Just a few days ago, many of us read about a harrowing, made-for-the-movies tale of survival that took place out in the remote wilderness of the Alaskan bush, and many of us were in total awe.
The story purported that a man was attacked by a bear on the way to his mining cabin and injured but then was forced to stay for an entire week waiting on help. During his time in the bush, the bear allegedly came back nightly to harass and threaten the man. It was only after he constructed a distress signal large enough to be viewed from the air as he finally rescued.
But now the locals aren’t so sure that this wasn’t all just hogwash.
The cabin [Tim] Jessee took refuge in, as it turns out, was not his. It belonged to a fellow miner, though Jessee’s cabin sat only a few yards away.
“We went out there to the cabin, but we couldn’t find a bear track within 500 feet of the place, but it should have been all torn up, according to his story,” said one anonymous source known to the Nugget. “There’s no hair, no tracks, no scat, nothing.”
And also:
A Coast Guard press release detailing the incident described Jessee as a “survivor of a bear attack.”
The Coast Guard crew delivered him to an ambulance in Nome, which took him to Norton Sound Health Regional hospital.
“We were told to get a man who had been mauled by a bear,” said Jim West Jr., the Nome Volunteer Fire and Ambulance chief. “He walked off the helicopter and walked into the ambulance. He had no animal bites and wasn’t bleeding.”
As the stories from the bystanders began to come together, it became clear the Jessee had simply wreck his 4-wheeler and trailer and was unable to be get back to civilization without a rescue. The bear story was just his way of not being embarrassed.
