your story about your dad and his little ruger reminds me of a guy I used to know , he was the grandfather of one of my cub scouts , he was a mule handler for a guided service , he took care of the mules and cooked and kept camp.
clients would give him a hard time about the model 94 he carried , being short and not very powerful . he would tell them I am not here to shoot the game and at the distances I will need to be shooting it will be just fine. carried in hand and not in scabbard.

I've heard the rifle shot/dinner bell analogy before and there might be something to it. Then again, bears have incredible noses and don't need a lot of help finding grub.

A bud and I hunted Kodiak for deer one fall. Deer numbers were up, the limit was five and it wasn't hard to put them on the ground. The first afternoon out, I had three deer like the one pictured down. It was late in the day so we stashed them in a ravine with the intention of retrieving them in the morning. We returned early the following morning and all three deer were gone. Bears came in during the night and hauled them off. We shot two more deer during the course of our trip. The two we got back to camp were taken in the night. They were boxed and stored sixty or eighty yards from our tent. There are no trees on that part of the island suitable to hanging meat, just alders. We never heard the bear or bears come in. We got one venison dinner off five deer.

We came upon this bear at about five to ten yards. You can see the cave the bear was in. It was right along the saltwater and the tide was in. We rounded a point and this bear came out sideways and stopped dead in its tracks. It was as surprised to see us as we were it. It didn't know what to do and for a few brief moments, neither did I

I've posted this and said it before...my first instinct was too throw my rifle at the bear and run. It was a relatively short standoff before I got me wits back about me. We all think we know how we'd respond until we find ourselves in that situation.

A guy I know that lives up in the Brooks range of Alaska had a run in with a very old thin bear that was out and about in mid-winter. He was running his team and met the old grizzly, the bear instantly attacked the team. The musher escaped with his life while eight out of his nine dogs weren't so lucky as you can see in the picture. As someone else had mentioned, the old, out during wintertime bears are the worst. They went and found the bear later and took care of matters. I think he said the biologists aged it at 29 years. Super old Bruin with really bad teeth. Always be prepared because you just never know when a bear might pop up.

Wow quite a story and photo. That was a war zone. Experienced trappers in my neck of the woods carry a heavy rifle all winter because there is always the possibility you will run into one of those old bears. Im sure everyone remembers that poor lady and her baby a couple years back in northern Yukon....Thats still the worst bear attack I've ever heard about.

I shot a seventeen year old male grizzly that had just come out of the den. There was not a single tooth in the bears head that didn't have a cavity. Every canine was snapped off from fighting, or so I presume. That bear knew I was there, it saw me but maybe its myopic eyesight wasn't enough and it wanted my wind. I shot it before it got directly downwind of me. I was well above tree line and there was nothing at all for cover. Maybe it would have run after it got my wind, maybe not. I've seen them take an awful lot of punishment from heavy caliber rifles before the fight goes out of them.