Braxton Taylor
In a moment of pure terror, Gene Moe turned to see a 600-pound brown bear charging. With his gun leaning against a tree and knife in hand, Moe was ready to accept his fate. It was him or the bear, and he was going to drive that knife as deep down that monster’s throat as he could.
And as it turns out, there are exceptions to the old saying, “Never bring a knife to a gunfight.”
This heroic encounter occurred on November 1st, 1999, when Moe and three other hunters set out to shoot blacktail deer on Raspberry Island, Alaska. The hunting party approached by boat, splitting into two separate groups when they reached the beach.
Moe recounted the morning wind as “Squirrely” during an interview with The Big Alaska Show. The unpredictable wind direction made sneaking up on an unsuspecting deer impossible.
Changing tactics, Moe told his friend to wait while he drove the deer down to his position. Despite some initial success in spooking deer, none fell to their rifles. Frustrated and determined to bring home a kill, Moe and his partner made an agreement:
“If I shoot, you come to the noise; if you shoot, I’ll come to your noise.”
However, there was a problem–his partner decided to break out a heavy-duty hat for the day’s hunt. The flaps covering his ears muffled much of the incoming noise.
During the second drive, Moe spotted a deer, fired, and dropped it. The gunshot echoed across the terrain, but no one came. He hooted like an owl a few times to draw attention, but there was no response. With daylight fading, he decided to butcher the deer alone.
“I got this all done in about 40 minutes,” Moe recalled in an interview with Remi Warren. “The only thing left was to get the liver and heart.”
With the liver in one hand and the heart in the other, an ear-splitting roar erupted behind him. Spinning around, he saw the brown bear charging from 30 feet. His rifle, just two feet to his side, might as well have been miles away. He had only one option—his four-inch buck knife. Dropping the organ meat, he bared the blade toward the beast.
As the bear lunged, he aimed for its open mouth but missed, slicing its face instead. The beast clamped down on his arm, stripping flesh from bone. Wracked with pain and pinned in a death grip, Moe used his free hand to gouge at the bear’s eye. Missing the mark, he instead jammed his finger deep into its ear canal and twisted. The bear recoiled in agony and annoyance, pulling away and running about 15 feet before turning back, its eyes filled with fury and confusion.
There would be no retreat.
Still on his back, Moe braced for another charge. As the bear lunged again, he lashed out with a desperate kick, striking it square in the neck. The bear stumbled, and Moe scrambled to his feet.
Desperate and bloody, Moe described his plan during the Warren Interview. “I took my leg and waved it out” to bait the animal, saying, “That was his one mistake because he grabbed me above the knee.”
Fixated on the jigging of his foot, the bear dove for his leg and bit down. Moe took his knife and slammed it into the bear’s neck repeatedly. The twisting of the blade dissuaded the bear’s attack, leading him to retreat again.
The bear turned to face Moe, a chunk of his thigh clenched between its teeth—easily five to ten pounds of flesh, by Moe’s estimation. But then he noticed something else. Blood was pumping from the bear’s neck.
Glaring into the beast’s fading eyes, Moe bellowed, “C’mon! The Lord’s on my side!”
Blood seeped from Moe like sap on an old tree. In a final desperate assault, the bear charged one final time. Mustering his last ounce of strength, Moe struck its snout with his fist. The bear collapsed, crashing into the snow and moss. It lay still. The fight was over.
Barely clinging to life, Moe limped to his rifle and fired a shot into the bear’s chest. It didn’t so much as twitch. He went to reload, but the flesh from his mangled arm had draped over the action, gumming up the rifle. Peeling the skin away, he chambered another round and fired again.
Exhausted, Moe looked to the sky. “Thank you, Lord,” he whispered.
Collapsing beside the bear, he believed that patch of moss on Raspberry Island would be his final resting place. But then, a flicker of strength returned to his limbs. Summoning every ounce of will, he reached his pack, retrieved plastic bags, and wrapped his shredded arm and leg with makeshift bandages.
But between Moe and the safety of the beach was a thick patch of alders. The limbs of the trees grabbed at his disfigured and scalped body, tearing plastic and flesh alike. For a moment, he considered cutting away the flapping meat to move more freely as he pressed on.
Each time he fell, he shoved a handful of snow into his mouth, shocking himself back to consciousness.
Reappearing on the beach, only a couple hundred yards from where they initially landed, he screamed, HEELLP!
Two members of his hunting party were already on the beach. Rushing to his side, they found him drenched in blood. Looking up at them, Moe pleaded, “Please, just take your gun and shoot me.”
One of them shook his head. “Well, if you’re still here in the morning, I’ll shoot ya.”
They loaded him into the boat as the wind picked up, stirring the ocean into three-foot waves. Fighting the churning sea in a skiff, they navigated to a sheltered bay, where they knew of a cabin.
The couple who owned the cabin retrieved bandages and began tending to Moe’s injuries. His exposed tendons twitched like boiled strands of spaghetti as they moved his fingers. Meanwhile, the cabin’s owner grabbed a chainsaw, cut two studs from the structure, and a sheet of plywood to craft a makeshift stretcher.
By sheer luck, a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter was preparing for night training exercises when it received a distress call from the cabin. The aircraft immediately rerouted and airlifted Moe to a nearby hospital on Kodiak.
The doctors worked on him for twelve hours, sewing for seven of them. When Moe later asked how many stitches he’d received, the doctor replied, “We quit counting at five hundred,” though his son Karl reported in the ballpark of 1,000.
Despite the trauma, Moe continued hunting well into his 70s. But the sounds of night haunted him in camp. The thought of a bear wandering by his tent rekindled memories of that fateful day.
Gene Moe passed away in 2024 at the age of 93. His love for the wild never faded, nor did his unshakable faith in the Lord—the force he credited with his survival. When asked about his father, Karl Moe simply stated, “Don’t play checkers with him because he had that mastered.”
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