Possible fatal B.C. bear attack brings back memories for survivor

The possibility that a bear may have killed a man in northern B.C. sets Wilf Lloyd to thinking it could have been him.

The 56-year-old taxidermist is still recovering from a grizzly attack near Fernie, B.C. last October. If he’d been alone, if his son-in-law hadn’t kept his wits about him, if he hadn’t had two loaded guns at the ready, Lloyd has no doubt the outcome would have been different.

“Without my son-in-law, I would have been that guy… that bear would have killed me,” he tells Yahoo Canada News.

The B.C. Conservation Officer Service, RCMP and the coroner are investigating the death on the weekend near Mackenzie, in northern B.C., as a possible black bear attack.

A black bear and a wolf found near the body were shot and killed. The cause of death has not been determined and the man’s identity was not released, but reports say officials suspect a bear.

In his case, Lloyd and his son-in-law, Skeet Podrasky, were heading back to their truck after – unsuccessfully – hunting elk. Lloyd was about six metres ahead and they were talking.

They had no idea that a grizzly den lay in the thick brush just ahead of them on the other side of a hill and they were downwind of the bruin, which meant he had no warning they were coming.

“When that bear attacked me, he was sleeping in his bear bed. He was laying there and he’d come back there for years and years; it was a place he was comfortable,” he recalls.

“He heard me. We were in in his bedroom, is what it was, and he just came to deal with it.”

Startled, the grizzly charged. By the time Lloyd saw him, the bear was six to nine metres away at a full run.

“It wouldn’t have mattered if you would have been the fastest guy in the world,” he says. Bears are fast. “Lightning fast.”

Lloyd had not time to raise his gun. The bear hit him and rolled him onto the ground.

“He was standing on top of me. His paws are on my chest and he’s trying to bite my face. I give him my one hand first – I put my hand in his mouth and he bit that,” he says.

That’s when Podrasky fired his first shot into the bruin. As Lloyd wrestled with the bear on the ground, a second shot hit his flailing leg.

“Now the bear’s been shot and I’ve been shot,” Lloyd says.

Podrasky had one bullet left and shot the bear again. It ran off but returned again, leaving Podrasky enough time to reach his father-in-law and grab his gun. He unloaded that gun, too. The bear charged two more times, bleeding from gunshot wounds.

Lloyd still has bullet fragments in his leg. He’s had a total knee replacement and still uses a walker for now. Just a month ago, an infection had him back in hospital.

“I’m pretty bear aware,” says Lloyd, who guided bear hunts in Saskatchewan and has been a hunter for decades. “There’s no way I could have prevented this. Not a chance.”

Floyd saw the viral video of tourists in Yellowstone Park stopping to take photos as they’re being chased by a mother bear with three cubs.

“It’s crazy,” he says.

British Columbia has one of the highest populations of black bears in the world, with between 120,000 and 150,000 roaming the province, according to Wildsafe BC, a program of the B.C. Conservation Foundation aimed at reducing human-animal conflicts.

Every year, the conservation officer reporting line receives 14,000 to 25,000 calls about bears.

Though vegetation accounts for about 80 per cent of their diet, bears eat fish, rodents, just about any dead animal they come across and sometimes young ungulates like deer or moose. And they can smell food up to a kilometre away.

Bears emerge normally in April from hibernation, hungry and with cubs.

Wildsafe says the primary problem is bears who have become habituated to humans – and their food.

“The bottom line is that habituated bears allow humans to get too close,” says the group’s website. “It is our belief that the best way to avoid conflict is to: keep bears from becoming food-conditioned and from becoming human habituated.”

Lloyd says he will go hunting again, as soon as he’s fully recovered.

“I’m not afraid of them. I respect them,” he says. “Would I get out of a truck and walk down the road where there’s a black bear or a grizzly eating a dead deer on the road? Not a chance.”

Black bear and grizzly are abundant in B.C. and Lloyd believes there will be more frequent attacks as their numbers grow.

“As they get more and more accustomed and not afraid of people, there’s going to be more people who are going to be injured and killed. For sure.”