FITCHBURG — Damaris Maldonado was about two miles into her regular hike at Coggshall Park on Labor Day when she was overcome with the feeling that she was not alone.
When she glanced over her shoulder that afternoon, she quickly learned why.
“All of a sudden I felt a presence [behind me],” Maldonado said on Monday, a week after the encounter. “So when I turned around and looked, it was a black bear.”
At first, she didn’t know what to do and wracked her brain for ways to escape, she said. She thought about throwing her backpack, at the bear and running away, but the bag had both her cellphone and her pepper spray inside. Briefly, Maldonado considered laying down and playing dead, she said, but that didn’t seem like a good option, either.
Out of ideas, Maldonado decided to run. (Generally speaking, one should try to intimidate a bear by making themselves large and making loud noises, according to Marion Larson, chief of information and education at the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries & Wildlife, but Maldonado said she didn’t know that at the time.)
“It’s a stupid thing to do,” Maldonado said, “but last Monday, I didn’t know that information.”
Tearing through the woods, Maldonado said, she ran through bushes and over rocks. Off-trail, she struggled to see where she was going, and soon realized the bear could run much faster than she was able and was closing in on her. When the animal came within five feet of her, she said, she opted to stand her ground.
“I kept screaming through my lungs, waving my hands, trying to scare the bear,” she said.
The bear, she said, just stood and stared at her. In turn, she threw whatever rocks and branches she could get her hands on and ran away again. She and the bear repeated this process several times, she said.
“I kept saying, ‘oh my God, Holy Spirit, keep me safe. I don’t want to die this way,’” Maldonado said.
After this happened four times, she grew concerned she would trip and that the bear would then be able to climb on top of her. So, she said, she pulled the pepper spray out of her bag, grabbed the longest branch she could find and thrashed at the bear while preparing to spray it.
It wasn’t until the liquid inside the bottle leaked down her hands instead of spraying outward that she learned the pepper spray canister was broken.
“So now I’ve got my hands burning like crazy, like I had put them in a grill,” she said.
Again, she took off running, she said, and again the bear chased her. But in a panicked effort to wipe sweat and hair from her line of sight, Maldonado spread the pepper spray liquid to her face and eyes, making it even harder for her to see where she was going.
In the middle of this, she said, she came across a large rock, which she was able to climb on top of. Finally, Maldonado had time to take her cellphone out of her bag and call 911.
At this point, she said, she had been running for about a quarter of an hour, and the dispatcher told her it would be another 20 minutes before emergency responders could get to her.
Staying on the phone all the while, she tried to call out to police to help them locate her, but she said her voice was hoarse from all of the times that she had stood off with the black bear while trying to escape.
“Finally,” she said, “I heard something really far away.”
She couldn’t see, she said, but five police officers had emerged through the woods.
“They had rifles and all kinds of stuff to scare the bear,” she said. “They scared the bear and the bear runs.”
As police guided her back to her car, Maldonado said, she could barely walk. A week later, she’s still processing what happened.
She attributes her survival to God, she said.
“It’s something a lot of people don’t believe, but the Holy Spirit was talking to me,” Maldonado said, explaining that when she decided to stand her ground with the animal she was simply following her gut. She did not know that was a method of warding bears off.
As for other walkers and hikers in the area, Fitchburg police Capt. Matt LeMay said that he did not believe that the public should be any more concerned about bears than usual, noting that he believed this bear, which reportedly had a tag on its ear, just happened to migrate down toward the park.
Larson, of Mass. Wildlife, said that their department is “very much aware” of this particular bear and that they have been trying to capture it for a month. The division has been capturing female bears as part of an ongoing research project, and marking any male bears that they happen to trap along the way, which is why this black bear was tagged, she said.
“This is not normal bear behavior,” Larson said, adding that it was evidently too comfortable around humans.
Typically, she said, bears will steer clear from humans. Larson said that the division can only speculate, but it’s possible that someone has been feeding this particular black bear, or that it has not been made adequately afraid of humans.
She underscored that, in order to prevent these kinds of events, people should take care to keep their trash in barrels and avoid putting garbage out in the days before it’s scheduled to be picked up. She also discouraged leaving birdseed out during the warmer months, when bears are preparing for hibernation.
Above all, she said, if you live in Worcester County, “you need to assume that bears live in your town.”
As for Maldonado, she said that the incident did not tarnish the last 35 years she’s spent taking regular walks. In the time since the encounter, she said, she’s already hit the pavement once again.
