A couple months ago, we posted six tips from a state bear biologist on avoiding a confrontation with a black bear in Maine. One of those tips: When all else fails, the best way to come out unscathed in the rare case that one attacks is to fight the bear.
It turns out that worked for a father in North Carolina who says he beat back a black bear that attacked his son.
Greg Alexander and his son, Gabriel, were sleeping in their hammocks while camping in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park when the black bear attacked the boy.
“I just felt a lot of pain in my scalp,” Gabriel, 16, told the Citizen-Times in Asheville, NC. “I had no idea what it was. I thought maybe it was a wild dog. I just remember my scalp tearing. … I was afraid. I kind of thought, this is it. I considered the idea that it might have killed my dad.”
His dad tried kicking the bear, then got more personal when that didn’t work.
“I tried to kick the bear in the face, but that didn’t have any effect,” Alexander told the paper. “I jumped on his back and hit him in the face. I was afraid it might already be too late.”
The bear relented, but “continued to make moves toward us,” Alexander said. “I was screaming at it, running at it. I threw some rocks and hit it hard at least once.”
Even after it gave up and moved back, Alexander said he “continued to hear it circling around us.”
Gabriel, who suffered deep slashes on his scalp and face, is recovering in an Asheville, NC hospital. Park rangers put down the suspected bear.
Bear attacks are pretty rare. Only 63 people were killed by black bears on the continent from 1900 to 2009, according to University of Calgary researchers.
And in Maine, there have been about six reported attacks in the last three decades. None were fatal.
