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Idaho hunter wakes up with head in black bear mouth; survives

Twenty-nine year-old Stephen Vouch did what most of us would surely do in such a predicament — he screamed. That not only woke his hunting companions but it startled the bear, which leapt back, bashing into the tarp Vouch and the other Idaho hunters were sleeping under. The tarp came down on them all, bear included, which naturally created confusion.

“He got a hold of my head, and that’s what woke me up,” Vouch told media. “That’s when I kind of freaked out. That’s when I could hear the bear breathing on me.”

Vouch, from Boise, next heard a shot ring out as one of this friends shot the bear with a .45-caliber handgun, hitting and wounding it. At that point the hunter – the bear – became the hunted. The large beast managed to get up into a nearby tree but it didn’t do itself any good.

Afraid it might come back to finish the job, the human hunter who’d been its victim, Vouch, shot and killed the bear. He had cuts and scraps himself and the medical supplies they’d brought along for the trip did the job until they could get out of the woods three days later. He was treated at a Idaho hospital and released.

Idaho Fish and Game official Jon Rachael said he doesn’t believe the bear was going to chew on the hunter’s head; had that been the case, Rachael said, Vouch would not have had a chance as the bear would have crunched down violently and that would have been that.

He said the bear may have simply been curious and wanted to find out what the ‘fur’ (hair) he saw on the ground was.

Rachael said it’s a tough year for black bears in the Idaho wilderness because drought and an unusually high number of forest fires have destroyed many of the berries they survive upon.

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