A three-year-old was lost in the woods of North Carolina for two nights last week. The weather was blustery and freezing as searchers covered ground for three days, finding no sign of the boy, doubtful he could have survived a single night, much less two with temperatures reaching the low twenties.
On Thursday evening, he was found alive, tangled in briars 40 or 50 yards into the woods from a dirt road. He was heard calling for his mother. A rescuer waded through thick brush and standing water and disentangled him, reporting that after being lost for three days, the boy was cold, but verbal, and for the the conditions, he was doing “very well.”
He was discovered not far from home near the small town of Ernul, where he’d wandered off while playing, leaving rescuers to wonder how they could have missed him.
The Craven County Sheriff said, based on the child’s story, “he had a friend in the woods that was a bear that was with him, that was with him for two [days].”
A bear in the woods saving a lost child? When I heard the news, I wondered, could such a thing happen?
The area is known for its black bears. I imagined a boy just out of toddlerhood, lost and scared in the cold, seeking shelter in a hole, a brace of tree roots underground where he could have found a hibernating bear, a warm pool of fur into which to crawl. Its slumber would have been so deep, it may have hardly stirred. Or the bear could have been woken by the incessant wails of a child outside, and pawed its way to the surface in the half-delirium of a mid-winter dream, coddled the child as if it were a woken cub, and herded it back to its den.
In winter, a bear’s heart slows to 14 beats per minute, enough to keep its blood from pooling. It is thought that they don’t dream. As metabolism and body temperature drop, a bear goes from sleep to shallow torpor to hibernation, a continuum that passes below REM sleep.
You can tell a winter bear is hibernating in its den by finding spider webs at the entrance, bits of dirt dangling from threads. They’ll ripple and swing from warm air passing over them, the bear’s breath and the warmth of its body rising through snowbanks.
I’ve climbed into dens just far enough to see, but generally not all the way. I startled a bear in a natural rock shelter in Colorado, practically climbed into its lap when I was looking for refuge during a snowstorm. The space was waist-tall and scalloped deeply into sandstone, and my eyes were unadjusted to the dark. The bear pulled up its head like lifting a boulder and fixed me with two dark eyes that said, clearly, no, not this. I apologized, quickly and audibly, and backed out of the shelter.
If the bear had been able to wake rapidly, coming immediately out of torpor into consciousness, I would have expected at least a wailing groan and a paw swipe. Instead, it struggled to understand what I was.
I’ve seen bears up close when they understand what I am and this was not such a bear. As I departed, I imagined it curling back into itself, puzzled at what just happened, soon to forget.
Another hibernating bear I encountered did not wake. A northern Wisconsin landowner took me to its den at the edge of a field in a copse of cottonwood trees. Spiderwebs wafted at the entrance. I leaned into its cave of roots where I could smell slept-in fur. I crawled down through snow into the dark until the black pad of a hind paw came dimly into view, not curled up tight but relaxed, unfolded, as if the bear had let go of itself.
I didn’t go any farther, but I wondered what would happen if I did. It looked easy to do. I imagined climbing in and threading my fingers through the bear’s fur, burrowing under an arm and into the softness of its chest. If it didn’t wake, I would lie still, feeling for its heartbeat, listening for a huff or snort of a dream.
How the boy survived two nights and evaded searchers all around him can’t be said for sure, but refuge in an occupied bear den is not out of the question. The survival instinct of a three-year-old is not to be underestimated. The boy’s aunt posted on the day he was found, “God sent him a friend to keep him safe.”
God may have sent the boy a bear, an outcome no less than a miracle, the stuff of legends.
The Craven County Sheriff said, “This kid is strong, he was meant to survive, he’s a survivor, he’s got a story to tell.”
I can’t wait to hear his story.
Art with permission: Andrea Lecos
Thank you for this. I’m just in a state of awe over here. I’m a mom. I don’t think he could have lived without some heat source or other living thing. This makes perfect and bizarre sense to me.
As always, well put, but….you will find this narrative recurring many times… child is lost in harsh temperatures and should have died from exposure, child exclaims about something large and hairy that kept them company/warm/dry until puzzled rescuers arrived. The conclusion of many who read and study these narratives, and all the other accounts/evidence of bipedal hominids in NA will tell you, “There was no bear”.
As the news article said, the boy would not have lived without warmth in two nights of 20F weather and he is alive today to tell us his true story.
I am imagining him needing warmth, snuggling into the deep, wooly pile of bear fur strewn with bits of twig and stray, dried out oak-leaf detritus adding a scratch to its embrace, like good daddy’s beard. A new, earthy odor, is rising and falling around him, with each breath, his paw, perhaps, as you said, outstretched, just like good Uncle Al’s when he falls asleep in his chair before bedtime. A cold 3-year-old needing warmth, who is all about personal comfort which informs him of what’s right and what’s wrong. A simpler time. Reasoning is based on sensory-motor stimulation: touch, sight, smell, hearing and taste, appearances and how things happen.
I run from the biting cold to the shelter of a nearby cave. I enter, with difficulty, tripping over rocks, falling, cutting my knee on a rock. A bear is sleeping calmly, hibernating, breathing and quiet, and seems unthreatening, appealing and warm. This cave is warmer, this bear is good; the cold outside is bad. I see, feel, want to be warm. I’m so tired. I fall into the arms of a bear.
Children can and do possess sweet animal nature’s that are unthreatening and fearless, playful, non-competitive. Adults grow into more fear-based behaviors once we learn cause and effect: that bears are larger than us, stronger and can hurt or even kill us. And we are afraid unless we are unconscious. Had the boy been older and known fear, he might have run from the bear and died in the cold of night.
The other alternative might be that Sasquatch harbored him those cold nights.