Not everyone can sit around the campfire on a warm summer’s night and say they survived an attack by a grizzly bear, but Lewis County native Neil Rico can. Born and raised here in Lewis County, Neil fell in love with the outdoors, becoming a passionate hunter at an early age. On a recent trip to Southwestern Montana, Neil was attacked by a sow grizzly bear with two cubs deep in the backcountry. Thanks to a little luck—or a lot of luck—and an unrelenting attitude, Neil is still with us today.
His story begins like almost any other hunting story that we hear in Lewis County in late fall. Neil headed east to chase elk in Southwestern Montana, an area well known for grizzly bears.
On the morning of Sunday, September 25, Neil, ahead of his three companions, soon heard the sound of a bugling bull. “All of a sudden, [the elk] just stopped,” Neil describes. “I made the biggest mistake of my life…for just a few minutes I’m going to take my pistol off and my binoculars and put them in my backpack. I don’t need it right now.”
Almost as soon as he did, he heard something on the trail about 25 feet in front of him. It was a grizzly sow in a full run towards him. Neil yelled “Hey” three times before she was on top of him. Grabbing his left arm, she started shaking him while climbing on top of him. Thankfully, due to a chilly morning, Neil was wearing several layers of clothing, the only protection between him and an angry mother protecting her cubs. Neil tried to fight back, punching the bear in the nose with his right fist as she stood on him, however, it was of no use. The bear continued to chew on his left arm and torso as her cubs walked mere feet from where Neil lay pinned by the bruin.
“It seemed to me like forever. I don’t know how long, it was a long time,” Neil recalled when asked how long it she mauled him. Soon, her cubs wandered away, causing her to lose interest in him. The sow crawled off of him, and wandered up the trail with her cubs.
As soon as she was out of sight, Neil got his backpack out, pulled out his pistol and cellphone, and tried to call his hunting companions. However, it was not to tell them to come help, but rather to get out of the woods because of the angry bear heading in their direction. Although his friends saw the bear, they were able to go around her without incident. Neil worked his way uphill on his own, and they met up as a group. He was forced to walk an hour and a half to the closest farm, where an ambulance met him to transport him to the Livingston hospital for care. The game wardens took DNA samples of the bear, to see if the animal was a repeat offender. Most likely, nothing will happen to the bear that attacked him.
Neil would come to find out that he escaped relatively unscathed, with the exception of numerous torn ligaments in his left arm from the attack. In typical fashion of the hard worker that he is, Neil returned to the construction site where he works just eight days after the attack.
“I don’t have time to wait around,” he explains.
Neil is lucky to be alive, he admits that. He lives to be outdoors, and like many of us who strive to see what is over the next ridge, knows the dangers of his lifestyle. But his encounter with untamed nature has done nothing to dampen his spirits when it comes to the outdoors. When asked what would change about his outdoor lifestyle following this attack, Neil replied thoughtfully, “I know I’m not giving up on bowhunting, and I know I’m not giving up on Montana.”
And, if his lifestyle in the month since the encounter is any indication, that holds true. He has taken a successful deer hunting trip to Eastern Washington with his girlfriend, gone scouting for more hunting trips, and is already talking about predator hunting this winter. N
