Shannon Stevens spent the weekend with her brother and his girlfriend at a remote yurt on Chilkat Lake, 17 miles from Haines.After traveling across the frozen lake by snowmachine on Saturday, they cooked sausages over an outdoor firepit. Later that evening, Stevens left the yurt to use the outhouse.
“Normally, when we are out there in the summer or the fall I’m used to shouting ‘Hey, bear!’ the whole way. It was the dead of winter, so I didn’t think to do that this time,” Stevens said. “I got in there and sat down on the toilet seat, and something just immediately bit me in the butt. I jumped up and screamed.”
She called for her brother Erik Stevens who came running to investigate.
“I’m like, ‘Okay, I’m going to open the lid and look.’ I take the headlamp and I grab the lid of the toilet seat and I lift it up,” Erik Stevens said. “Right at the level of the toilet seat, maybe an inch or two below, is a gigantic bear face looking right back up at me.”
He closed the lid and they ran back to the yurt as fast as they could. Shannon Stevens was bleeding, so they cleaned the wound and bandaged it up.
She said she was shocked, but not seriously injured.
“It felt like just a single puncture. Maybe it wasn’t even a bite. It might have been a swipe with his claw potentially. I don’t think we’ll ever really know that part,” Shannon Stevens said.