It's been done, but not by anybody who wasn't absolutely forced into it.

In 1823, [Hugh Glass] joined the Major Andrew Henry expedition to the upper Missouri. He was scouting with some others when he came between a female grizzly bear and her two cubs. He was severely injured, slashed from head to foot. He was bleeding profusely. It was not a matter of if he would die but when. The other members of his party carried him on a litter for several days waiting for him to die, but he still held on. Now came a decision. They were going through dangerous Indian country. They couldn't jeopardize the entire party for one man. So two men would stay behind with him, young Jim Bridger, and a man named John Fitzgerald. Finally after a week it looked like he had died, showing no signs of life. So Bridger and Fitzgerald packed up to go, taking Glass's gun and gear.

But somehow he came out of his coma, so weak he could only crawl. His back was infected from the bear wounds. He rolled over onto a rotting log and let the maggots eat the infection out of his back. Then he started dragging himself toward Fort Kiowa, a trading almost 200 miles away. He lived on the meat of dead animals and rattlesnakes. He slowly gained his strength so that he could walk upright. Most on his mind was getting revenge on the two men who had left him. At one point he was almost run over in a buffalo stampede.

He narrowly avoided being seen by Indians. After somewhere between two and three months he reached the fort. At the fort other mountain men were amazed at his story. He nursed himself back to health. He became obsessed with finding the two men who deserted him on the trail. He discovered that Fitzgerald was working for the military as a scout. He was told he would be hunted down and killed if he killed a soldier. He caught up with Jim Bridger, but had not realized he was just a boy and inexperienced. He forgave Jim Bridger.

A Brown Bear was shot and killed by an Alaska woman using a .22 caliber pistol, too. She was very very lucky.

A Tlingit living near Juneau came across a hiberanting griz. He told his buddy that he was going to kill the bear with an axe, the way his ancestors did. About all you can say was that the fella survived.

There's damned good reason why, from the Ainu to the Apache, the bear has been held in such high regard.