New York Times By Neil Vigdor 7/22/2021
Down to his last rounds of ammunition, with bruises and a leg injury, the man was rescued by a helicopter crew that just happened by.
He was sleep-deprived and nearly out of ammunition, alone in the wilderness of Alaska. Well, not really alone.
For several nights in a row, the man had fended off the tenacious advances of a grizzly bear that had attacked him a few days earlier at a mining camp some 40 miles outside Nome.
There was no way to phone for help. But then help found him.
En route to a mission on Friday, the crew of a Coast Guard helicopter saw the man waving both hands in the air, a widely recognized distress signal, the helicopter’s pilot said. On the tin roof of a shack, SOS and “help me” had been scrawled. The shack’s door had been ripped off.
The crew took the man to Nome to be treated for bruises to his torso and a leg injury that was not life-threatening, according to the Coast Guard. So ended a weeklong ordeal that could pass as a sequel to “The Revenant,” in which Leonardo DiCaprio was mauled by a computer-generated grizzly bear.
“At some point, a bear had dragged him down to the river,” Lt. Cmdr. Jared Carbajal, one of the pilots of the Coast Guard helicopter, said in an interview on Wednesday. “He had a pistol. He said that the bear kept coming back every night and he hadn’t slept in a few days.”
More:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/22/us/bear-attack-alaska.html
