"I'd been in bed for 20 minutes when I heard a horrible racket outside the camper," recalled Knipe. "I went running outside with a pistol and a flashlight and I could hear him making a bunch of noise plowing among the trees. I fired a few shots to scare him off, and then he really took off into the woods."

Apparently as Knipe and his wife began to settle down for the night, a grizzly bear had been craving a midnight snack and had gotten up on its hind legs, reached its head over the tailgate and dragged the entire carcass out, despite the fact that the Knipes' camper was parked just a few feet away. Paw prints at the scene indicated it was a grizzly.

"We were dumbfounded," said Knipe. "Our camper couldn't have been five feet away from the truck and it really showed a lot of braveness to come into a camp like that. The next morning we went out into the woods and you could clearly see where he drug it away because there were broken trees everywhere. Then we saw some huge paw prints in the mud."

Realizing that grizzlies are very dangerous with their food, Knipe stopped tracking the bear, and then contacted Fish, Wildlife and Parks. A game warden in Bigfork gave them another elk tag to replace the one they "lost."

"The Fish, Wildlife and Parks department was very helpful with everything," said Knipe. "They reacted quickly and did a great job."

Fortunately, there was no damage to their truck, but the Knipes had to go home with an empty truck bed.

"It was sure a disappointing thing for us to go out there, get an elk, and drag it all the way back to our truck, only to have it swiped," said Knipe with a laugh. "But I guess it was his lucky day."

Whether Knipe can bag another elk before the end of the season remains to be seen, but if he does, he's going to do things a little differently this time with the carcass.

"I am taking her directly home," he said.