There was a large polar bear in my childhood house and all we had was a single load shotgun and a large caliber smoothbore musket, the musket needed to be loaded the old old way, it took a lot of work and it was complicated.
Somehow dispite forgetting to load the ball, powder and wad it still fired and I hit the thing in the shoulder, severely slowing it, but now that I needed another shot to finish it off, the process of loading was just too much to do, the "cartridge" incorporated a match as part of the system and you still had to breech load that catridge along with the powder, ball and wad from the front but it was all so retarded, there was no way to know if it was going to fire at all and you had to get so close to the bear to fire at it accurately it was dangerous to misfire.