Late one afternoon, on what was supposed to be a six-week white-water canoe trip through the Canadian wilderness, 17-year-old Alex Messenger left his campsite to climb a steep ridge that promised panoramic views of the tundra. It was the highest point for at least 50 miles. “You could see lake after lake, after lake,” he says. Then, directly across the ridge, Messenger saw something else – a flicker of brown. His body recognised it before his conscious mind did. “It triggered all of the physiological responses in a fraction of a second,” he says, “before I even realised it was a grizzly bear.”
Four weeks earlier, in July 2005, Messenger’s group of six had set out on their summer adventure from Lake Wholdaia, in the remote Canadian Northwest Territories. They had been told that they would be lucky even to see a bear. “I felt like I had a good appreciation of what risks we were likely to encounter,” Messenger says. “Top of my mind was flipping the boat, and other things that can happen in white water.”
