WILDERNESS SURVIVORS
Saved by bears and guided by talking plants
BEAR IN MIND
A three-year-old boy who survived two nights alone in a heavily wooded area of North Carolina in freezing conditions told police and family he was helped out by a friendly bear that was with him the whole time. Rescuers responding to reports of a baby crying found Casey Hathaway tangled up in thorny bushes, cold and soaked but safe on the night of 24 January. He had gone missing in conditions so bad the subsequent search had to be called off. Craven county sheriff Chip Hughes said Casey “did say that he had a friend in the woods that was a bear that was with him”. The claim was repeated by the boy’s aunt Breanna Hathaway. “He said he hung out with a bear for two days,” Hathaway wrote in a Facebook post. “God sent him a friend to keep him safe. God is a good God. Miracles do happen.” It’s true that North Carolina is home to plenty of black bears.
Hughes said the boy had been playing with two other children in his grandmother’s backyard in Ernul on 22 January, but did not come inside with them. Below freezing weather conditions and concerns Casey wasn’t dressed for the cold sparked a search that involved helicopters, drones, dogs and divers, as well as hundreds of volunteers. By 24 January the wind and rain had become so bad authorities urged volunteers to stay away. “He’s a survivor,” said Hughes, pointing out that rescuers had to wade through waist-high water to reach the boy, who stands at 2ft 2in (66cm). Casey escaped with just a few scrapes and simply wanted some water and his mother, he said.
This tale of Jungle Book-style inter-species friendship was probably the product of Casey’s imagination, according to Chris Servheen, a bear researcher at the University of Montana. “I’ve never known such a thing to happen, bears don’t do that,” he said. “Wild bears aren’t friends
with people.” With a sense of smell around seven times stronger than a bloodhound’s, a bear would have smelled Casey long before seeing him and would most likely have then left the scene. “Bears are by and large afraid of people no matter how big the person is,” Servheen said. “Bears that move towards people don’t survive long, so they get selected out. The only reason it would go near the child would be to be predatory, although black bears are very rarely predatory of humans and obviously that didn’t happen here.” [AP] theguardian. com, 28 Jan 2019.
• However, pace Servheen, a few news reports do suggest that, given the right conditions, bears will take care of human infants. In 1971, five-year-old Goranka Cuculic got lost in the forest near her home village of Vranje in Yugoslavia. Three days later she was found by a farmer and related how she had met a bear and two cubs. The bear licked her face, and she played with the cubs and snuggled up to them at night in a cave [FT3:4]. In October 2001, a 16-month-old toddler went missing in Iran and was found in a bears’ den three days later, safe and well. It was thought that the baby had been breast-fed by a mother bear. [FT155:8.] Sir James Frazer
“He said he had a friend in the woods... a bear was with him”
mentions a girl who was said to have been nursed by a bear. Coolies from the tea gardens found her in a forest in Jalpaigori in 1892, sitting beside a huge bear den. Aged two or three, she walked on all fours and bit and scratched, but was gradually taught to walk upright and wear clothes, although she never learned to speak. [Sir James Frazer ed: Fasti of Ovid, 1929, quoting North Indian Notes and Queries, Mar 1893.] For further historical examples of care bears, see ‘Wild Things’ by Paul Sieveking, FT161:38.
GUIDED BY VOICES
On 25 March 2018, Katherine Brewster, 27, from Seaford, East Sussex, left a mediation retreat in Brazil, walked barefoot into dense forest, wearing only a T-shirt and shorts. It was five days before she was found sheltering near a waterfall by two local men. She was in a very hard-to-access area – very steep terrain with no roads. The forest teamed with venomous insects, deadly snakes and jaguars. She had left all her belongings behind, including her cell phone, and had hidden her passport and credit cards.
She had been staying with a family in the small ecovillage of Dom Jose near Alpestre in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil’s southernmost state. “We are a community of environmentalists,” said Neimar Marcos, 35, who co-founded UniPermacultura, a centre for bio-construction and alternative living with his brother Clairton. The community is largely vegetarian and alcohol and drugs are prohibited.
Following her rescue, Brewster said that she had been receiving divine messages for three months prior to her disappearance. The divine voice told her to prepare for a trek into the wilderness, but did not tell her when that trek would be until the day of her disappearance. Interested in wilderness survival and increasing her connection with nature, she was intrigued by Rupert Sheldrake’s concept of the morphogenetic field (see FT286:38-40). “I’d researched a lot about the morphogenetic field, how consciousness within form connects everything,” she said. “We have access to the whole Universe, all we need to do is to detach ourselves from the material. We are thus the intrinsic consciousness of the Universe. I’ve been preparing for this experience for a month. I learned how to [be] nourished by the Sun and not by food, and for 30 days I had managed to live without eating anything.”
The divine voice told her to keep moving, and she covered about six miles (10km). She was found covered in scratches and insect bites. She said that she allowed mosquitoes, wasps, and ants to bite and sting her: “I let myself be bitten, so I could feel the pain and learn how to not suffer.” She claimed to have survived on wild plants and used herbs to treat wounds. “The plants were taking to me, telling me which ones I could eat, which ones I could make tea with, or to heal a wound with. The messages would come in words. It was more like having a conversation with the plants.”
This sounds like shamanic accounts of ayahuasca ceremonies and the secrets of Amazonian tribal medicine. Brewster had been living in Brazil for two years, and spent time in Florianópolis, close to the Amazon, where ayahuasca ceremonies do happen – so it’s possible that she experienced such a ceremony at some point. Perhaps the spirit of the forest, whom shamans allegedly commune with, reached out to her without chemical aid; or perhaps it was all a fantasy… theguardian.com, 29 Mar; BBC News, 30 Mar; dailymail. co.uk, Sun, D.Mirror, 31 Mar; mysteriousunicerse.org, 4 April 2018.
A DIET OF MOTHS
Yoga instructor Amanda Eller, 35, spent 17 days wondering the Makawao Forest Reserve on the Hawaiian island of Maui. She became lost after sitting down to meditate and getting disoriented during what was meant to be a three-mile hike, “not a spiritual journey”. Speaking on 25 May, a day after she was spotted by a search helicopter hired by her frantic parents, she said from her hospital bed: “I wanted to give up, but the only option I had was life or death. I heard this voice that said, ‘If you want to live, keep going’.” After three days’ trekking in an area inhabited by wild boar, she fell 20ft (6m) into a deep ravine and fractured her leg. Weak and injured, she began to crawl. She survived on wild berries and a few moths. She tried to catch some crayfish, but was “not very successful”. One night, she took shelter in a boar’s den, covering herself with leaves and mud to keep warm. She was eventually spotted four miles away from the original search area. D.Telegraph, 27 May 2019.