A woman suffered severe injuries after a grizzly attacked her while she was running along a trail on the huge military base on the outskirts of Anchorage last week. According to reports she did everything right, following the general advice of remaining calm, looming large and backing away, eventually playing dead if the bear actually attacks and grabs you. None of it worked except that she could have been killed if she had not played dead. The bear eventually left her and she made it to a road where rescue followed.
In the aftermath of the attack, an Anchorage outdoors writer who has almost made a living writing about and postulating about bear attacks, offered a newer method for dealing with a potential bear attack. He does write with some credibility given his experience with the subject and his own encounter when a grizzly grabbed his leg and he fought it off with a handgun.
His suggestion deals mostly with urban bears that are accustomed to people on the various running and bicycling trails around the city. According to his numbers, there are 65 grizzlies and about 250 black bears prowling within city limits.
These, he postulates, frequent the same trails and often may lurk in the brush just off the trail while runners, hikers or bicyclists pass. It is the bears' being accustomed to that traffic that forestalls more attacks. The woman in this attack had come between a sow and cub and she stopped. The writer suggests that if she had just kept going and run past them, the bear might not have felt any threat and merely let her pass. Certainly others passed that bear at one time or another and if the runner had kept going she might not have been attacked. It sounds logical but a tough decision to make in the immediate moment when you encounter a bear on the trail. Kind of like a quarterback analyzing the defense in the one or two seconds he has before he has to throw the ball or be smashed to the earth by a charging 300-pound lineman. How many of us can do that? And, the quarterback knows the intentions of the defense; you never know immediately what the bear is going to do.
The writer also advocates the use of pepper spray, citing statistics that show the spray has stopped more attacks than guns ever have and stating that no one has been killed by someone who used the spray during an attack.
I have never been attacked by a bear, but life at the East Pole involves them. I always carry a heavy rifle with me but in recent years have added a can of bear spray. I don't want to kill a bear for one thing and for another there can be incidents where you don't even have time to raise the rifle. In my only encounter out there, bottle rockets did the trick, but this was not an all-out charge and attack.
This happened back when I smoked and one evening when I was there by myself, I was leaning out the window puffing on a cigarette and watching down the hill where a bear trail passed along the base of it. I heard a branch crack and shortly a grizzly emerged from the brush. She was followed by one, then a second, and then a third cub. These were almost her size and given that cubs stay with the mother for two years, these had to be yearlings almost ready to head out on their own.
They slowly worked their way to where their path crossed the trail I had used earlier in the day when I climbed to the cabin. I fully expected her to catch my scent and head off into the woods. Instead she put her head down and began following the trail. For a few moments I stood there mesmerized. Most of us see bears in zoos or stuffed and in cases at the airport. A fully fluffed out bear is a whole lot more imposing than those other specimens, especially when it is on the ground and can get at you -- huge.
As she progressed up the trail, it dawned on me that I had better get ahead of this situation. A friend who worked at a remote fish hatchery where bears often wandered through the grounds once told me it is best to make any bear visit an unpleasant experience for the animal. Her solution was bottle rockets fired judiciously to scare the animals away. With that advice in mind I always keep a supply of the firecrackers near the door. I grabbed a handful of them along with my rifle and a lighter and stepped out onto the porch. By that time she had reached the point about two thirds of the way up the trail where you make a sharp turn for the last run to the cabin still with her head down in the weeds about 30 feet from the porch. All three cubs were coming along right behind her.
That was too close and I lighted a bottle rocket and fired it. It landed and went off right in front of the lead bear, startling her. She stood on her hind feet, head swinging from side to side trying to catch the scent of whatever had caused that noise. While she was still standing I fired another one at her, which exploded as it hit her in the chest. This time she let out a roar, did something of a pirouette and landed on the cub behind her. They ran back down the hill while I listened for their progress. To my mind the noise stopped too soon, like she was still intent on finding what was at the end of that trail she was following and also what had caused the disruption. They just hadn't gone far enough to not still be a danger, so I fired another bottle rocket in their direction. Another roar echoed through the woods and then rose the noise of what sounded like four bulldozers tearing off through the underbrush. The sounds slowly faded until I couldn't hear them any more and this time I suspected they had run far enough. Half an hour or so later I heard a couple of gunshots in the distance that seemed to come from where the bears would have crossed the main trail if they had continued on the same course.
All things considered, we had had an encounter and everyone lived. It left me nervous. I didn't have Billy the Big-mouth Bass yet, so I put a bunch of pots and pans out on the deck to make some noise if they came back later in the night.
As stated, this was not an all-out attack. I don't think she ever saw me, but I have to wonder what would have happened if I hadn't been looking out the window smoking that cigarette. It almost gave me an excuse to keep smoking, forget about the health hazard. That smoke had saved me from what could have been a much more serious encounter, one that could have turned out quite differently.
I guess the point of all this is that each situation is going to be a little different and in many cases a judgment has to be made fairly quickly. In this one, I had some time to think and get ahead of it, but that is not always the case. Running on by might be a good strategy on urban trails but not so much in the big woods. Then, too, the bears around the East Pole must be somewhat used to the sporadic traffic on the main trail, so, at least if you are driving a noisy machine, it might be best to drive on by. I did in fact see the hind end of a black bear one day as it ran off the trail a few hundred feet ahead of the four-wheeler. But that is in no way a proven theory. A friend of mine came around a blind corner on his trail one time and actually ran into a black bear. But, the idea of just running or walking on by, gives us one more choice when dealing with a bear.
The original story
Billy the Big Mouthed Bass
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