Terror in paradise

AARON SPITZER

IQALUIT — Eric Fortier used a pocketknife to fight off a polar bear that was trying to kill his friends last week.

But when someone suggests that the soft-spoken, bespectacled 32-year-old is a hero, he stares at the floor and shakes his head.

Patricia Doyon begs to differ.

“You probably saved our lives,” she says, her voice shaking. “You have a choice to consider yourself a hero or not, but I’m pretty sure you saved our lives.”

Doyon, 25, was speaking to Fortier on Saturday in a TV lounge at Iqaluit’s Baffin Regional Hospital, where she was recovering from the claw wounds she’d suffered the day before.

The bear was on top of Doyon, slashing her head, back and thigh, when Fortier rushed up and stabbed it twice in the neck with a 10-centimetre-long blade. The knife drew blood, and the bear backed off and lumbered away.

Moments before, the bear also mauled Alain Parenteau, 31, gashing and biting him and nearly severing his jugular vein.

Now, sitting in the hospital lounge, an IV-bottle drips fluid into Parenteau’s arm. Both he and Doyon wear bandages to cover the stitches that closed their wounds.

All four campers appear glassy-eyed, weary and stunned as they recount their ordeal.

The attack came in the early morning of July 27 on Soper Lake, about 15 kilometres from Kimmirut.

Fortier, Doyon, Parenteau and Anne Dumouchel, 33, were asleep in two tents, resting up for what was supposed to be the last day of a week-long canoe trip down the Soper River, which flows through Katannilik Territorial Park.

All four are medical professionals from the Gatineau region of Quebec. All but Doyon has extensive outdoor experience. They’d been planning the trip for six months.

They said the bear first approached Fortier and Dumouchel’s tent, rousing them from their sleep.

“I felt something pushing against the wall of the tent — something pushing against my feet,” Fortier said. “I had no idea what the hell it was. I pushed it away, and that’s when it kind of scratched the roof of the tent.”

That’s when the two began screaming.

The screams sent the bear toward the other tent. Doyon and Parenteau awoke and saw the animal coming.

The bear appeared huge. When it stood on all fours, its head was five feet off the ground. It moved silently and gave no warning of its attack, they said.

Within seconds it ripped open the end of the tent. The campers fled out the side door.

“I think we didn’t have time to go out completely because the bear grabbed Alain,” Doyon said.

As the bear tore into him, Parenteau lay on his back, protecting himself with his feet and trying to wriggle away. The animal slashed him repeatedly and, according to doctors, probably bit his left thigh.

A claw carved a hole in his neck only an inch from his jugular vein, and his T-shirt became shredded and blood-soaked.

“I knew that I was injured,” Parenteau said. “But I didn’t know how much.”
The other three stood close by, yelling at the bear and lobbing rocks at it.

In less than a minute it was off Parenteau and heading for Doyon.

“It just threw me on the ground,” Doyon said. “That’s the only thing I can remember. I tried to escape and I just heard Anne screaming to roll up into a ball.”

That’s when Fortier, standing beside the bear, began stabbing his knife at its throat.
The blade, he said, was barely bigger than that of a Swiss Army knife, but it drew blood. The animal stopped mauling Doyon and strolled off down the lakeshore.

The attack lasted less than five minutes.

But the campers’ problems were far from over.

Doyon and Parenteau were di y and bloodied. And all four were terrified that the bear would return to finish what it had begun.

“I don’t think we were thinking of anything,” Doyon said. “We were just thinking of getting out of there.”

They threw their gear in the canoes and pushed off toward Kimmirut. Within minutes it became clear that Doyon and Parenteau were too weak to paddle, so the campers lashed the canoes together and Fortier and Dumouchel did the work.

Parenteau lay in the boat, shivering. He was clearly the most severely injured. “I saw Alain had big wounds,” Dumouchel said. “But I didn’t see any flowing blood. Just leaking blood. We were speaking to him and he was responding enough to reassure us.”

All four kept an eye on the lakeshore and the water, fearing that the bear might follow them.

By 7:30 a.m. they reached Kimmirut, and soon they were at the community nursing station awaiting a medevac flight to Iqaluit.

It was in the nursing station, Parenteau said, that he first began to feel the pain.

By that afternoon he was in surgery at the Baffin Regional Hospital.

“I can’t say I’m lucky to get a polar bear in my tent,” he said. “But in these conditions, it could have been worse. It could have been much worse.”

Doctors said Parenteau may be left with decreased feeling where the bear clawed his scalp. Save for some scars, Doyon is expected to make a full recovery.

The campers returned south on Sunday.

Katannilik Park was closed over the weekend while wildlife officers searched for the bear. The animal was not located and the park reopened Wednesday.

The mauling was the first involving a polar bear in Canada this year. Two years ago, a 64-year-old Baker Lake woman was killed by a polar bear on the shores of Hudson Bay near Rankin Inlet.