Friday, July 30, 2010

Woman recounts bear attack

One of the survivors of a deadly grizzly bear attack said Thursday she realized her only hope was to play dead after feeling the bear's jaw clamp onto her arm in the middle of the night. "Something woke me up, and a split second later, I felt teeth grinding into my arm," Deb Freele of London, Ontario, said from a Wyoming hospital. "I realized, at that split second, I was being attacked by a bear, but I couldn't see it. "It was behind me and I screamed. I couldn't help it — it's kind of like somebody else was screaming," she told The Associated Press. "And then it bit me harder, and more. It got very aggressive and started to shake me." She kept screaming but then realized that if she didn't do something, she was going to die. "I decided at that point, the only other thing I knew to do was to play dead, and I just went totally limp, got very quiet, didn't make a sound. And a few seconds later, the bear dropped me and walked away," she said. Freele said she couldn't understand why the bear attacked her, because she posed no threat. "If it was something that I had done — if I had walked into a female with cubs, and startled her, and she attacked me — I can understand that," she said. "She was hunting us, with the intention of killing us and eating us." Officials have said the bear will be killed if DNA evidence confirms it was the same one that attacked the victims. Aasheim said the test results were expected by Friday...more

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