During a cold night on Nov. 1, 2013, 30-year-old Erin A. Greene from Dollard-des-Ormeaux, Quebec, was walking in a neighborhood with two friends to their temporary residence in Churchill, Manitoba, following an all-night Halloween party. The group were walking across a street in the dark when from behind them a 275-pound, adolescent polar bear swiftly approached them.
Although polar bears were not uncommon in the town as they migrated through the area during that time of year, fatal attacks were rare, numbering two during the past 45 years. Residents of the town often carried flare-launching devices called “bear bangers,” which were meant to scare an approaching bear away.
One of Greene’s friends spotted the bear and told them to run.
“We looked over and saw it running at us,” Greene said in an interview with CBC. “First instinct was to run…but it was so quick. It was a matter of seconds.”
The friend tripped on the ground as the polar bear chased them, but passed her by with its sights set on Greene.
“I knew he was going to get me. I pretty much knew the moment I saw him running that it was a lost cause to run.”
She stopped to brace for an attack as the bear stood on its hind legs and clamped its jaw on the back of her head.
“Within seconds of seeing him, he was already on my head, scratching at me, biting my head and pulling.”
The friend who fell regained her footing and continued to run, while the other friend became frozen with fear.
The bear pushed its front paws on Greene’s shoulders as she tried to throw her fist over her head in an attempt to punch the bear in the nose. She kicked at the bear to try to get it off her and the bear dropped her briefly.
Greene fell to the ground and she tried to wrap her arms around her head, but the bear resumed its attack. It bit her about the head, thrashing her body back and forth.
Greene told reporters that she had little hope for rescue.
“I thought, like, somebody has to come out, but it was early morning,” Greene said. “I just thought I was going to keep screaming and hopefully somebody was going to call bear patrol or get someone to help.”
In one of the neighboring houses south of the scene, 69-year-old William Ayotte, a retired water treatment plant operator, was watching television when he heard the attack. Ayotte opened his front door and witnessed the bear on its haunches with Greene’s head in its mouth, shaking her body.
“I thought to myself, ‘I’ve got no weapon or anything,’” Ayotte recounted in an article by David Hochman from AARP.
Ayotte yelled at the bear, but it was undeterred.
“Then I saw my shovel sitting there and found myself going to get it. Once I picked it up, I thought, ‘Well, am I going to do anything, or is that woman going to die?’”
He then moved toward the bear after grabbing his snow shovel and swung it over his shoulder to strike the bear, hard, about the face. The bear then released its grasp of Greene, allowing her to flee into Ayotte’s home and call 911.
As Ayotte attempted to retreat to his home, the bear turned its ferocity onto him and grasped his left leg with his front paws. Ayotte fell to the ground and lost his glasses as the bear began to maul him. It bit and clawed at his face, then pounced on his chest.
By then, neighbors had awoken and, from their porches, attempted to scare the bear away. One neighbor, who was a police officer, discharged his pistol into the air while a 16-year-old neighbor fired a bear banger several times.
A third neighbor, an 18-year-old male, fired several rounds of birdshot from a shotgun at the bear and struck it multiple times from a distance, but the small rounds did not penetrate the bear’s thick skin and failed to stop its attack. The 18-year-old then started his pickup truck, drove toward Ayotte while flashing the vehicle’s lights, and honking its horn. The bear released Ayotte before it fled just as conservation officers were arriving. The officers later shot and killed it.
Neighbors placed Ayotte in the bed of the pickup and took him to the hospital. An ambulance arrived minutes later and took Greene to the hospital. Both Ayotte and Greene were airlifted several hours later to another hospital, where Greene was held for 24 hours for treatment.
Greene was diagnosed with a concussion and treated for puncture wounds to her shoulder, and a torn scalp and ear. She also had claw tears on her knees and abdomen. Although she nearly recovered at the time of the Hero Fund’s investigation, she still suffered from a compressed spine and pain in her knees and her shoulders from the bear shaking her.
Ayotte was in the hospital for a week for treatment of his injuries and surgery to reattach his nearly torn-off ear. He also suffered from lacerations to his eyelid, face, and scalp, which included a laceration 7 inches long; bite marks to his right shoulder and chest; and lesser abrasions and lacerations to his torso and thigh. He fully recovered.
According to the Canadian Geographic, the first thing Ayotte asked an attending nurse was, “Was I able to save the woman?”
“She’s in the next room,” the nurse said. “They’re going to release her tonight.”
When asked by CBC about Ayotte’s involvement, Greene was quick to recognize that if he had not grabbed his shovel and intervened, she would have surely died.
“I would be dead, yeah,” she said. “Because even seconds more with an animal of that magnitude…one swipe could pretty much take your head off. He was just a young bear. Just a couple more seconds and he would have got it right.”
She then shared her heartfelt gratitude for the man who saved her.
“Thank you will never be enough. He gave me life. It’s the most remarkable thing a person can do – risk his life for another human being, a stranger!”
Ayotte was recognized for his bravery with the Carnegie Medal in September 2015, along with receiving the Canadian Star of Courage from Governor-General David Johnston, and was inducted into the Order of Buffalo Hunt in 2014. Ayotte echoed the response by many Carnegie heroes to being called a hero.
“I never saw myself as a hero and still don’t. You’re dealt a situation, and you either respond or you don’t do anything,” Ayotte said. “The only thing I could think was, ‘If I don’t do anything, she’s not going to make it.’”
Greene has since remained in Churchill and done everything she can to move on from the traumatic events of that day.
“Most of my friends and family think I’m crazy that I still live here after being attacked by a bear,” said Greene . “But I didn’t want my last memory of Churchill to be something horrific and terrifying.”
Greene felt an obligation to stay and honor neighbors like Ayotte.
“I want to live in the same place he does,” she said. “I want to impress him all the time and I want him to be proud of me. I want him to know he saved a good human being.”
Greene works four different jobs in Churchill as the manager of a gift shop, yoga teacher, and serves as an “unofficial dog walker.” Most significantly, she leads paddle boarding tours in the summer for tourists to see beluga whales, which helps in moving past the trauma of the attack and hopes to spread environmental awareness, she said.
“I had a lot of work to do on myself to move through that and to feel comfortable in the place that I call home now,” she said to the Associated Press. “The whales were part of that process of moving through the various stages of dealing with trauma.”
— Griffin Erdely, Communications Assistant