Two Juneau residents hunting on Admiralty Island at the end of September ended up face-to-face with a brown bear. Luckily, everyone walked away from the encounter – but not without some battle scars.
Amanda Compton and her friend Nicholas Orr have been hunting together for years. Last weekend on Sept. 29, they took Compton’s boat to Glass Peninsula on Admiralty Island, across from Port Snettisham.
A few miles into their deer hunt, they were walking single file through open muskeg with Compton in the front. As they stopped by a grove of trees, a brown bear rushed them without warning.
“I would say it was two seconds of seeing the bear, seeing and registering that it was charging full force for me, and also determining that I had no time to pull a shot off,” Compton said.
The bear was on Compton immediately. It grabbed her head in its jaws and shook her for several seconds – it’s hard to know exactly how long it lasted.
“I was lucid through the whole thing,” she said. “There just wasn’t enough time to be terrorized.”
Then, just as quickly, the bear released her and moved away. But it didn’t leave. It watched from several yards away. Orr had fallen to the ground when the bear charged, but managed to get back to his feet.
“By the time I got one loaded, the bear turned around and I shot and then it ran off,” Orr said.
He’s not sure if he hit the bear, but he’s convinced he was the original target when it started charging. Compton was closer.
When the bear ran back into the trees, they noticed a cub for the first time.
Meanwhile, Compton’s head was bleeding – a lot. Her hand was also injured. But she could walk and her mind felt pretty clear. She just couldn’t believe she was alive.
“I just didn’t anticipate that having a large brown bear on me would do anything but the most extensive damage,” she said.
Though they had a radio, Compton and Orr decided to hike back out to the boat instead of call for help. In retrospect, she admits that may not have been the best call.
“I didn’t know the extent of her injuries at the time,” Orr said. “I just saw the superficial one up front, and I was like, ‘Well, maybe you got lucky on this one, and it just got your hand.’ But no, it got her more than that.”
After more than an hour, they made it back to her boat. On their way back to town, the Coast Guard showed up for an unannounced vessel inspection. They radioed their situation and the Coast Guard vessel ended up accompanying them to Douglas Boat Harbor, where a friend met them to take Compton to the hospital.
At Bartlett Regional Hospital, doctors cleaned and stapled gashes in Compton’s scalp. She also received a few stitches, an x-ray and a CT scan. Her hand is in a brace, and she doesn’t have full use of it yet.
“I’ve got my Halloween costume put together early,” Compton said. “I look like a hybrid between Chucky and Frankenstein right now.”
The sow also left something behind – a shard of tooth was embedded in Compton’s scalp.
Even with her injuries, she knows she’s lucky.
“It is more amazing to me that it literally gnawed on my head and used its paws and teeth to the point where it got a piece of tooth stuck in my head. And I, with the exception of a few staples, don’t have much to show for it,” she said.
This wasn’t Compton and Orr’s first close encounter with a bear on Admiralty. A few years ago, they were deer hunting in early November. Usually by that time of year, most of the bears are settling down for winter. But Compton says it had been a bad salmon and berry year.
But on that day, a predatory bear approached them, coming within 10 feet before Compton fired a warning shot to scare it off.
Even as an active outdoorsman, she can’t believe she’s had two extremely close calls with brown bears in the span of a few years.
“There are people that hunt way harder than I do that have been in Juneau for eight times as long as I have, and have never had something remotely close to this happen,” she said.
Still, both Compton and Orr feel like there’s nothing they could have done to avoid the situation. Alaska Department of Fish and Game Wildlife Biologist Carl Koch agrees.
“They’re doing what hunters do, and they surprised a bear,” he said. “It sounded like [it was] very close by, too close to to use a deterrent. So, yeah, I’m not judging anything that they did.”
Koch said Admiralty is home to some of the highest concentrations of brown bears in the world. And this time of year is when they’re especially active as they prepare for hibernation.
“If you think about all the hunters that are out on the landscape and how uncommon something like this is, it’s reassuring,” Koch said.
In this case, the bear was able to walk away from the encounter. But Koch said when a bear is killed, Alaska Wildlife Troopers will investigate to make sure the death was legal. The people involved are required to skin the animal and provide the hide and skull to Fish and Game for inspection.
Orr said their encounter comes down to bad luck. He’s been to that area and many others on Admiralty countless times without issue.
“If we had gone to the lower part of the muskeg instead of the middle, we would have walked right by it,” he said.
Orr said he’ll be back out hunting later this fall. For now, Compton isn’t in any rush to head back into brown bear territory.
“I feel like I’ve had my fair share of brown bear encounters, and I really — I don’t need anymore,” she said. “Am I going to take up knitting and like, I don’t know, painting rocks? Probably not.”
It’s going to take some time for her to heal and to process what happened. She still has the tiny shard of tooth. Maybe, she says, she’ll put it in a locket.
