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Mark Freeman's Commentary Mullinnix has a bear of a story Larry Mullinnix awoke at 10 p.m. to the scratching of paws on kitchen cabinets, and he thought raccoons had found their way into his summer cabin in remote southwest Oregon. Mullinnix slipped into his tennis shoes, grabbed his rifle out of habit and stepped through the bedroom door. But his flashlight beam found no small masked bandits. Instead, he came nose-to-nose with a 400-pound burglar that already had broken into the cabin four times that month. This was the very trespasser Mullinnix had come to confront - but not inside, and not at close range. "As soon as I opened the bedroom door, I knew it was my bear," says Mullinnix, 62, of Ashland. "He could smell me. He knew I was there, but he didn't give a damn. He was a mean, mean bear." A quick and violent encounter ensued, with the big black bear never venturing more than six feet away from Mullinnix in the cramped cabin along Oregon's Wild and Scenic Rogue River that November day four years ago. When it was finally over, Mullinnix's rifle hung empty of shells, the last of which dropped the charging bear in front of the fireplace like a huge, plump and bloody rug not four feet from Mullinnix's toes. "It was," he says, "quite an ordeal." And it was quite illegal under current Oregon wildlife laws, which sport a glitch in the language that allows the killing of bears to protect sheep and tree saplings but, technically, not people. The Oregon Legislature now is attempting to address that glitch. Legislators are considering a bill that explicitly allows people to shoot bears or cougars strictly in self-defense or in defense of previously unprotected assets such as houses and barns. No one, including Mullinnix, has been prosecuted for shooting bears or cougars. In fact, the practice was considered well within wildlife laws until a 1999 state attorney general's opinion concluded that it wasn't. But the predatory nature of black bears - a creature that one expert says is five times more likely to attack a person than a grizzly bear - leaves some lawmakers and biologists to insist the new law is needed. Most public interest in the bill has focused on legalizing the shooting of cougars that threaten people. But Gary Shelton, a British Columbia researcher who has written three books on bear behavior, says West Coast residents likely have more to fear from black bears because of their superior numbers and an aggressiveness that researchers are only starting to understand. As more bears cross paths with more people, the bruins are developing a dangerous notion that humans are not to be feared, says Shelton, 57. "Conflicts are increasing all over North America," Shelton says. "I'd suspect, at any time now, we'll have a predatory attack by a black bear in California or Oregon. Definitely." You don't have to look past Mullinnix's cabin to find that black bear facts are stranger than fiction. "Everything he says about black bears is confirmed," Mullinnix says, "by me." Black bears are a common sight along the Wild Rogue, which flows past a small complex of old cabins built as Zane Grey's steelhead-fishing camp 70 years ago. The cabins are now owned by the Haas family of Levi Strauss fame, with Mullinnix as their caretaker and fishing guide. The main cabin houses the guests, while the secondary cabin is for Mullinnix and a quarry of cats kept to keep down the rodent population. But some catfood stored in Mullinnix's cabin in November 1997 apparently caught the powerful nose of a black bear. The bear then came to dinner, breaking through a sliding glass door and ransacking the unoccupied cabin. Frank Moody, who works for Mullinnix, discovered the break-in the next day and boarded up the broken door. The next night, the bear broke through a window, knocked over the refrigerator and feasted on frozen salmon eggs kept there for fishing. Moody stuffed the wrapped cat food into a windowless closet that also sports a ceiling vent for a water heater. Apparently smelling the catfood through the vent, the bear scaled the cedar-shaked cabin and tore through the roof to reach his nostrils' nirvana. The bear repeated his attack from on high the next night, and Mullinnix had enough. He flew his small airplane the hour's flight from Ashland to meet the bruin burglar face to face. "I knew I had to kill that bear," he says. Mullinnix stayed in the nearby main cabin while first setting snares near the windows of the smaller cabin, waiting to catch it before killing it. But the snares proved too small to snatch the bear. After three failed attempts, he decided to spend the night in his cabin and wait for the bear to come to him. With a fire warming his bedroom, Mullinnix went to sleep early that night and set his alarm for 3 a.m. - the time when the bear regularly made his food runs. But the raccoon-like scratching awoke him five hours earlier. As soon as he pulled open the bedroom door, he could smell the bear in the darkness. The fight was on. With rifle raised, Mullinnix walked three paces past the cabin's fireplace to see the bear nosing through the kitchen cabinets. He fired once, and the wounded bear leaped over a kitchen counter. A second shot sizzled wide, striking an armchair as the bear bounded into an adjoining living room. Bullets three and four found their mark, but the bear just turned and charged as the fifth and final bullet reached the rifle chamber. The last shot left the bear dead and spread-eagle next to a wood stove. "The farthest he ever got from me was six feet," Mullinnix says. "He was one mean bear." Mullinnix is returning to the cabin today to get it ready for a summer of fly-fishing visitors. A hot-wired electric fence now encircles his cabin, but Mullinnix can't sleep nearly as well there as he once did. "I've had a lot of stress, a lot of bad dreams," Mullinnix says. "I don't go to sleep without my gun, loaded, next to me. "Except now," he says, "I have a bigger gun." (Staff writer Mark Freeman covers the outdoors for the Mail Tribune. Call him at 776-4470, or e-mail him at: [email protected] ) Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.