“He was looking me straight in the face, I could see his big brown eyes and all the flies swarming around his head. I said ‘oh my God, this is it.’”
Gardner Moores, of Red Bay, was sitting on the marsh picking bakeapples when he was alerted to a movement behind him.
About 25 feet away stood a huge black bear on its hind legs.
“I didn’t panic,” he said.
“I think I said something like ‘get outta here’ but he didn’t, he just went down on his two front paws and started walking towards me. I picked up my berry buckets and started walking at a very fast pace.
“When I looked behind me the bear was still following me. I remembered I had two bars in my pocket and I tossed one of them over my shoulder and kept on walking.
“I came to a brook, and when I got to the brook I was kind of out of breath, I washed my face in the brook and when I didn’t see him I assumed he was gone. I kept on going in the direction of my bike, but a short while later, I looked and there he was, he was about a couple of hundred feet from me.”
Mr Moores is familiar with Bakeapple Road where he had left his four-wheeler, about three kilometres from where he was picking berries.
“When I looked back and saw him still coming after me, I told myself I couldn’t go any further. I was just to the point where I just had to give up, I told myself I got to go somewhere to get to higher ground,” he said.
“Then I saw this rock, I dropped my buckets and got up on the rock. He came up to where I dropped the buckets and he licked my empter, and then he came up to the rock and I wasn’t there very long before he came over and put his two paws right up on the rock.
“He was looking me straight in the face, I say I was about six feet from him.
“I stayed completely still, my heart was pounding in my chest, he was just staring at me.
“He dropped down finally and went back to the marsh, and then he came back the second time, I thought for sure I was gone this time. I didn’t know if he was going to come up on the rock, I just knew he was going to do something. He just kept looking at me straight in the face.
“Then he got down on the marsh again and he started eating berries on the marsh.
“I said to myself if he could get a hundred feet away from me I could get to the next rock, I knew if I got to the next rock I was very close to an old foot path and it would be good walking. When I got up to the next rock, I saw him turn and walk away. The bear was about 400 pounds or more, he was a big bear.”
Mr Moores said the bear was a lot taller than him and thinks if it had intended to kill him, he would have been dead.
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