A pair of hunters stumbled into a mother grizzly bear during a hunting trip in the Alaskan wilderness — and made it out alive, news reports say.
They were about an hour and a half into their deer hunt in the bush of Admiralty Island at the end of September when they came to a cluster of dense brush, and a sow charged out right in front of them , the Anchorage Daily News reported.
“It was like stepping on a landmine,” Nicholas Orr, one of the hunters, told the outlet. “You’re just walking along, and then boom, you get ambushed.”
Orr, 45, was walking behind his 44-year-old hunting partner Amanda Compton during the attack, the outlet reported. The bear “reared, roared, and charged Compton,” who told the outlet she “probably had two seconds to determine that the bushes were moving and something was coming at me, that it was a bear, and then to seek as much shelter as I could,” which she said consisted of shielding her head and face with her hands and arms.
In those couple seconds, the bear gnawed down on her head before letting go and moving away, the outlet reported.
“I was lucid through the whole thing ,” Compton told Alaska Public Media. “There just wasn’t enough time to be terrorized.”
Orr had fallen to the ground when the bear charged, but managed to get back on his feet and load a bullet into his rifle to shoot toward the bear, the outlet reported. While he wasn’t sure he hit the bear, it did the trick to get the sow to run off.
Compton and Orr didn’t realize how badly Compton was hurt in the incident, and they hiked back out to her boat rather than calling for help, the outlet reported.
Once at the hospital, doctors cleaned Compton’s scalp, stapled the gashes in her head and stitched up one on her hand, the outlet reported. They also removed a shard of grizzly tooth embedded into her scalp, which Compton kept as a grim souvenir of the attack.
As for the bear, Alaska Department of Fish and Game officials determined she was defending her cub, biologist Stephen Bethune told McClatchy News in an email.
“Because it was a defensive attack, there is no further imminent threat to public safety and no further action is planned at this time,” Bethune said.
The bear likely abandoned the attack once she no longer felt threatened , Alaska’s News Source reported.
“The bear felt threatened, protecting its cub, and the victim did exactly what we talk about — made themselves not a threat anymore,” Bethune told the outlet. “Once that threat was over, the brown bear got away.”
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