Musician ‘inspired by great outdoors’ killed in bear attack

THREE years ago, Julien Gauthier began planning to carry out his childhood dream. He had reached his 40s and was determined finally to explore the rugged landscapes of northern Canada.

Soon an idea took shape, one that combined the FrenchCanadian composer’s love of music and adventure: In the summer, Gauthier would embark on a roughly monthlong canoeing and camping trip through part of Canada’s remote Northwest Territories. Along the way, he would record nature sounds for a collaborative music project in Paris.

“It was his dream to go there, to go to the north,” Camille Toscani, a biologist who joined Gauthier on the journey, recently told Le

Parisien. “He asked me to take part in this adventure, which he had been thinking about for three years .... He was a unique artiste, he was inspired by the great outdoors and by nature.”

But last Thursday, Toscani said, Gauthier’s long-awaited trip came to a tragic end. As the pair slept in their camp along the Mackenzie River near the hamlet of Tulita, a bear attacked, dragging the 44-yearold musician from his tent in the middle of the night, Le Parisien reported.

Authorities recovered a man’s body on Friday afternoon, noting that evidence from an investigation “confirms a bear encounter,” CBC reported. The man was not identified, but friends of Gauthier said it was him.

A black bear and a grizzly bear found near Tulita were killed on Friday and necropsies are scheduled to see if either animal was involved in the fatal attack, CBC reported. The incident marks the fourth bearrelated death in the Northwest Territories in 20 years, according to CBC. About 4,300 black bears and 4,000 to 5,000 grizzlies are in the largely uninhabited region.

“Human-bear encounters in the Northwest Territories are not out of the ordinary, although fatalities are rare,” Meagan Wohlberg, a spokeswoman with the region’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources, told the news outlet.

Canoeing through the territories wasn’t Gauthier’s first time venturing into remote wilderness. According to a biography on his personal website, the composer was “attracted by the most unusual or extreme places” and once spent five months in a group of islands in the Antarctic more than 2,000 miles from civilisation. Drawing inspiration from the sounds of nature recorded during his stay, Gauthier composed “Southern Symphony” and produced an album, “Inaudita Symphonia.” — WP-Bloomberg