Bear Attacks: Their Causes And Avoidance
A short story inspired by Stephen Herrero’s landmark study of the same name
Dani didn’t like the sound of Alaska. It was Tyler’s idea, but Tyler was full of it: Make a fortune in AI, move to Lisbon, become a digital nomad. Mostly, his ideas blew over. So she didn’t see any point in taking a stand about something that was never going to happen.
Then Tyler made a fortune in AI. Not a huge fortune, not Silicon Valley-style mega-millions, but handsome enough from the sale of a software business which had first taken shape in her mother’s spare bedroom.
Come to think of it, she hadn’t believed him before, when he said he was going to quit his IT job and set up his own company. Nor when he said he was taking the brightest and best of DH Medical Diagnostics with him.
But that is what he did.
Now he, Dom, Richard, Tomasz and Aakash worked out of a cheap industrial unit on the old airfield. She and Tyler lived with her mother. Dom, Richard and Tomasz at first shared a flat together but then, when the start-up money ran out, they shared the office, sleeping under their desks and littering the floor with boxes of half-eaten pizza.
Dom, Richard and Tomasz thought of Dani as “Tyler’s Hot Girlfriend”. She knew this because that was how he’d introduced her: “This is my Girlfriend.” Not even: “This is Dani, my girlfriend.”
And Tomasz, who was on the spectrum, said: “This is your Hot Girlfriend?” and the others had laughed, and even Tyler had looked embarrassed. But unlike her he was never embarrassed by anything much, for very long.
All the same, she suspected that if she ever looked inside his phone, she would find her number in H for Hot rather than D for Danuta.
But that was during the first year, when things weren’t going well at the new company. Tyler would come home hyper, bouncing off the walls with unresolved frustration.
It was in this context that she had, if not encouraged exactly, at least gone along with the hiking. On summer weekends they would fling some camping gear into the back of her little Vauxhall Agila and head off to the Moors, or the Dales, or the sea cliffs at Bempton.
And if she didn’t enjoy the midges, or the rain, or the smell of the camp stove, she did take pleasure in seeing Tyler unwind. He didn’t nurse his worries to himself, as she did, but packed them away in the cupboard with his laptop. And for a few days he’d be with her, really with her, as they clambered across stiles or up a steep hill to look at the mountains beyond.
There was pleasure, too, in having something to say on Monday mornings, when her co-workers asked her if she’d had a nice weekend. “Oh yes,” she would say, “Tyler and I went up to Settle.” Just as though they’d stayed at the Golden Lion, and not sat shivering in a tent eating noodles.
As the years passed, Tyler’s business gained clients. Dani hoped this would mean they could stay at the Golden Lion, but what it actually meant was that they owned better camping gear. She didn’t protest: she was half-afraid that if they stayed at the Golden Lion he would bring his laptop, which would ruin everything.
“Tyler,” she whispered one cold night, as the rain hammered down on the fabric above them, “Am I still your Hot Girlfriend?”
She wasn’t feeling it right now, with aching feet, and her period due and her blonde highlights in need of retouching.
“Course,” he said, snuggling up. “You’ll always be my Hot Girlfriend.”
And that was the problem. Years had passed and Tyler seemed to have the life he wanted. He didn’t much care where he lived, and her widowed mother appreciated their company. When she hinted at marriage and children he became evasive.
“Let’s enjoy our youth,” he’d say. “We won’t have it forever.”
But she was almost 30 now and she wanted more. She still looked good. But sometimes when she examined herself naked in the full-length mirror she thought she wasn’t quite the honey she used to be. Whereas he, with his profitable business and his Tesla, was becoming more of a catch all the time.
Dani wished she could talk things over with her mother, but she was afraid that if her mother took up cudgels on her behalf with Tyler, then Tyler would leave.
She could find another boyfriend, maybe, but she wasn’t sure how you did that. Men were always silly around her because of her looks but, until Tyler came along, she’d never had any actual offers. Not ones that were worth considering anyway.
Dani worried that it was because of her height. Her mother said: “No, it’s because you’re too picky.”
She hadn’t thought Tyler’s offer was worth considering. Not at first. Her dad had died, and then Jojo, her spaniel, was hit by a car and had to be put down and she was -- tired. He’d asked her five times to go for a drink with him and when she finally did, just to stop the asking, he viewed their relationship as a done deal. Which it was.
Dom, Richard, Tomasz and Aakash might think of her as the Hot Girlfriend, but what she thought about herself was that she was one half of an oddball couple. She was taller than most women –she had tall genes inherited from her great-grandmother, who’d pitched up in the West at the end of the Second World War from somewhere in Russia.
Whereas Tyler was smaller and slighter than most men, although he made up for it with boundless energy and regular visits to the gym.
A few months after he moved in with her, he confessed that he’d made a list of the six hottest girls at DH Medical Diagnostics and pestered all of them to go out with him, on the grounds that sooner or later one would give in.
Despite his growing eligibility on paper, she didn’t think his seduction technique was capable of advancing any further than this. And maybe that was the secret to their lasting relationship. It was a million-to-one fluke they’d got together in the first place. It was such a miracle that neither of them wished to upset the status quo.
She felt sorry for their baby. They were both in their different ways so socially awkward. But Tyler got round that by ignoring it and bulldozing through.
“If I have a baby,” she thought, “I will really, really love it. As much as it is possible for a baby to be loved, and that will make up for everything.”
In the meantime she’d better keep blonding up her hair. And possibly get her lips done.
Aakash was married, of course. And Tomasz was rumoured to have an online girlfriend in the Philippines, though they’d never actually met each other in real life. But Dom and Richard were still as single as the day they’d first gawped at her. They’d both put on weight and from the puffy look of his face, she thought Dom was on anti-depressants.
She thought she’d be depressed as well if she had nothing in her life except work and video games.
But Tyler played video games too, all night sometimes if the mood was upon him. On the whole being curled up together with just two layers of polycotton blend between themselves and the night sky was better than lying alone in what was still her childhood bedroom, listening to the beeps and muffled yells of intergalactic warfare from his office.
Their mutual love of hiking had become so much a part of themselves, of their relationship and mutual compatibility, that even she half-believed it.
And this is what made Alaska such a tricky proposition. He’d been talking about Alaska for a long time. She wanted to say: “But I hate hiking. Now we’ve got some money at last, why can’t we go somewhere sunny and stay at a luxury hotel?”
But she couldn’t because she’d been silent for too long.
No. She’d sold the pass on the very first night they’d spent under canvas together, when he’d gazed proudly at her as though he owned the twinkling landscape beyond the tent flaps and said: “It’s mint here, isn’t it?”
And she, discreetly trying to rub life back into her frozen toes, had smiled and said: “Yes.”
So Alaska was going to happen now, and the chief objection she had to going with him wasn’t even the cold.
It was bears.
Camping in the British Isles had many hazards – fierce dogs, adders, stampeding herds of cows, filthy, unpredictable weather, aggressive farmers and overgrown footpaths covered in stinging nettles. But what it didn’t have was bears.
Oh, Britain used to have bears. In Roman times. But later on, the bears had been hunted to extinction. There had been no bears recorded in the British wild for at least 1,000 years.
Whereas Alaska had a lot of bears. A very lot. Four, possibly five, different kinds depending how you counted them. But all big, all fierce and all extremely unpredictable as far as human beings were concerned.
Bear Attacks: Their Causes And Avoidance by Stephen Herrero. It was on Tyler’s desk right now. He’d bought it because someone in Palo Alto had told him it was essential reading for their trip.
He hadn’t read it, but she had, discreetly, when he was out — a fact which would have surprised him because she never usually read books. Maths puzzles and painting were more her thing.
The bears played on her mind so much that, untypically, she shared her fears at work. She didn’t get much sympathy.
“I’d rather have a bear in my tent than a man,” said a colleague, who was in the middle of a divorce. “Better house-trained.”
“It’s people you’ve got to worry about,” said someone else. “If you’re eaten by a bear they’ll find your bits all over the place. But that lass from Huddersfield just disappeared.”
There was more, much more, in that gruesome vein. Dani pretended to find their banter amusing but she didn’t think any of it was a laughing matter. If she and Tyler went to Alaska they would be killed by a bear. She knew it like she knew the names of her cousins or the days of the week.
She was filled with grief. Not just for herself and Tyler but for the baby, which would never come into existence and never be loved.
There was a basket of old toys under the bed in the spare room and she went to it now. There he was -- Mr Snowy, a grey and elongated polar bear with chewed ears. Her mother bought it for her after she’d screamed the house down with her first-ever nightmare.
She still remembered her vivid confusion. It was that of a child too young to understand what was a dream and what was real. In the nightmare, which repeated itself occasionally throughout her childhood, there was always a bear coming to get her.
“Look,” said her mother. “Mr Snowy is your power animal. He will protect you.”
Her mother still went through phases when she said stupid things like that. Far too much of the shared housekeeping money, in Dani’s opinion, went on feng shui, and dreamcatchers, and ordering self-published books off Amazon with titles like: The Power Of The Goddess: A Book Of Modern Spells.
Privately, Dani thought her mother would do better to improve her cooking rather than her spells. The unorthodox nature of her daily packed lunches was one of the reasons she’d been bullied so much in school.
Dani put Mr Snowy back in the toy basket. Tyler would be in from the gym soon. He would find sharing his bed with a grubby – and, yes, now she sniffed it – smelly old toy a bit weird.
That night, uncomforted, she dreamt a bear was coming to get her. Tyler, curled up beside her, slept like a log.
Days passed. And then weeks. And then months. Tyler spread maps of Denali National Park and Glacier Bay across her mother’s old Turkmen rug in front of the fireplace, planning the routes they would hike together. Plane tickets were bought and accommodation booked.
She had another anxiety dream. This time she was suckling a child at her breast. But when she looked down she saw that instead of a baby she was holding a hungry bear cub in her arms.
Dani’s mother had travelled a great deal before she met her father on a beach in Goa and settled down. Dani didn’t want to travel. Her heart sank when the US Visa and Immigration Department granted her an ESTA. She’d been hoping that some choice words online about the stupidity of American gun laws had got her banned.
Being British, neither she nor Tyler had ever handled a gun, something she now regretted.
But not even a gunshot wound was guaranteed to stop a grizzly. Her dread gave way to resignation. As she made lists, and packed clothes, and checked over her hiking equipment, she quietly embraced her fate. She felt sorry for her mother because soon she would be living in this big house all alone.
Dani hoped her death, and Tyler’s, would be over quickly, and there wouldn’t be bits all over the place.
Meanwhile, preparations continued. She had a new rucksack which she had never tried. It was a sunny day and she thought that she should test it now, while she could still send it back. Tyler had gone to the match with Dom and wouldn’t be back for hours. Meanwhile, she could hike down the canal path to the transport hub in the centre of town and come back by bus.
She filled her new rucksack with bits and pieces until it weighed as much as she thought it would on the trail. Then she scribbled a note for her mother and Tyler to say where she was going, and set off at a steady pace.
Walking beside the canal, for the first time in ages, she felt peaceful. The regular motion of her body calmed her, and the canal offered up lots of wildlife. It was all very delightful and, except for the occasional dogwalker, she met hardly anybody.
She always stopped to pet the dogs. She’d been ready for a couple of years now to replace Jojo but her mother didn’t want another dog. Her mother was more of a cat person and Jojo had been her father’s pet.
It was strange, as she approached the town centre, how the roads adjacent to the towpath could be so busy, while the path itself was deserted. She was passing under a railway bridge now, and a train clattered overhead.
Beyond the bridge it was even quieter. The canal was lined with old brick warehouses, empty because no-one had any ideas how to redevelop them. The town was no longer a thriving seat of commerce and it was much simpler to rent industrial property on the airfield, as Tyler had.
For the first time she felt uneasy. The path was narrow here – in places just wide enough between the canal and a warehouse to take, in single file, the horses that once pulled the barges. Ahead of her she could see no-one, and behind her she could see only as far back as the railway bridge.
A large man stepped out of the shadows and stood facing her in the middle of the path.
Dani stopped dead. In vain she looked round for his dog. But she knew already there wasn’t going to be one. He wasn’t a dog-lover, that was clear. Instead, he stood and stared directly at her, his eyes oddly wide and fixated, and an expression of unblinking ill-will written on his face.
She glanced back nervously, assessing her options. She couldn’t go forward without squeezing past him, and going back would take her beneath the darkly shadowed railway bridge.
Strapped into her heavy pack she could never outrun him.
He was very big, but childlike. Perhaps she was misunderstanding the situation. She’d always struggled to read other people’s emotions.
Then she saw the knife, bigger than anything her mother used in the kitchen. It was a knife that was up to no good.
She knew now what had happened to the lass from Huddersfield.
Dani discovered that she was rooted to the spot. Without her consent, her body had shut down and wasn’t obeying her commands.
A shrill noise pierced the air. It was herself, screaming.
The man advanced. With the knife. She couldn’t see anything, think of anything, except that awful knife.
Then she heard footsteps behind her. Something shot by, small and fast.
It was Tyler in his running gear. Without slowing down for an instant he hurled himself, full-bodied, at the much bigger man. The momentum, combined with a martial arts move, took them both to the ground.
Then Tyler grunted as the knife entered his chest. He choked, gasped for air and flailed around -- but only succeeded in cutting his hand severely on the blade. The other man rolled out from under him and grabbed him round the neck.
“No!”
She found her legs at last and sprang forward, knowing even as she did so that her effort would be pitiful and he would kill them both.
She smelt it before she saw it – like the stink of a wet dog but a hundred times more pungent. With a pant, and a snarl, and then a great roar like a giant piece of earth-moving equipment starting up, the bear was upon him.
Where the bear had come from, she didn’t know. First it wasn’t there, and then it was. Very much there. Enormously there. Its brown fur filled her field of vision. The only thing she could see of Tyler, as he lay choking up blood on the ground beneath a mountain of bear, was his running shoes.
Now the bear had the big man’s childlike face between its jaws. As he struggled and tried to pull away there was the sound of ripping flesh and crunching bone. The man’s scream became a gurgle and in his final, panic-stricken effort to extract himself he toppled into the canal. Dani stared in horror as he thrashed around for what seemed like an eternity at the centre of a dark and growing stain. Then he went still, face down in the water, and his body began to drift downstream.
“Tyler!”
She lunged forward, determined to save him from the bear. But as suddenly as it had appeared, the bear had gone.
Afterwards, once Tyler had been stabilised and brought back up into the ICU, a police woman took her statement.
“Dani,” she said gently, “You told my colleague that a bear…?”
Dani nodded dumbly and the policewoman decided to pursue the conversation at another time.
When he was conscious enough to give a statement Tyler confirmed to the police that what Dani had told them was correct, and that his assailant had been killed by a bear.
And when the man’s body was fished out of the canal and underwent an autopsy it was grudgingly admitted that the injuries he had sustained were, indeed, compatible with a bear attack.
Of bear DNA there was no sign. Two days in the canal and a delay in testing the towpath had put paid to that.
In the end, the best the police could come up with for the press was that the “bear had escaped from a private collection”. But Dani didn’t believe it. The UK had laws. You couldn’t just keep a bear. And you couldn’t hide one either. Someone else would have noticed a large bear ambling through the town.
Her mother, who spent almost as much time in the hospital by Tyler’s bedside as she did, had a different suggestion.
“It was Imekanu,” she said calmly, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Your great-grandfather’s first wife. She was looking out for you.”
“Oh, Mum,” said Dani, through force of habit. “Don’t.”
She hadn’t minded the newspaper stories. It was the social media that had been awful.
“I’ve always told you that bears were your power animal.”
It was true. Her mother had always told her that bears were her power animal. And Dani had to admit that it made more sense than “escaped from a private collection”. All her strange dreams had meaning now.
“I summoned the bear?”
“Yes. Or she came to you.”
There was an old photograph of Imekanu somewhere. Someone had written on the back in pencil: Dawid and Imekanu, m. Stettin, 1945.
Imekanu was wearing a neat Russian Army uniform but she still looked infinitely wild and strange.
“Nobody knew too much about her,” said her mother. “She died quite soon after they came to the West. Even your grandmother couldn’t really remember her.”
Perhaps I am her, thought Dani. I’m a shaman too.
For many days Tyler was too high on painkillers to think there was anything unusual about the bear. Then he put it aside, as though it was all part of a confused dream. One day she found him sitting up in bed with his laptop, looking miserable. It seemed to Dani that in the past few weeks he’d aged 30 years.
“Alaska trip’s off then,” he croaked, as though he’d only just come to that conclusion. “It’ll be months before my breathing’s right.”
Dani thought that was optimistic. His chest injury had been severe – it had been touch and go.
“We could do something else,” she volunteered.
“Like what?”
“Well – a cruise. One of those small-ship expeditions to the Antarctic. With skidoos and things when we go ashore.”
And we’ll have a nice, warm cabin, she thought. And restaurant meals. With any luck there’ll be an onboard spa.
Another thing about Antarctica was that there were no bears. None at all. The worst she would have to deal with was angry penguins.
Tyler closed his eyes, considering it.
“And then we’ll get married,” said Dani.
Tyler opened his eyes again and examined her, for a long time. He looked like a man who sensed his options were narrowing. Somehow, imperceptibly, the power balance between them had shifted.
“Okay,” he said, finally. “Book it.”
“The cruise or the wedding?”
“Both.”
A thought occurred to him.
“Maybe the captain could do it. At the Halley Research Station. You’d look great in a white expedition suit.”
Dani laughed with happiness. She was no longer afraid that he would leave her. And if he did leave her, she would deal with it. She had summoned a bear, there was nothing she couldn’t do. She could even summon another man if she wanted.
“Aren’t you going to propose to me? I mean, like properly?”
“Yep. And then we’ll move to Lisbon.”
“What?”
“After we’ve got back from our wedding on the Brunt Ice Shelf, we’ll move to Lisbon.” The pain made him slightly tetchy. “Remember? Like we said we would.”
Dani had forgotten that was one of Tyler’s big ideas. But what could she say? Dom’s panic attack outside the stadium meant they’d left early without going in. And when Tyler saw her note on the table he’d put on his sports kit and run to catch up with her, doubling his pace when he heard her screams.
And then he’d launched himself with every fibre of his being at a man with a knife who was twice his size.
“Are there any bears in Portugal?” she asked cautiously.
“One or two,” Tyler admitted.
He put on his problem-solving face while he thought about it.
“But we could get you a dog. One of those enormous Pyrenean Mountain Dogs. It’s barking will keep those pesky bears away.”
“And my mother.. will she?”
“No,” said Tyler firmly. “I mean, she’s great. I’ll miss her. But she’ll be fine here, with her spells and stuff.”
“Propose to me,” said Dani. “Take my hand.”
He did so.
She didn’t want to summon any man she wanted. She wanted Tyler, who never ceased to amaze her.