Father and son recall grizzly attack

CODY — Cody chiropractor Vince Kalkowski and his son Garrett vividly recall the close encounter they experienced with a grizzly bear on October 3 east of Meeteetse.

“All seven of us left camp and headed up the same drainage that day. My friend’s daughter got her first bull on that trip and the other guys helped her take care of it,” he said “Since I still needed to fill my tag and it was still early, my son and I decided to keep hunting.”

Kalkowski and his son, after tying up their mules, hiked further up a drainage and saw a bull enter the timber at the tree line near a ridge.

“We went to check out that bull near the top of the ridge where it dropped off almost cliff-like on two sides, so there’s not much room up there,” he said.

“The timber was so thick up there, and we couldn’t see the bull very well, even though it was only about 15 yards from us. When he heard us, he blew out of there,” he said.

“I heard a snap in the timber and I’m thinking it was an elk. But the crashing timber sounds were different than that. When my son took out his cell phone to take a picture of the scenery, seconds later I saw this grizzly bear charging at him.”

Split seconds seemed like hours to Kalkowski at that point.

“It was as if I was watching a movie,” he said. “I told my wife later that if it was a real movie, I’d be saying, yeah right; those things never happen.”

“But then I realized this is really happening to us. I was envisioning the bear on top of my son and me having to shoot it. But instead, all I heard was my son start shooting. He was in the process of bringing up his pistol, and right before his shooting hand reached his brace hand, the head [of the grizzly bear] came through the trees. Thank God my son had a bullet in the chamber of that 10 millimeter Glock.”

Kalkowski recounts that bear spray would have been useless in that situation, since a slight breeze was blowing toward them, and the spray would have hit them in their faces.

He went on to say that his son emptied four shots into the bear when it was only five yards from him. The bear then turned left and rolled into a log.

“Don’t you stop shooting,” Kalkowski yelled to his son, who proceeded to shoot another 11 rounds into the bear. By then, he was out of bullets.

His son told his father after the incident that he was adrenalized in attack mode the whole time. “And I was going to win,” Garrett said.

After the bear hit the log, he then rolled onto his feet.

“He had just enough life left in him to slip into the timber and it disappeared,” Kalkowski said. “We lost vision on it.”

The only way back to camp was by father and son retracting their steps.

“We heard the bear breathing [as we descended]. One of the members of our hunting party was about 500 yards down the ridge, with the rest of the group about 800 yards away. I immediately got on the radio and said, ‘We’re fine.’

“I contacted my wife and told her that we got charged by a grizzly bear, and that Garrett had killed it,” Kalkowski said.

The radio that he used was a handheld satellite communication tool that could only send a limited number of texts. After receiving the text message, his party contacted the warden, who contacted the Game and Fish department.

Kalkowski said that the local Game and Fish employees were extremely professional and well-trained.

“I really want to give a shout out to them. It was an extremely dicey situation going back up there. I told them on the way up that I wished I could confirm that the bear’s dead. But I don’t know for sure because we could still hear it breathing [when we came down]. The scrub pine was so thick that I believed the Game and Fish folk were not going to know [if the bear was dead] until they literally stuck their head in there.”

Kalkowski has been hunting for 21 years. His son Garrett shot a bull with his .270 smaller-frame rifle on his first hunting trip at the age of 12.

Grizzlies remain under federal protection, so they may not be legally hunted. They can, however, be killed in self-defense or in defense of another human.

“Thank God that it’s how we wanted things to happen that day, and that He prepared my son to react the way that he did,” Kalkowski said.

This story was published on November 13, 2024.