On Tuesday afternoon, Oct. 2, Haines local Shori Heaton drove her Ford Sport Trac down to the Chilkoot River to go fishing, a daily ritual while salmon are running. Skittles, her yellow lab who was raised in the neighborhood, rode with her. The two staked out a spot about 20 feet into the middle of the river, near a duo from Canada, and Shori cast her line.

“Someone from the road screamed ‘Bear coming down the trail!,'” Heaton recounted. She remembers looking at the two Canadians, who veered toward the shore, while Heaton herself went left and began walking diagonally towards where Skittles stood on the embankment. The bear, identified as a 3.5-year-old female commonly called ‘Lulu,’ looked at all three of them, but zeroed in on Heaton.

“The bear started walking towards her, then trotting towards her,” said Gord Smith, a Whitehorse resident who fished next to Heaton that day.

Heaton tried to throw Skittles up the embankment, before pushing herself onto land. At that point, she said, the bear was 12 inches from her foot and started reaching for her with her paw.

“That’s when I grabbed Skittles and turned him around and said ‘bear,'” she said. “He jumped over me and towards the bear and grabbed the rear haunches of the bear,” Heaton said. Skittles followed the brown bear up the river like that, holding on with his teeth.

Smith, who heard the attack without seeing it from where he stood further down the river’s edge, said, “my heart was pumping faster.” After Skittles let go of the bear, “The lady and dog came towards us so we could go up the bank where we came down, and the bear [was] watching from the bank,” he said.

Heaton called Trooper Trent Chwialkowski to report the incident, and was directed to call Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologist Carl Koch. Koch asked Heaton if her dog provoked the bear, if she had a food source on her, or if she was running-all factors that might contribute to a bear pursuing a human. “No,” she said to all three. Heaton said she had a run-in with the same bear five days before when Lulu tried to get into a bucket of eggs she was using for bait. Heaton and Skittles scared her off by screaming and barking.

According to Koch, bears remember things very well. “It’s certainly possible it remembered a negative encounter in the past with that dog,” he said. Also, bears can see unleashed dogs as threats. According to Park Ranger Travis Russell, who followed up with Heaton the following day, the same bear approached within 20 feet of a barking dog on Sept. 27, which possibly further contributed to her negative associating with dogs.

Also, Koch heard from a local who had seen Lulu just before the incident on Oct. 2, and said she was honked at by a car horn for sniffing around a truck. Koch thinks Lulu jogged down river toward Heaton directly after this event.

President of the Chilkoot Bear Foundation, Pam Randles, said that this was Lulu’s first year on her own after being kicked out by her mother, locally known as Speedy, last year. “Lulu did not want to get kicked out, she wanted another 20 bucks and to borrow the car again, “Randles said, so whenever she neared her mother, Speedy became aggressive with the adolescent. “She was more afraid of her mother than she was of us,” Randles said, which could contribute to Lulu’s bold behavior. “I get reports almost daily that she’s running people off of fish,” Russell said. The state park has posted a red flyer on poles at Chilkoot Lake that reads BEAR ALERT, and has laminated plastic for visitors to write the last bear sighting on it. The warning was instigated by Lulu’s behavior. The adolescent bear has never been hazed, according to Russell. Both Russell and Trooper Chwialkowski said they’ve intended to haze the bear if they caught her in the act of stealing fish out of unsecured storage, but neither have had the opportunity.

Smith, who has fished on the Chilkoot for more than two decades, said he saw five other incidents that week involving the same bear. “The bear kind of stalks people, but it’s after the fish,” he said.

Koch said it’s important to emphasize that these accounts show bold behavior, but that it’s instinctual for bears to pursue food sources. That’s why it’s important to secure your fish as you catch them, always carry bear spray, and keep your dog on a leash, no matter how well behaved it is, he advises.

“You got to remember a dog is a canine, and there’s wolves in the wild, Koch said. “Bears can have an instinctual way they’ll react sometimes.”

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