A DAD shared the terrifying story of how his face was torn off by a grizzly bear while on a hunting trip.
Jeremy Evans, 39, was hunting alone in the remote Alberta Rockies, Canada, in 2017 when he was viciously mauled by a bear – leaving him with such severe injuries that he considered ending his life.
Within hours of arriving on August 24, the dad-of-one found himself slumped on the ground, critically injured and barely conscious.
A bear had torn off Jeremy’s face in “one fell swoop” and chewed on his head “like a dog gnawing on a bone”, as he previously told The Sun.
Describing the immediate aftermath of the attack, Jeremy said in March of last year: “I found a piece of flesh with a little bit of bristles on there, and some soft spot which was part of my moustache.
“Then I found another larger chunk that felt like hard cartilage. This was a piece of my ear and a piece of my scalp. So I picked that up off the ground.
“I was sitting there holding a piece of my face, I knew I wasn’t going to make it, and there were a couple of options.
“Do I try to endure the unendurable? Do I just like I didn’t let things happen? Or do I end it on my terms?
“So I loaded up my rifle, and I place one against the ground, and I put my chin on the barrel, and I pulled the trigger.”
The attack began when Jeremy, an experienced hunter, spotted some sheep and sat quietly to observe them.
A female bear, protecting her cub nearby, charged at him unexpectedly before he could grab his weapon.
The dad had “just half a second to react” and immediately fought back, hitting the bear with his backpack and smashing it in the face.
Jeremy said: “I remember seeing her teeth sink into my hand, and I could feel it separating the bones.”
After scrambling up a tree for safety, he was dragged back down and continued to be attacked.
He said: “She came in with her mouth and bit me right on the left side below my ribs, but above my hips.
“She picked me up and shook me like a rag doll and threw me on the ground.
“Then before I can even take a breath and curl up in a ball she bit me on the left side of the face.
“When she crunched down she removed the whole left side of my face in one fell swoop.”
Eventually, after a violent struggle, Jeremy managed to fight off the bear by targeting its underbelly.
He explained: “She made a horrible sound and started bucking like a bronco and squealing like a pig.
“I let go, and she ran away defecating across the mountainside.”
But unfortunately, the hunter’s nightmare didn’t end there – things were about to get even worse.
He suddenly heard the sound of ice breaking and realised the bear had come back.
She grabbed him “by the back of the head” and started dragging him around 1,000ft across the ground before stopping.
“She reached over and caught me on the bottom corner of the left side of my face and she peeled all the way across, removing all the skin off my face all the way through my head to my ear,” he said.
Jeremy found the bear’s soft underbelly once again and squeezed with all his strength.
The bear, startled, released him and ran off across the mountain, leaving Jeremy’s battered body slumped on the ground.
At this point, Jeremy felt a strange “calm feeling” as he resigned himself to the reality that he might not survive.
He said: “I started picking pieces of my face off the ground. I knew that this was it. I wasn’t gonna make it very far.
“I was bleeding out of my face, my hands, my left side, my legs the blood was just pouring out.
“I was sitting there thinking, this is it. This is the end. When I came to that realisation things slowed down and I got really calm.”
Jeremy made the decision to end his own life, loaded his rifle and pulled the trigger. But it didn’t fire.
As he tried to reload, the gun went off and missed his face by just “inches”.
This gave him the courage to walk down the mountain and “make it somewhere where they’re going to find the body” to give his wife closure.
He said: “I made it maybe 15ft down there, and I fell into the drainage and rolled about 200ft down to the bottom to a creek and I was laying there, tangled in the rocks and just face down in an excruciating amount of pain.”
Jeremy then sent goodbye messages to his family and played music to calm his thoughts.
The first song that played was the baby shark song he used to put his daughter to sleep the night before.
This gave the severely injured hunter “inspiration” to keep going.
Eventually, Jeremy reached a campsite, where he found a notebook and wrote a message to his wife, Joyce.
After hours of lying on the ground with alarms set to keep himself awake, he decided he had to keep moving and find his vehicle.
Against all odds, he made it to his car and drove 22 kilometres to a resort, where he was able to get medical help.
When he arrived, his injuries were so severe that a child mistook him for someone dressed as a “zombie” for a prank.
He was airlifted to the hospital and underwent five major surgeries to treat his injuries, two of which lasted up to 13 hours to try and salvage some of his face, along with 15 minor ones.
Jeremy spent five weeks recovering in the hospital, but the trauma of the attack remained with him.
He later faced a long battle with PTSD , triggered by everyday sounds or smells that reminded him of the attack.
Jeremy documented his experience in a book titled Mauled and hopes to raise $5 million in funds for PTSD research.
