Grizzly sow attack interrupts quiet morning of mushroom picking

CINTHIA RITCHIE

June 26, 2008 at 1:58PM AKST

It’s been one week since 54-year-old Jenne Danzl’s harrowing bear attack, and she isn’t lying in a hospital bed or resting on the couch.

She’s serving homemade strawberry rhubarb and green tomato pies to her boyfriend Roger Long, whose 67th birthday falls the next day on the solstice.

After the pie is served (“Try the green tomato,” she says. “It tastes like apple but better.”) Danzl, Long and friend Joanie Merritt move to the living room. With the dog curled cozily in her lap, it’s difficult to imagine that seven days ago a grizzly’s teeth were bearing down upon her ribs.

But that’s exactly what happened.

It began the morning of June 13, when she and Long decided to hunt morel mushrooms out by Skilak Lake. It was, she says, a typical day. They got up early, had breakfast, drove over, put up the camper and unloaded the trailer. After they beached the boat on the opposite side of the lake, they started walking through the burned out vegetation paralleling the lake.

“I’m always yak, yak, yakking,” Danzl says. “But this time I was concentrating on mushrooms and wasn’t talking nearly as much.”

“You have to know that the moss is like walking in really nice carpet,” Longs says. “You don’t snap twigs or make a sound.”

Danzl was about 20 yards behind Long when she noticed the bear scat.  

“And I said, ‘Oh Roger, this is a really fresh pile of scat.’ And Roger joked, ‘Why don’t you taste it and see how fresh it is?’”

Danzl joked back that she’d pass, and that’s when she heard the three woofing grunts. Seconds later a sow charged.

“My first thought was to run, but I knew I wasn’t supposed to run, so I threw up my hands and was waving my paper bag and yelling,” she said. “I thought I was being authoritative.”

Danzl dropped down, covered her head with her arm and assumed a fetal position.

“She was standing up and she came down and straddled me, and her one claw got my arm and grazed it. Then she bit me on the side.”

The sow bit her again, harder this time, on the rear end.

“I thought, oh, that hurt really bad. I hope she hurries up and kills me fast.”
She didn’t move. She waited.

“About five years ago I had a car accident and almost died,” she says. “What I thought at the time was ‘I wish I had my will done.’ This time I thought, ‘I think she’s going to eat me but I’m glad I have my will done.’”

Nothing happened. Danzl waited longer.

“I thought, ‘Oh, I’m going to rise up and she’s going to bite me in the neck,’” she says.

Then she noticed Long screaming and waving a stick. The sow had moved away, accompanied by a couple of older cubs — Long estimates they were about 2 years old.

He ran up to Danzl, afraid she might be dead.

“Oh, you should have seen the look on his face,” Danzl says. “If I ever had any doubt that he cared about me, I don’t anymore. The look on his face!”

He asked if she was OK. She said she had been bitten twice and needed a hug. He told her they had to get out of there.

“And I said, ‘No, I need a hug,’” Danzl says with a laugh.

Danzl was taken to Central Peninsula Hospital where she underwent six hours of wound cleaning.

“They used almost five yards to gauze to fill the holes,” Long says.

A week later, the wounds are in the process of healing but still have to be dressed once a day.

“It’s stings, it’s uncomfortable and it hurts,” she says.

Still, Danzl doesn’t blame the bear.

“She was doing what she had to do,” she says. “It was me, not making enough noise.

I almost always talk.”

Long also blames himself. He had become complacent, he says. He used to carry a side-arm but stopped.

Things happen, Danzl says with a shrug. The bear attack was traumatic and emotional but that’s just part of life.

“Someone asked me, ‘Are you going to hunt for morels again? I’ll bet you’ll never go in the woods again.’”

She and Long laugh — they have plans to pick morels the following day, but in a less remote area.

“I live every day to its fullest,” she says. “That’s what I was doing that day. If I had died, it would have been doing something that made me happy.”

Cinthia Ritchie can be reached at (907) 342-2428 or toll free at (800) 770-9830, ext. 428.