A man has revealed how a bear attack during a hunting trip left him with injuries he wasn’t sure he would recover from.
Jeremy Evans, 38, had recently become father to a baby girl when he headed out into the remote Alberta Rockies in Canada.
While out in the woods, he was approached and savagely attacked multiple times by a grizzly bear, which ripped off pieces of his flesh, leaving them on the forest floor.
The injuries he suffered as the result of the bear chewing on his head ‘like a dog gnawing on a bone’ were so severe he says he even considered ending his life ‘on his own terms.’
The hunter also explained how he was able to fight off the bear by finding a soft spot on its stomach and squeezing as hard as he could, which caused the bear to panic and run off.
He said: ‘I found a piece of flesh with a little bit of bristles on there, and some soft spot which was part of my moustache.
‘Then I found another larger hunk that felt like hard cartilage. This was a piece of my ear and a piece of my scalp. So I picked that up off the ground.
‘I was sitting there holding a piece of my face, I knew I wasn’t going to make it, and there were a couple of options.
‘Do I try to endure the unendurable? Do I just like I didn’t let things happen? Or do I end it on my terms?
‘So I loaded up my rifle, and I place one against the ground, and I put my chin on the barrel, and I pulled the trigger.’
The gun initially failed to discharge but when Jeremy tried a second time, it went off and missed his face by mere ‘inches.’
He then remembers playing a song on his phone to try and gather the strength to get up.
He said: ‘The first song that came on was the baby shark song that I played for my daughter the night before while putting her to bed.
‘That song just triggered me to just roll over and pull myself up. In that moment I found my motivation, my inspiration to keep going and that was my family and that song really made me think of them.
Eventually Jeremy was able to stand up and walk to his car, he then drove to a nearby resort, where the child who first saw him approach initially thought he was dressed as a zombie.
He was subsequently airlifted to hospital for two surgeries lasting up to 13 hours in a bid to save some of his face.
He has since written a book, Mauled, about the ordeal and is raising money for research into PTSD, which he has suffered since the attack.
