So, tell me if you've heard this one before: a man, a bear, and a cougar are walking through the woods... Actually, I think an equally likely story is mamma bear got startled by the mountain lion and did what startled mamma bears naturally do. In other words, if that'd been a deer (and the attack wasn't immediately fatal) the outcome would've essentially been the same. But, hey, I wasn't there, and if the old man thinks that bear decided to help him, I'm not going to contradict him.