On Sunday morning of last week, Lynn O’Connor took her two dogs and her neighbour’s dog for a walk, as she often does, on her rural property near Washington state’s Kettle Falls. The dogs took off, chasing something in the distance, but she couldn’t quite see what.
“I thought it was cows,” she told Daybreak South host Chris Walker.
It was not cows.
It was a black bear. And she was about two metres away from it.
“She was coming at me swiping and huffing, and she had her shoulders really big and her head kind of low to the ground,” O’Connor said.
The first thing that came to mind? A CBC Radio story she heard about a man who punched a bear he was squared off against.
“So I punched her,” said O’Connor, 63. “I’ve got scars on my knuckles to show it. I think I got three good punches in.”
But the bear was mad, O’Connor said, and it kept coming.
“There was that moment of clarity where an attack was imminent, so I dropped to the ground and rolled into a ball.”
The bear scratched and bruised her. O’Connor said she needed 18 staples in her head to seal up a wound.
It wasn’t until the three dogs, Sunshine, a two-year-old Aussie cross, Kodiak, a six-year-old Newfoundland Pyrenees and Griff, a two-year-old golden poodle cross, chased the bear away that the attack ended. O’Connor figures the whole encounter only lasted a few seconds.
When she got back on her feet, O’Connor noticed a bear cub running across a field and presumed the bear she came in contact with was its mother.
“I thought, ‘OK, well, that explains everything.'”
She found her cellphone in some dirt on the trail and called her family for help. They, in turn, called 911.
The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) confirmed in a statement that on Sept. 1 it received a report of a black bear “incident” in Ferry County. The department said the female victim was treated at a Spokane hospital that day.
In its statement, WDFW said the following day, its officers and other wildlife specialists located and killed a 54-kilogram black bear in the area.
While the team thought the bear was a female at the time it was killed, they later learned it was male.
“The team made additional efforts to locate the female black bear. Those efforts were unsuccessful, and the operations were suspended at the landowner’s request. Officers donated the black bear meat to the U.S. Air Force.”
O’Connor continues to recover from her injuries at home.
What to do when you come across a bear
While CBC has shared multiple stories of people punching bears in tight situations, Canadian officials say the best way to handle a bear attack is to avoid an encounter altogether by making noise near streams, berry patches and other areas bears may frequent. It also says people should travel in groups and use officially marked paths. The federal agency also suggests carrying bear spray.
O’Connor said she asked WDFW officials if she made a mistake throwing fists at the bear.
“They said no, especially with a black bear,” she said. “Most of the time, they will back off. There was no way to run.”
According to WDFW, if a black bear walks toward you, you should stand up, wave your hands above your head and speak in a low voice. If you have bear spray, get it out.
If you don’t have time to move away from the bear, continue making noise to try to scare it away.
The department says you should not run from the bear or climb a tree.
And if a bear does attack you, WDFW says you should “fight back aggressively using your hands, feet, legs and any object you can reach.”