Juneau hunter survives bear mauling

Note to readers: This story contains graphic images of an injury.

A hunter was mauled by a brown bear defending its cub on Admiralty Island in Southeast Alaska last Sunday in an encounter that had her head inside a bear’s jaw, then — miraculously — out again.

Amanda Compton, 44, was hunting black-tailed deer with hunting partner Nicholas Orr on the island 15 miles southwest of Juneau around 11 a.m. on Sunday. They were about an hour and a half into their hunt when they came to a muskeg with a cluster of denser brush, Compton said.

Both hunters were carrying rifles, and Compton said hers was loaded with the safety on.

Compton was paces ahead of Orr when a sow emerged from an island of brush directly in front of them, reared, roared, and charged Compton, Orr said.

“It was like stepping on a landmine,” Orr, 45, said. “You’re just walking along, and then boom, you get ambushed.”

“I probably had two seconds to determine that the bushes were moving and something was coming at me, that it was a bear, and then to seek as much shelter as I could,” Compton said from her home in Juneau, days after the attack. “Which was getting down in a ball and putting my hands and arms over my head and face.”

Both Compton and Orr said what happened next was quick: The sow was on Compton in seconds, had opened its jaw, put her head in its mouth, and gnawed. Then, just as quickly as it started, it released her and ran off. By the time that Orr — who lost his balance stepping backwards during the charge — was on his feet, the bear had let go of Compton and was retreating.

When the bear was 15 feet away, the hunters estimate, it turned around again, and Orr shot at it, scaring it off, they said. Then, Orr said he noticed a cub in a nearby tree.

The hunters did not call for rescue using their inReach phone, in part because Compton was wearing a hat, and the extent of her injuries weren’t obvious, she said. “I had no idea the extent of my injuries, but I did know that I could walk, that I was cognitively unimpaired,” Compton said.

They made the roughly hour and a half trek to Compton’s boat, and Orr drove them back to Juneau, they said. From the dock, a friend picked Compton up and took her for treatment at Bartlett Regional Hospital. She was released from the hospital and home by 7 p.m., she said.

Compton’s injuries include a 6-inch laceration down the crown of her skull, a 4-inch gash at the back of her head, and a puncture on her left hand from the bear’s bite.

Hospital staff removed a 2 millimeter piece of bear tooth that got embedded in her skull, which she kept, she said. They then stapled her head and put stitches in her hand. She said she’s expected to make a full recovery.

“I’m not very spiritual, and I’m not having a big ‘come to Jesus’ moment where I’m saying prayers and writing poems about how happy I am to be alive, but I don’t get it at all,” Compton said. “I don’t get how it would bite my head and just do this superficial, Frankenstein damage. It ripped me up enough to say ‘I can do damage’, but it didn’t cross the line into breaking a bone or anything. It’s so rare to have a bear bite your head and be able to walk out of it and do math problems.”

Alaska Department of Fish and Game area management biologist Carl Koch and Alaska Wildlife Trooper Branden Forst visited Compton in the hospital on Sunday to learn what happened and determine if there was a future safety risk, Koch said.

“It became pretty obvious from the story that it was a surprise encounter with a sow that had cubs and felt defensive of the cubs,” Koch said. “It is a remote location, which reduces the risk to other folks, so once we gathered all the details, there’s no other action we (will) take at this point unless we get other reports of problems with a bear in the area.”

Brown bear attacks on Admiralty Island are rare, according to the area management biologist who oversees the region that includes Admiralty Island, Stephen Bethune. The island that has among the highest concentrations of brown bears in North America, about one per 1,700 square miles, he said.

Fish and Game sees an average of less than one mauling per year, said Bethune. About 1,100 hunters reported hunting on Admiralty Island annually over the last five years, according to the department’s data. Nearly 70% of them reported hunting in November through January, when bears are likely to be denning, he said.

Bethune said that most bear attacks, like this one, are what biologists call “defensive encounters,” where a bear is trying to eliminate what it perceives as a threat. The last mauling he remembers on Admiralty Island was a fatal attack in 2018, where a Greens Creek mine employee was killed by a sow with two cubs.

As far as bear attacks go, Koch said Compton’s went about as good as it could have.

“She did exactly what we’d tell somebody to do,” Koch said of Compton’s actions during the mauling. “These things happen so quickly. People are sneaking through the woods and surprise a bear, and everyone is equally as surprised. If (a bear) feels threatened, the best thing you can do is act non-threateningly: get on the ground, cover yourself up. After some time, the sow gave up.”

For Compton and Orr, who have been hunting together for close to a decade on Admiralty Island, Sunday’s encounter wasn’t their first, or only, experience with a bear — they say they’ve had other bear encounters on the island — but it was their closest and hopefully their last.

Compton said she won’t stop hunting, though likely in open areas, to eliminate another chance of a surprise encounter.

“I don’t think this will deter me that much,” Compton said. “I think this situation was so freak.”