Angry ex wife gets man in trouble after he shot charging brown bear

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On a cool, October day more than four years ago, a nearly 10-foot tall grizzly bear tried to kill Pat Hughes along the shores of Katlian Bay on Baranof Island on Alaska's Panhandle. Hughes did the only thing he could to survive. He started shooting with his .30-06-caliber rifle.

"I shot six rounds into him," Hughes said Monday. The bear stopped, but it did not go down. Out of ammunition, Hughes ran for the protection of a tree while grabbing more shells from his pocket. Despite being badly shaken, he managed to reload and fire one more shot, which killed the bear.

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His problem?

Angering an ex-spouse.

His crime?

Instead of reporting the bear kill as a so-called "defense of life and property" shooting, skinning the animal, and forfeiting its hide and skull to the state, as required by law, Hughes went and bought a $25 resident tag to shoot a grizzly bear. Then he put the tag on the dead bear and took the hide to a taxidermist to have it tanned.

He figured that when a bear tries to kill you, and you by good luck manage to kill it instead, you ought to be able to hang the hide on your wall in memory of how close you came to death.

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Troopers seized the bear hide and charged the 49-year-old professor at the University of Alaska Sitka with "failing to report a DLP, two counts of unsworn falsification in the second degree, and one count of unlawful possession."

Investigators did not challenge the claim Hughes shot the bear to save himself, but noted that he "obtained a brown bear tag and permit after the fact, and provided false information to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in regards to the circumstances around which the bear was taken and the date it was harvested. This was done so that Hughes could retain the bear."

"It is the law," Hughes agreed Monday.

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The most common way around the law is to spend $25 on a brown/grizzly tag before the season, so if you are out deer hunting in Southeast Alaska and get charged by a grizzly bear, you can keep the hide without resulting to subterfuge. Since 2009, Hughes said, he's been in the practice of doing just that.

"I'm under the impression it's pretty common" for deer hunters -- who spend a lot of time sneaking around the woods in Southeast looking for deer and thus are most likely to stumble on bears at close range -- to go and obtain a tag after a DLP kill in order to be allowed to keep the hide. But he agrees that is wrong -- and that he broke the law.

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