UK Edition
'Forget DiCaprio, I was attacked by a grizzly bear and lived to tell the tale'
There is a scene in The Revenant, Leonardo DiCaprio’s new film, in which he is stood in a pine forest, his rifle focused on a distant target. From nowhere, a mammoth grizzly bear storms into shot, sinking its teeth into his leg and shaking him like a rag doll.
It makes stark viewing, even in a film that has received 12 nominations for next month’s Oscars. DiCaprio himself described the attack as “one of the most immersive experiences audiences will ever have, with what it would be like to come face-to-face with an animal of that magnitude that is incredibly primal”.
Sitting in the Dundee Odeon with his girlfriend on Saturday night, Greg Boswell may have permitted himself a wry smile watching the actor thrash about in the snow. For only two months ago, that was him, alone in the Canadian Wilds with a bear’s jaws wrapped around his leg. The 24-year-old knows all too well what it is like to stare a grizzly – and death – in the face.
Boswell admits he was warned by a lot of friends not to even watch the trailer for The Revenant, let alone the entire film. But remarkably, aside from the fresh scars on his left leg, he has suffered no lasting mental trauma from his horrendous six-hour ordeal.
“I don’t get any nightmares,” he says in his first full newspaper interview since the attack in November, which prompted headlines across the world. “But I do still see the bear’s green eyes all the time in my head.”
Boswell, the son of a lawyer and photographer from Fife, is regarded as one of the most talented climbers of his generation. 5ft 11ins, with a shock of brown curly hair, he got into the sport as a teenager. He has since scaled peaks across the world and boasts an impressive range of sponsors to his name.
Six years ago at a British Mountaineering Council event, Boswell met the man who was to become his climbing partner – Nick Bullock, a 50-year-old from rural North Wales. Despite the age gap, the two became firm friends and before last year had done 20 climbs together in Scotland and Canada.
Last November, Bullock invited his young companion out to Banff, a resort town not far from Calgary, to join him on a three-week climbing trip.
On Sunday November 29, they decided to head for a climbing expedition to Mount Wilson – a drive through the Canadian Rockies several hours away. They left their hostel at 7am and drove in their hired jeep deeper into the mountains, where phone reception soon vanished.
They arrived around 9.30am and set off into minus-22C temperatures outside. “We were in the middle of absolute nowhere,” says Boswell.
“Out there, you have to literally bushwhack through dense forest. There are bears and cougars, wolves and moose, and even though I had never seen them, I was always wary.”
Even for such experts, the route was far from straightforward: up a recent avalanche fall and over two mammoth rock faces, before trekking two thirds of the way up the 3,260m mountain.
But going was slow. By 4pm, they had only made it to the second rock face. By the time they ditched ice axes and crampons in a forest and donned snowshoes for the long walk up the mountain, the pair were using head torches to see through the pitch-black.
Eventually, they decided they had gone far enough and turned back for the long walk home. As they re-traced their footsteps walking single file through a patch of sparse forest, something made Boswell – who was bringing up the rear – turn around.
“I don’t know whether it was sound or instinct, but suddenly I looked over my shoulder and saw this bear running full pelt towards us, its paws bounding over the snow.”
Within a second, the animal (whose size Boswell puts at bigger than a quad bike) was upon them. Bullock started sprinting along their route. Boswell stepped to the side and instantly sunk into waist deep snow.
“Once it realised I was down, it jumped on top of me. I kicked out and it bit my boot. I only noticed the holes later, when blood started pouring out. It grabbed my leg in its teeth, making this super-loud crunching sound and lifted me up so only my shoulders were on the ground. It was crazy how much strength it had.”
While screaming for his partner to save him, Boswell started battering the snarling bear with his thick leather gloves. At one point, he assumes he managed to punch the roof of its mouth, as suddenly it stopped mauling him and bought its face four inches from his.
“It was breathing really heavily, and you could see it was confused. Suddenly, it walked over me and ran off, almost as if it was scared.”
Boswell, adrenaline pumping despite his injuries, staggered out back towards his partner who had returned for him. Writing on his blog later Nick Bullock said: “I looked into his ashen face and saw something I had never seen.” Boswell puts it rather more simply: “He looked just as scared as I did.”
It was 8pm and around 2,000m up a mountain-face. Despite the blood pouring out of Boswell’s leg, the only way to survive was to press on. They pushed back through thick forest to retrieve their ice axes, before following what they presumed to be their footprints from earlier.
After an hour and a half, they realised in fact they had been following bear tracks in the wrong direction.
“That was when I saw I was losing a lot of blood,” says Boswell. “Every other footprint was like somebody had poured juice into it.”
Eventually, they staggered back towards the higher of the two rock faces and prepared to abseil down. Wolves howled in the darkness below them. “I felt utter fear,” says Boswell.
Another two hours of walking and abseiling later, all the time banging their ice axes together and screaming to keep wild animals at bay, they finally saw the sight of the rental jeep.
Driving towards the hospital at 2am, Boswell managed to finally get some phone reception and called his dad, who was seven hours ahead. “I said: ‘I’ve been attacked by a bear, I’m still an hour away from hospital and bleeding heavily.’ They were pretty upset. They didn’t know what the hell was going on.”
The nurse who was on shift at Banff Mineral Springs Hospital that night had seen two bear attacks previously. Both arrived in an ambulance and neither had ever left. But, remarkably, when Boswell staggered in suffering serious shock and his boot was pulled off, spraying blood across the room, it was found that the bears jaws had punctured the muscle around his calf and shin, missing major arteries by a whisker.
“I was super lucky,” he says, even if the wounds were so deep they required three layers of stitches. “I don’t think the bear was trying to kill me, just scare us off, and that has made it easier to deal with.”
He was released from hospital the next day and, while the international media besieged his hostel and his parents’ home in Fife, recuperated at a friend’s house in Banff.
When he flew back to Edinburgh at the start of last month, his entire family was there to greet him for an emotional reunion at the airport.
His wounds have healed well, and next weekend he plans to head out into the hills again for the first time – tackling a route on Ben Nevis. “It will definitely be playing on my mind, and I’ll keep looking over my shoulder,” he says.
But despite the terrifying ordeal, Boswell hasn’t been put off returning to climb in Canada, although next time vows to bring industrial quantities of bear spray.
He is a brave man to say so. But as Leonardo DiCaprio puts it in the The Revenant: “I ain’t afraid of dying anymore. I dun it already.”