Had Toby the retriever not laid down his life the day he was chased by a big black bear, a human member of his family might be dead now.

Toby, an 8-year-old, 95-pound black Labrador-retriever owned by John Wacker of Evergreen Township in northwestern Minnesota’s Becker County, was a friendly, smart dog. He loved to sneak off and play with the neighbor kids a half-mile away.

And Wacker swears he could speak English, at least two words. “He could say ‘water’ and ‘hello.’ I taught him,” Wacker said with a laugh.

“Speak up,” he would say to Toby, and the dog would get noticeably louder.

Toby wasn’t trained to hunt, but the first time he went out with one of Wacker’s sons, he swam into a lake and retrieved several birds.

And after being told just once to leave them alone, Toby never bothered the sandhill cranes nesting near Wacker’s house about 11 miles east of Frazee, Minn.

“You don’t know how much I miss that dog,” said Wacker, 67.

Toby was killed by a black bear about 5 p.m. May 21, close to his back yard, after he accompanied Wacker’s son, Chris, 45, on a mushrooming expedition.

The two were only a few hundred yards from the house, after following a trail that led into a 25-acre woods and out into an open meadow visible from the house.

“There’s lots of mushrooms there,” Wacker said. “Morels. We eat nothing but morels.”

Chris Wacker said he had gathered a respectable batch of mushrooms when the trouble started.

“I was getting them pretty good. I had a bagful,” he said. “Then I heard something in the woods in front of us. I thought it was a man, standing by a tree, looking at us.”

Then he noticed two bear cubs in another tree scooting up a little higher.

“At the same time, an adult male bear moved across one of our 1-acre food plots; we have a couple of them,” he said. “I looked back, and the one bear was still standing there.”

Then Toby came up, looked at Chris Wacker and disappeared into the brush.

MOTHER NATURE AT HER CRUELEST

“A few minutes later, Toby was running back to me like a scared dog,” Chris Wacker said. “I thought, ‘Oh, no …’ “

The bear, which Chris Wacker estimated at 300 pounds, was after the dog and moving at least 25 mph, he said.

“Toby stopped when he got to me and turned and faced right into the bear. It actually overran him and just kind of caught him in the hind end,” Chris Wacker said.

Then it got ugly, fast.

Chris Wacker ended up on the ground, scrambling backward about 10 yards as the bear savagely attacked the dog.

“Chris said he’d never seen anything so violent in his life,” John Wacker said. “The bear took Toby and (smashed him from side to side), wham, wham, wham — it was sheer muscle and violence.”

Chris Wacker said he wasn’t even sure how Toby made it the 250 yards back to the house.

“I’m not much of a running guy anymore,” he said. “I was just shot by the time I got to the house. I was seeing stars. I lost my hat, my mushrooms, my jacket. The next day I pulled a half-inch-long thorn out of my head. … It was just Mother Nature at her cruelest. It was really something else.”

“My son was really shaken. I’ve never seen him that shaken, and he’s been in the woods a lot,” John Wacker said.

“The bear I’ve seen with the cubs is huge. I’ve seen her going across the road.”

He believes the same bear has been causing problems in the neighborhood for several years. It has raided his bird feeders and shed, might have killed a neighbor’s steer and was perhaps the reason a neighbor girl’s usually gentle horse threw her and bolted.

“This bear has become brazen. She’s aggressive. She would have killed Chris. … Toby saved his life. I’m convinced of that,” he said.

Chris Wacker is not so certain.

“I’m pretty sure the bear didn’t have any interest in me,” he said. “We just got in the wrong situation, with the cubs and a male bear and a female bear. It was not a good place for a dog, especially a big black one.”

Still, he hasn’t gone back to retrieve his hat, and nobody has hunted for mushrooms since the attack.

“I’m staying out of the woods,” Chris Wacker said. “She’s probably still out there.”

John Wacker said the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources gave him the OK to shoot the bear if it reappears on his property.

TOBY DESERVED A CHANCE

About 10 minutes after the attack, Toby made it home.

“He was in tough shape,” John Wacker said.

The Lab-retriever had claw injuries 4 to 6 inches deep and bite marks on a shoulder.

“I should have put him down. I was brought up that way on the farm, but because of what he did to save Chris, Toby just needed to have a chance,” he said.

So they took Toby to the closest veterinarian, Randall Lindemann.

“I didn’t know him, but by 11 p.m. that night, I had a whole lot of respect for him. He did everything he could to save Toby’s life,” John Wacker said.

The dog was there from May 21 to May 24, when he was brought home.

“He was drinking but not eating,” John Wacker said. “On Sunday evening, he took a turn for the worse.”

On Monday, John Wacker had to drive bus for the Frazee-Vergas school district students’ Memorial Day services.

When he got home, he said, “I could tell Toby was going downhill. Every time he drank water, he was throwing up white foam. The vet dropped everything and met me at the clinic, on Memorial Day, too.”

Toby was given fluids to rehydrate him and stayed at the vet’s overnight.

“I told my wife, I don’t think Toby’s gonna make it,” John Wacker said. “I could tell the spirit and life was going out of him when I left.”

He died the next morning.

The Wackers buried him in the back yard.

John said he plans to put a concrete marker over the grave that reads, “Here lies Toby, the dog who saved my son.”