‘I still see the bear’s eyes in my head’
Forget Leonardo Di Caprio in The Revenant, Greg Boswell was attacked by a real grizzly. Joe Shute finds out how he lived to tell the tale
There is a scene in The Revenant, Leonardo Di Caprio’s new Oscarnominated film, in which he is standing in a pine forest, his rifle focused on a distant target. From out of nowhere, a mammoth grizzly storms into shot, sinks its teeth into his leg and shakes him like a rag doll.
It makes stark viewing, and Di Caprio has described the scene as “one of the most immersive experiences audiences will ever have, with what it would be like to come face-to-face with an animal of that magnitude that is incredibly primal”.
Sitting in the Dundee Odeon with his girlfriend last night, Greg Boswell may have permitted himself a wry smile as he watched the actor thrash about in the snow. Because just two months ago, that was him in the Canadian wilderness with a bear’s jaws wrapped around his leg. The 24-year-old knows all too well what it is like to stare a grizzly – and death – in the face.
Boswell admits that he was warned by a lot of friends not to even watch the trailer for But remarkably, aside from the scars on his left leg, he has suffered no lasting trauma from his horrendous six-hour ordeal.
“I don’t get any nightmares,” he says, in his first full interview since the attack in November. “But I do still see the bear’s eyes all the time in my head.”
Boswell, who is from Fife, is regarded as one of the most talented climbers of his generation. He has since scaled peaks across the world, boasting an impressive range of sponsors to his name. Six years ago, Boswell met his climbing partner, Nick Bullock, 50, from North Wales. The two have done 20 climbs together and, last November, Bullock invited Boswell to Banff in Canada to join him on a three-week climbing trip.
On November 29, they left their hostel at 7am and drove into the Rockies, where phone reception soon vanished. They parked at 9.30am, in temperatures of -22C, and set out for Mount Wilson. “We were in the middle of absolutely nowhere,” says Boswell. “Out there, you have to literally bushwhack through dense forest. There are bears, cougars, wolves and moose, and even though I had never seen them, I was always wary.”
The route was tricky, passing over a recent avalanche and two mammoth rock faces, before trekking two thirds of the way up the 10,700ft mountain. Going was slow and by 4pm they had only reached the second rock face. By the time they stowed their ice axes and crampons and donned snowshoes for the long walk up the mountain, they were using head torches to see.
Eventually they decided to turn home. As they retraced their steps, walking single file through sparse forest, something made Boswell – who was in the rear – turn around.
“I don’t know whether it was sound or instinct, but suddenly I looked over my shoulder and saw this bear running full pelt towards us, bounding over the snow.”
Within seconds, the animal (which was larger than a quad bike) was upon them. Bullock started sprinting along their route and Boswell stepped to the side, instantly sinking waist-deep in the snow.
“Once the bear realised I was down, it jumped on top of me,” he recalls. “I kicked out and it bit my boot. I only noticed the holes later, when blood started pouring out. It grabbed my leg in its teeth, making this super-loud crunching sound, and lifted me up so that only my shoulders were on the ground. It was crazy how much strength it had.”
While screaming for his partner to save him, Boswell started battering the bear with his gloved hands. He thinks he managed to punch the roof of its mouth, which is when it suddenly stopped mauling him and put its face four inches from his.
“It was breathing really heavily and you could see it was confused. Suddenly, it walked over me and ran off, almost as if it was scared.”
Boswell, adrenaline pumping despite his injuries, staggered back towards his partner, who had returned for him. Writing on his blog later, Nick Bullock said: “I looked into his ashen face and saw something I had never seen.” Boswell puts it rather more simply: “He looked just as scared as I did.”
It was 8pm and the pair were around 6,500ft up a mountain. Blood was pouring from Boswell’s leg, but the only way to survive was to press on. They pushed back through thick forest to where they had left their ice axes, before following what they assumed to be their footprints from earlier. But, after an hour and a half, they realised they had in fact been following bear tracks in the wrong direction.
“That was when I saw I was losing a lot of blood,” says Boswell. “Every other footprint was like somebody had poured juice into it.”
Eventually, they staggered back towards the higher of the two rock faces and prepared to abseil down. Below them, they could hear wolves howling in the darkness. “I felt utter fear,” says Boswell.
For the next two hours they walked and abseiled, all the time banging their ice axes together and screaming to keep wild animals at bay, until they finally reached their jeep. Driving towards the hospital at 2am, Boswell managed to get some phone reception and called his dad. “I said: ‘I’ve been attacked by a bear, I’m still an hour away from hospital and bleeding heavily.’ They were pretty upset.”
The nurse at Banff Mineral Springs Hospital that night had seen two bear attacks previously. Both victims had arrived in an ambulance and neither had ever left. But, remarkably, when Boswell staggered in suffering serious shock, and his boot was pulled off, spraying blood across the room, it was found that the bear’s teeth had punctured the muscle around his calf and shin (wounds so deep, they required three layers of stitches) but missed the major arteries by a whisker.
“I was super-lucky,” says Boswell. “I don’t think the bear was trying to kill me, just scare us off, and that has made it easier to deal with.”
He was released from hospital the next day and, while the media besieged his hostel and his parents’ home in Fife, he recuperated at a friend’s house in Banff.
His wounds have healed well, and next weekend he plans to head into the hills again for the first time – tackling a route on Ben Nevis. “The attack will definitely be playing on my mind, and I’ll keep looking over my shoulder,” he says.
But despite his terrifying ordeal, Boswell hasn’t been put off returning to climb in Canada – although next time vows to take industrial quantities of bear spray.
He is a brave man to say so. Then again, as Di Caprio puts it in The
Revenant: “I ain’t afraid of dying any more. I dun it already.”
‘It grabbed my leg in its teeth, making this super-loud crunching sound’