During almost every human-bear encounter, the bear just wants to leave or, at worst, might attack because it’s startled, agitated or defending its cubs.
In the most terrifying and extremely rare cases, a bear sizes a person up as a possible meal.
California resident Ryan Lutes believes he had a predatory encounter with a female brown bear in Sitka, Alaska, during the first week of June.
He told Cowboy State Daily that he credits confidence and bold action for coming out of the encounter unscathed.
Lutes said he encountered the bear near a raptor center along the trails.
He approached the center but discovered it was closed.
Needing to answer nature’s call, he entered some thick cover at the end of an abandoned road.
“It looked like a good place to take a leak,” he said. “I was just finishing buckling my pants back up when I heard the unmistakable crunching of leaves that I knew could come only from the weight of a bear or human.”
He said the bear almost immediately locked eyes with him.
“The second she made eye contact with me, I knew I had to plant my ass,” standing firm and not appearing weak, he said.
And he started taking video with his cellphone.
Lutes said he and the bear went through an intense back-and-forth for at least several minutes.
At one point the bear charged, and he dropped his phone. When he scared the bear back by shouting at it, he picked up his phone and started taking video again.
At another point, the bear “got down on her belly with her head away from me, like a dog,” and he thought he’d finally established dominance over it.
But then, “she popped back up like a jack-in-the-box,” and the standoff began all over again.
Lutes said he was pumped full of adrenaline and not particularly proud of “some of the language I was using in those videos.”
Eventually, the bear “stuck its head in some brush” as if it had lost interest in him, and Lutes left quickly.
He said he learned later that the bear’s two juvenile cubs might have been shot while trying to kill goats with her, and so she might have been “angry” toward people.
