I’m writing a fantasy short story in which a 15 year-old farmboy has to kill a bear that’s been helping itself to some of the livestock. The setting is standard medieval fantasy, (so no guns), and while the boy is very big for his age (the size of a full-grown man), he’s still acting on his own. The bear is lame in one leg and blind in one eye, hence the reason why it can’t hunt normally and has been forced closer to human habitation to find easier prey. Nevertheless it’s still a bear, and more than a match for any single man.
So how is he supposed to defeat it? Dig a covered pit trap lined with stakes and bait it with more livestock? Once the bear falls in, he can pretty much shoot it with a bow at his leisure (or just drop rocks on it for that matter). That seems the simplest way, but it doesn’t make for a very exciting story. The angle here is that the boy grows up to become a hero and eventually a king, so this is his first step along that road, and I’m therefore looking for something heroic, yet still within the bounds of plausibility…
A perfect heart or lung shot with a bow would kill a bear quickly. That seems like a good way to me because it is medieval sounding and pretty difficult to pull off. If you miss at all, you just get a pissed off bear.
Long spear braced against the ground, get the bear to rear up and then fall on it. That’s how Anthony Hopkins & Alec Baldwin killed a grizzly in “The Edge”.
What kind of heroism are you going for? Is he a clever hero, or a brave one, or a strong one, or a highly skilled one, or a great leader of others, or just plain lucky?
Seems to me by blinding the one remaining eye, the bear doesn’t stand much chance of survival for long. The boy realizes this and gets cunning…
So, the kid can hit him with an arrow, sling, or sneak up on his blind side and quickly stab him in the good eye. Wait for the inevitable death, lure him over a convienient cliff, trick him into attacking a stronger animal.
Bears in North Carolina are hunted in a special archery season. I see no reason that a strapping 15 year old could not do the same with medieval bow and arrow.
Even with a compound bow and stainless steel broadheaded arrows, hunting a bear via archery is for the pathologically insane. I would not settle for anything less than a 12 gauge loaded with deer slugs.
I seem to recall an incident many years ago in which a woman in Canada (possibly Alaska) was caught outdoors by a polar bear. The bear opened his mouth to bite her, she jammed her fist in there - and the bear promptly choked to death on the mitten she managed to lodge in its throat. I have no cite for this, but if it happened, I imagine her arm got torn up a bit, though I could imagine the bear freaking out and waiving off its attack once it started gaggin on the mitten.
Daniel Boone did it before he was 15 according to some. (according to others he did before he was born). But if he did, he would have used a musket.
There’s also a story about a young ‘Eskimo’ boy who killed a polar bear by coiling up sharpened strips of flexible whalebone, stuffed them into balls of blubber, then left a trail of them behind him as a polar bear stalked him. The polar bear would stop and eat each ball of blubber which them dissolved in his stomach, and the whalebone would uncoil and pierce him internally.
I’d just get a gun and hang around any dumpsters in bear territory. But there might be interesting methods involving rocket powered roller skates or a giant sling shot.
Provoking the bear into charging him while standing in front of a buffalo jump (or equivalent) and dodging aside at the last moment would be plenty exciting.
Make it clear that our hero is the fastest runner in all the land.
Gather all the village children and approach the bear together. Then prod the bear into an attack.
Everyone runs. Some even escape.
Then when the bear is sleeping off it’s huge meal of village children, everyone comes back, led by the hero, and stabs it to death with many pointy sticks.
Um, it is possible I have different criteria for ‘heroism’ than the OP.
