ANCHORAGE, Alaska – An Alaska woman was terrified of a lifetime when she used an outdoor room in the hinterland and was attacked from below by a bear.
“I climbed out of there and sat on the toilet and immediately bit something in my butt when I sat down,” Shannon Stevens told The Associated Press on Thursday. “I jumped up and screamed when it happened.”
Stevens, her brother Erik and his girlfriend took snowmobiles to the wilderness on February 13 to stay at his yurt, about 20 miles northwest of Haines, in southeast Alaska.
Her brother heard the screams and went out to the outside room, about 150 yards from the yurt. There he found Shannon was prone to her wound. At first they thought she had been bitten by a squirrel or a mink, or something small.
‘I close the lid as fast as I can. I said, ‘There’s a bear down there, we need to get out of here now,’ ‘he said. “And we run back to the yurt as fast as we can.”
When they were safely inside again, they treated Shannon with a first aid kit. They determined it was not that serious, but they would go to Haines if it got worse.
“It bled, but it wasn’t very bad,” Shannon said.
The next morning, they found carrier tracks all over the property, but the bear left the area. “You can see them over the snow, coming towards the outside,” she said.
They think the bear came inside the outside room through an opening at the bottom of the back door.
“I expect it’s probably not that bad of a small pit in the winter,” Shannon said.
Carl Koch, Alaska’s Department of Fisheries and Wildlife Management, suspects it was a black bear, based on photos of the tracks he saw and the fact that a neighbor who lived about half a mile there spent two days sent her a photo of a black bear. later.
That homeowner yells at the bear, but he does not respond. It did not approach her either, but struggled over matters, as if in a hibernation mode.
Even though it’s winter, Koch said they’re through calls all year to be bears.
And 2020 was a record year for common bear problems in the Haines area. The reasons for this, he said, could be that it was a poor salmon year, combined with a mediocre berry harvest. “It is also possible that a bear cannot put on enough fat when it goes into the pit, so that they can leave more or less frequently or earlier,” he said.
Koch suspects Shannon’s wound was caused by the bear swarming with a paw on her rather than being bitten. Either way, the location is perhaps a first.
“What restrains her if you sit down in the winter, she may be the only person on earth I have ever been able to overcome,” Koch said.
No matter the season, Erik says he will take bear spray with him all the time if he goes to the country, and Shannon plans to change one behavior as well.
“I’m just going to look at the toilet better before I sit down,” she says.