HELEN, Ga., June 23 (AP)  When a 300-pound black bear raided a family’s campsite, the father saved his sons from harm by throwing a log at it, killing it with a single blow.

The father, Chris Everhart, and his three sons were camping in the Chattahoochee National Forest in northern Georgia on June 16 when the bear took the family’s cooler and was heading back to the woods with it.

When the youngest son, 6-year-old Logan, hurled a shovel at it, the bear dropped the cooler and started toward the boy, Mr. Everhart said. A former Marine, he grabbed the closest thing he could find  a log from their stash of firewood.

“It happened to hit the bear in the head,” Mr. Everhart said. “I thought it just knocked it out but it actually ended up killing the bear.”