them. Lying on the ground, bleeding from his head and arms, West tried
to fathom what to do next. It was his dogs that gave him the motive and
clarity to act: “I heard one of my dogs yelp,” said West, an intense and
wiry man who stands about five-foot-nine (shorter than the bear, had she
been standing upright). “I thought, ‘Well, you’re not gonna kill my dog.’
So I stood up; there was a stick at my feet. As I picked it up and looked,
the bear was running at me full tilt and I in effect said, ‘Let’s go, bitch.’
So I swung the stick, hit her between the ears, stopped her dead in her
tracks. And she shook her head and she was stunned, and I realized that if
I didn’t continue, that bear would attack me again because I knew if I
went down a third time I would never stand up. So, I just pretended I was
driving spikes with a sledgehammer ’til that bear hit the ground, I saw
blood coming out her nose. I then dropped the stick, wrapped my shirt
around my head and told my dogs, ‘It’s time to go, kids.’ ”
West was treated for shock and required sixty stitches in his scalp,
face, and arms.
“None of us had ever heard of anything remotely like this,” said Darcy
MacPhee, the field supervisor who oversaw the investigation with British
Columbia’s Predator Attack Team.^14 “A bear is a pretty robust animal so
we approached this from a very skeptical point of view.”
Due to the extraordinary circumstances, an exhaustive necropsy was
done and, in the end, it confirmed that West had indeed crushed the
bear’s skull. “In that sort of situation, you only have one choice,” West
said later. “It’s live or die. Most people are too scared to think about
living.”
There is every reason to suppose that, in the heat of the moment,
Markov believed he faced a similarly stark choice. It was well known that
Markov loved his dogs, and the motive to act decisively may have been
identical. Had Jim West been in Markov’s situation with a loaded gun,
there is no question what he would have done. “There are two categories
of people when it comes to extreme situations,” said the leopard
specialist Vasily Solkin. “One gets scared first and then starts thinking;
the other starts thinking first and gets scared after the fact. Only the latter