Grizzly Came as He Slept, Took Him Away

A highly rare unprovoked grizzly bear attack took the life of a 44-year-old French man in Canada's Northwest Territories last week. The BBC reports Julien Gauthier was asleep in his tent early Thursday when a grizzly bear came upon him and dragged him away. His body was found the next day. The Canadian-born Gauthier—a composer-in-residence with the Brittany Symphony Orchestra in France—had been traveling along the Mackenzie River to record nature sounds for a music project; he had done something similar over five months in the Kerguelen Islands in Antarctica in 2018.

The female biologist who was with him near the village of Tulita was able to find some hikers who enabled her to activate a distress beacon, which the Royal Canadian Mounted Police responded to, reports the Guardian. She told Le Parisien, "He had asked me to take part in this adventure, we had been thinking about it for three years. We were so happy to get to do it." The Guardian quotes a Canadian official who says the Northwest Territories have only seen four fatal animal attacks in the last two decades. (More animal attack stories.)