When he was eighteen years old, my great uncle Tom Kelly got into a fistfight to the death with a bear. And won. This story was part of the legend of Tom Kelly when I was growing up. My Poppa used to tell stories about his brother-in-law, like that he would pick up drunken servicemen two at a time—one in each hand—to eject them from the local bar when they got too rowdy, or that he was known to have fought a bear with his bare hands. And I’d sit there half listening and nodding and wondering about how age and distance act as magnifiers—the walk to school was forty-five miles and we walked it barefoot in the snow! We were so poor we ate dirt sandwiches! Your Great Uncle Tom was such a tough young man he could win a fight with a bear. Sure thing, Poppa. Tell me again, how high were the snowbanks?

But then my sister went and looked up the front page of the Toronto Daily Star from June 17, 1957, and sure enough, there it was:

Shoots Bear with Birdshot, Wrestles It, Boy Emerges as Winner

____________________________

Farmer’s Son of 18 In Hand-to-Hand Fight With Bear at Midnight

By Ted Leonard
Special to the Star

Brechin, June 17—Thomas Kelly, Jr., 18, son of a Mara township farmer, is fully recovered from his wounds and back at work after a terrifying midnight hand-to-hand combat with an angry mother bear, from which he escaped with his life only by a few seconds, when the bear died on top of him…

Tom Kelly has a souvenier of the fight, his shotgun with bite marks on both sides of the butt where the bear gripped the gun in its jaws. Every tooth in the bear’s mouth made an imprint, many of the marks a quarter of an inch deep.… Tom also has his claw-ripped clothing, splotched with an animal’s blood. On his face, chest, legs Tom can display traces of claw scratches….

On the moonlit night of June 8, Tom took his 12-gauge shotgun, loaded with three shells of light 7 ½ ounce shot, a weight of shot used for small animals and birds. He was after a fox that had been hanging around the farm chicken pens…. [Lost about a quarter mile into the bush, he pauses to get his bearings.]

With a snarl the shape came hurtling in his direction. Tom realized that it was a bear and that the whimpering must be a cub close by.

He said he didn’t want to shoot a mother bear, but he had no choice. He fired a shot but the bear came on. He only had time to fire a second shot before the bear was on him.

He swung the gun like a club but the animal knocked it aside. Tom then swung a ‘round-house’ blow with his fist to the bear’s nose and jumped back to once again prod the animal away with the gun butt.

The bear got the butt in its teeth as it reared up, its claws raking at the boy holding the gun by the barrel. Tom was afraid to turn his back and run, and fought the animal with the gun until the bear bore him to the ground.

Thought End Near

“I thought I was finished,” said Tom, as completely defenceless, he fought the bear with his fists, the animal’s teeth inches from his face.

Then the bear went still. The boy struggled out from beneath the animal. He didn’t know if the bear was momentarily unconscious and would rise in a minute to go after him again.

He was shaking so hard he could hardly stand and was covered with blood, whether his own or the bear’s he didn’t know. But the bear didn’t move again, and Tom knew it was dead. His shots had killed it.

Shocked, dazed and shaking, Tom stood for a while trying to get control of himself and figure where he was. He heard a train whistle, and saw, high in the night sky, two stars he recognized. He picked up his gun and started out of the bush.

Around 1 a.m. he emerged near a neighbor’s farm and, knowing if he went home in his blood soaked condition, he’d worry his parents, he went to the neighbour’s farm to wash up. Then he went home….

I love that detail towards the end about washing up before going home so as not to worry his parents. Somehow he has the presence of mind, after wrestling with a wounded mother bear, to look at himself and say, “If I go home looking like this my Mom’s gonna freak!”

There must be a bit of that in the blood. Once I was jumped from behind by a bully when I was in high school (he hit me in the head with a briefcase—weird accessory for a badass, but effective in this instance) and he blackened my eyes, fattened my lip and bloodied my nose. I stood up while he was walking away, looked at my girlfriend and all her friends who were staring at my purple and red face swelling up before them. Then I glanced down at my pants, which were black and muddy from the ground.

I looked up at the thug walking down the street surrounded by his jeering pals. “These stains better come out of my pants or you’ll be sorry,” I shouted. He made an elaborate show of turning to come whack on me some more while his friends held him back while I just stood there, staring and seething. My girlfriend thought I’d literally been knocked silly.

The moral of the two stories? One might think it is that I was unlucky in the genes I share with Uncle Tom Kelly—I somehow got the same disproportional concern for a tidy appearance without the ability to throw haymakers to ward off attacks.

But another message is that you need to do more than sucker punch a little guy like me if you want to impress me with your toughness. Dude, my great uncle won a fight with a bear. We set the bar high in my family.

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Posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 11:41 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.