On the 29th day of an exhausting canoe expedition that traveled 600 miles (966 km) through the Canadian subarctic, 17-year-old Alex Messenger was viciously mauled by a grizzly bear.
That day in 2005, he’d abandoned his tent by himself to summit a nearby mountain. And as he ascended, head down, his mind drifted to commonplace subjects like The Liars’ Club, the novel he read in high school, the weight of the camera bag he was carrying, and the vibrant tiny flowers underfoot. But the bear was plodding undetected up the other side of the ridge as Messenger was lost in thought.
The moment Messenger’s body responded before his thoughts, their paths finally met. “I just saw this kind of brown blob come up over the rise,” he continues. “There was a strain in my body that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. My pulse instantly doubled, my eyes enlarged, my breath sped, and my airways opened.”
Even after authoring a memoir titled The Twenty-Ninth Day, some 20 years later, Messenger can still remember the exact moment when his conscious brain finally caught up with the barrage of messages his body was sending out. “There was this visceral or subconscious bodily reaction,” he claims. “And then, later, there was my intellectual and emotional reaction.”
