Free 127 Hours: Between a Rock and a Hard Place by Aron Ralston Page B

the bear. He hadn’t yet moved. I imagined he was sitting there grinning as I struggled to escape him. I surveyed the snowpack from the hill, and it seemed to be shallower to the east; I reasoned I could make an off-trail shortcut directly to the highway and avoid wallowing in the drifts at the top of the moraine. Crossing the ridgeline of the hill, I descended to a hollow in the forest and looked back over my left shoulder. The bear was gone. He’d dropped off the other side of the hill toward the lake. Relieved, I walked about fifteen paces, then checked behind me again, just as the bear sauntered over the hillcrest in my tracks, a mere thirty feet away.
    For ten minutes, I blazed a heading to the east, alternately glancing at the compass, orienting the map to my surroundings, and peering over my left shoulder at the bear. He closed in to within twenty feet behind me a couple of times, and I was ever more nervous about finding my way, avoiding deep snow, and trying to guess what the bear would do to get at the food bag strapped to my chest. Navigating in such stressful circumstances was very difficult, and I shortly became disoriented; the terrain no longer matched what I was expecting from my judgment of the map. It took me a minute to get back on the correct bearing, compensating for the declination between true north on my map and the magnetic north shown on my compass. Then, surmounting a short rise, I found myself looking down at a lake. I wasn’t counting on a lake. But there, between my position and the snowy lakeshore, were some footprints. Aha! My spirit leaped at the discovery. Navigating would be no issue, and I might even find some other people to help me scare away the bear. I tromped through the snow to the boot track, and then it hit me: “Those are my footprints…and this is Bradley Lake…I’ve gone in a complete circle!” My heart sank in disappointment.
    The bear was ten paces behind me; to this point, he had stopped when I stopped. But now he came down the hill toward the trail and my stance. I felt like giving up, throwing my food bag to him—damn the regulations not to feed the bears—and, most strongly, I wanted to cry.
    The bear was only fifteen feet away when again something changed in my demeanor: My despair turned to anger. “Leave me alone!” I shouted right in his face. Again he stopped. Recalling the most visceral threat I’d ever heard in a movie, I adapted a few lines from Pulp Fiction and continued, “I’m gonna get some hard pipe-hittin’ rangers to come out and get medieval on your ass! They’re gonna tranquilize you and ship you off to Idaho!” I resorted to waving my arms over my head and growling, but this was old news to the bear. He cocked his head like he’d done the night before during our standoff on the log. Spying an exposed stone in the conical dip surrounding a pine tree a few feet to my left, I reached into the tree well and grabbed the softball-sized rock to carry for self-defense, then hurriedly moved to the south, retracing my old tracks.
    The bear followed me, too closely now, stalled only at intervals by my shouting. I figured I would hit the bear with the rock if he came within ten feet of me. I wouldn’t be able to throw it much farther than that with the packs and their straps confining my range of motion. I focused on keeping myself upright, though the snow got deeper and was noticeably weaker than it had been the day earlier, due to the rain that was still falling. At one point, I broke through the crust and sank in up to my hips. I was good and stuck and couldn’t pull myself out. The bear seemed to understand his opportunity and narrowed our separation to a mere twelve feet from my head to his snout. As I groped for purchase in the snow, my arms flailed, and my feet stayed stuck. I twisted left at the waist and rolled onto my back over my right shoulder, popping my legs out of their holes. Like an upturned turtle, I was weighted down by both the