BEFRIENDED BY BEAR.

Taranaki Central Press, Volume IV, Issue 377, 8 March 1937, Page 6

BEFRIENDED BY BEAR.

FORTNIGHT OF AGONY. AN INJURED COMEDIAN. VANCOUVER, In a mlMion hospital oo( in the tiny fur-trading settlement of Burns L-ake, an English prospector, Arthur Gammon, Iles with a compound fracture of the leg. and endeavours to piece together Incidents covering fourteen days from the time a Jkck-pine he was felling kicked back and crushed his leg on his claim, 60 miles towards the Rookies.

He made a rough splint of- places of timber, bound with his mackinaw, and then started to crawl ten miles to his nearest neighbour. Overtaken by a blizzard, he crawled Into a- small rock cave, aind for five days shared it with a. bear, which at first resented his Intrusion and later trailed him for a week across the snow.

Gammon ate wild berries, and lapped snow with his tongue. On one occasion a cocH spruce partridge alighted near him pecking at the berries. Gammon lay still till the bird came near, and he killed it with a sapling. Tearing the feathers from the bird, he devoured the raw flesh in hurried mouthfuls.

The bear, evidently guided by some instinctive desire to repay man for not being molested in that part of the country by trappers and prospectors, stood by him while a pack of coyotes bayed menacingly near. On the fourteenth day Carl Pierson’s dogfl gave and he set out, gun In hand, only to find Gammon, in a delirious and emaciated condition, drugging him with neat brandy, he s ung him over his shoulders and carried him to Decker Lake, where Indians fashioned a bush stretcher, and carried him to a small trading post, from which he was conveyed to hospital.

Pierson followed Gammon’s tracks to the cave, where he found the bear which, henceforth, will be given special protection, under the quaint unwritten code of {| lP wilderness.