Hermit Ken Smith Shares Near-Death Bear Story From His Book

After an attack by a group of drunken men left him for dead and disillusioned, Ken Smith quit his job and spent years traveling and honing his survival skills in the Yukon. Gone from the wilderness of northwest Canada, Smith continued his nomadic lifestyle in Britain before settling in the Scottish Highlands as a “hermit of Loch Treig.” The subject of a film of the same name, Smith is the author of a new book released earlier this week.

Written with Will Millard, The Hermit's Way: My Incredible 40 Years Living in Nature shares Smith's thoughts on why he turned his back on society, how vulnerability increases with age, and how living a life in nature can create a sense of fear — and sometimes of terror. In the following extract from The hermit's path, Smith tells a story related to the latter called “My Best Bear Near Death Story.” (If you ever find yourself in a situation similar to Smith's, here's what to do.)

This happened while I was stopping in Whitehorse, the capital of Yukon, and indulging in one of my favorite financial escapades. I was at the local dump looking for useful items that people had thrown away. Anything that could help me in any way. You wouldn't believe what's thrown out there. Humans are extremely wasteful, but as the old Northern saying goes, “Where there’s mud, there’s brass.”

Over many years of diving, I have found clothing (including brand new boots), cans of food, expired pots and pans, full batteries and piles of electronics; I even found some money. Industrious people with flatbed trucks were going in and out of these places all the time, lifting kitchen appliances, old motors, electrical cables, entire carpets, then making simple repairs or cleaning them before selling them, almost like new.

This particular dump was huge. A large twelve-foot-high fence spanned the perimeter, while bulldozers and backhoes moved inside, managing mountains of trash so tall they towered over you and often blocked the sunlight.

The trick to successful harvesting was to head towards areas freshly dug or piled up by diggers: either the mountains of newly processed treasure, or the craters left in the waste. That fateful day, I was at the bottom of the dump, climbing a hill of trash to get to an area where a new pile had just been created. I was walking along a plateau and I must not have been very far from my destination, when a movement to the left of my makeshift path stopped me dead in my tracks.

My heartbeat danced as my focus was drawn to the source of the movement. I could see a huge mass and brown fur retreating. It wasn't a light show, or a stuffed animal, or a hallucination caused by the stench of the dump. What I was looking at was the giant ass of a simply enormous grizzly bear as it backed up to get out of the hole it had just created in the trash can.

Obviously he was looking for food and, judging by his expression, he hadn't been successful. I stood still, not because of my superior knowledge of avoiding a bear's death, but because I was simply stunned with terror.

We were face to face on the same path, and now the grizzly was moving slowly, but very resolutely, towards me. Obviously, I was in a really difficult situation. I was surrounded by the fence of the dump on all sides, and at twelve feet high, although it seemed theoretically possible for me to scale the fence without getting eaten, I could only do so if I could manage to first to negotiate my way. the labyrinth formed by all the waste from the landfill.

If the bear didn't catch me before I got to the fence, which seemed very likely, it would almost certainly catch me as I tried to climb over it. This adult grizzly bear stretched approximately eight feet in height, from its feet to the tips of its claws. It would rip and bite me as easily as I would pinch an apple from a tree.

This left me with only one credible option for escape. I had to go back the way I came. Return along the plateau to the top of the rubble mountain, then head down the path until I come to the only entrance and exit: the main gate in the fence. It seemed so far away then, but through the fog of catatonic fear I knew that no matter what I did, I couldn't escape.

The bear may have been coming toward me with serious intent, but he wasn't charging at me. Not yet anyway. Since a grizzly bear can sprint up to thirty-five miles an hour whenever it wants, the best chance I had was if the bear maintained its measured walk. This was obviously not a grizzly defending its cubs. This is a much rarer example of a grizzly bear actively engaged in stalking a human. If it got to me, which it absolutely would if I stood still, “playing dead” would quickly result in performance art becoming a terrible reality.

In terms of human-bear interactions, this was the most dangerous position you could be in, with the worst species of bear: a giant adult grizzly bear that had no fear of humans and was very hungry.

As the gap closed between me and the bear, I slowly began to back away. Staying calm in my body language, not making any rapid movements or giving the bear any reason to lunge, while very deliberately moving away and keeping my eyes focused on the animal. Fortunately, as I started to move, the bear's pace did not accelerate and we entered into a curious dance where we maintained a distance between us by adapting the rhythm: me behind, the bear forward . I just had to hope I didn't trip over a pile of trash, otherwise I would definitely be a thing of the past.

It is a curious experience to be confronted with one's total physical vulnerability. Our lifestyle, our technology, our homes and our cars all protect us from our real, weak reality. They create a reassuring gap between today and the days when we all lived in caves and trees. In prehistory, the specter of a very violent death at the hands of a cave hyena, cave hyena, or short-faced bear was omnipresent; but today, most humans, and especially those living in the Western world, can easily go their entire lives without ever realizing how fragile and weak we are, especially when faced with the world's apex predators natural in the broad sense.

It was very ironic that, trapped in this colossal mountain of human engineering, a visual metaphor for all our “progress”, there was nothing within reach that could have repulsed the murderous advances of this bear. Most of the trash I walked through had been created purely for our convenience, improving our lives on the one hand, while degrading the planet's habitats and condemning this bear to hunt the dump for food. somewhere else. I was in a truly pitiful situation. A very intelligent turtle who had forgotten to put on his shell.

Walking backwards, I crossed the plateau and realized that I was going back down the slope. It was my eureka moment. If I kept the gap now, there would soon be a very brief moment when the bear would disappear from view over the top of the hill; the only time in my retirement where I wouldn't be able to see the bear and, more importantly, he wouldn't be able to see me either.

I looked at the bear as I walked. “I can’t see his ankles now,” I whispered. “I can’t see his paws now,” I continued. “I can’t see his stomach…I can’t see his head.”

And in that moment, I broke the golden rule of grizzly bear attack and ran as fast as I had ever run in my life. In Derbyshire parlance, I ran like an absolute fool – straight for the gate and onto the road outside the tip. There I encountered a V-junction cutting around a small wood but, filled with adrenaline and panic, and certain that the bear's breath was hot on my heels, I didn't even deviate from my road. Instead, I ran straight through the woods, straight to the other side, and almost got run over by a truck.

The man slammed on the brakes and blasted me in a rage of smoke and brake pad dust. “There’s a grizzly bear inside!” I shouted back. “GRIZZLY!” he shouted back, his face instantly flipping as he quickly reached down to grab his gun.

This man was armed and ready in a way that suggested he could have waited his entire life for this moment. With one hand on the steering wheel and the other on the trigger of a rifle that looked like it could take down a T. rex, he blasted his truck up to the front door and ran inside.

I was safely back in the human world of false superiority thanks to functional technology, but I didn't hear a gunshot and the bear had already escaped. I had been very lucky, just like the bear. The city dump was no place to die for either of us.