The grizzly that mauled a Canmore, Alta., woman to death on the weekend appeared to be hunting humans, survivors of the attack and at least one bear expert say.
The two women who survived the encounter with the male grizzly bear that killed Isabelle Dubé on Sunday said the animal appeared to be treating them as prey. "The bear came towards us like he was stalking us," Jean McAllister and Maria Hawkins said in a statement. "He was not afraid."
That same fearlessness was on display just an hour before Ms. Dubé was attacked and killed. According to provincial wildlife officials, the grizzly -- which wildlife officials were at that point trying to pinpoint using satellite technology -- wandered onto the course of the nearby SilverTip Golf Resort around 1 p.m. that day.
Through the morning, the four-year-old bear had moved up the slopes of the hills to the north of Canmore, with wildlife officials aware of its movements, but not its precise location, because of interference from the mountainous terrain. One week earlier, the animal had been tranquilized, fitted with a monitoring device and lifted by helicopter 15 kilometres away after intruding onto the same golf course. But he made his way back to the Canmore area in the subsequent seven days.
By the early afternoon, the animal was near the first hole of the 18-hole course and close enough to a hiker to force her to shout out. That drew the attention of a golf-course employee, who brought the woman to safety in a pickup truck. He then doused the animal with the sprinkler system and drove it off into the wilderness corridor to the northwest. Then, around 1:30 p.m., he phoned to notify wildlife officials that a bear had been spotted on the golf course.
During that call, the employee did not disclose that the bear had approached a human, said Dave Ealey, a spokesman for Alberta Sustainable Resource Development. "There was no mention of a woman being picked up or that a bear had tracked her," he said, adding that wildlife officials only became aware of the full extent of the incident on Monday afternoon, more than a day after Ms. Dubé was killed.
An official at SilverTip said the company was still figuring out the timeline of the encounter and had no comment. However, Mr. Ealey said it is not unusual to see a bear on the course. The course's name, SilverTip, is a nickname for a grizzly and the company's logo features a bear.
Mr. Ealey said that wildlife officials were concerned because the bear had returned to the golf course. But no alert or warning was issued, and Mr. Ealey pointed out, there was only about a half-hour between the call from the golf course and the attack on Ms. Dubé.
"There wasn't a lot of time," he said.
At 2:06 p.m., a few hundred metres away from the golf course, Ms. Dubé and her two jogging companions rounded a corner and saw the bear about 20 metres down the trail. As the animal advanced, all three women at first began backing away, but Ms. Dubé then clambered up a tree. Her two companions continued to edge away, and then ran for help when they heard Ms. Dubé shouting at the animal.
She was dragged from the tree and mauled to death, with witnesses reporting that the bear then seemed to be standing guard over her body.
Alberta wildlife officials are sticking by their assessment that the animal was curious, not aggressive. But one bear expert in Canmore said that the frequency and nature of the bear's encounters with humans -- particularly its protective stance over Ms. Dubé's body -- suggest it had started to treat humans as prey.
"What I'm wondering is if this was not a predatory attack after all," said Reno Sommerhalden, who has studied the animals and teaches bear-safety classes. Grizzlies are not exclusively carnivorous, but unlike other species of bears, they do often hunt for food.
Members of Ms. Dubé's family said they do not blame provincial officials for her death, but instead view the deadly attack as a freak accident and proof of the unpredictable nature of grizzlies.
"Could it have been prevented? It's hard to say," said Mike Sternloff, uncle to Ms. Dubé's husband, Heath McCroy.