Fighting for his life underneath a grizzly’s claws

Shayne Patrick Burke describes how his wife helped save his life after his attack by a sow grizzly.

JACKSON — Shayne Patrick Burke was moving quickly through the woods, when he saw it clearly, running up a small hill: A grizzly cub, running the opposite way. As soon as he saw the bear, he knew.

He was in trouble.

Burke grabbed his bear spray and stepped backwards. Then he saw the mother bear, charging. She was within a few feet of him, and Burke realized she wasn’t bluff charging.

“I duck and covered and took the hit,” he said.

In the moments that followed, what he did separated from what he was thinking. In an interview with the News&guide, Burke, the 35-year-old Massachusetts man attacked by a grizzly bear May 19 in Grand Teton National Park, said he dropped to the ground, covered his head and neck with his hands, lay flat on his stomach and tried to be as quiet as possible to convince the bear he wasn’t a threat. But as the bear bit his back, right shoulder, buttocks and legs, Burke said he wasn’t thinking about the bear but rather his family.

He thought about his wife, Chloe. The couple had gotten married a year and a half prior, earlier than expected. Burke’s doctors had discovered a brain tumor, and he and Chloe got married in case there were any complications. After surgery and recovery, they were just getting around to their honeymoon, which should have been a three-week jaunt around the western states. Their trip through the Teton was toward the beginning.

Burke thought about his dog, Cadence, a Belgian Malinois who he described as one of his best friends. He thought about how happy he makes her when he comes home from work.

And Burke thought about his extended family. In 2020 he lost both of his parents. Now, Burke is the only surviving member of his nuclear family.

“I thought about the rest of my family and I didn’t want to give them another grave to go visit,” he said. “I didn’t want to put my wife through that.”

Chasing owls

Burke’s ordeal started about an hour earlier.

He, Chloe and Cadence had passed through Badlands and Yellowstone national parks, and they were just intending to spend a few hours in Grand Teton, enough time to try and photograph a great gray owl near Signal Mountain. Burke had read extensively about the Mountain West before the trip — where to find the wildlife he wanted to see, what to do if he was attacked by a bear — and learned that the treed hill east of Jackson Lake was a hot spot for the large, nocturnal birds of prey.

He and Chloe parked at the base of Signal Mountain and started walking up the Summit Road with Cadence. But because dogs aren’t allowed off road, Chloe decided to turn back and return to the car with the pup. Burke went ahead alone, and at first there were people nearby, including a guided wildlife tour. The group was on the road when Burke ran into them, but they said they’d gone off road and hadn’t seen any bear sign — or owl sign. Still, Burke left the road.

At one point he thought he saw an owl, but couldn’t identify whether it was a great gray or a great horned owl. He went farther back in the woods, hoping he would bump into his quarry.

After about an hour, he realized that he was late. He started heading back to the car, quickly.

He’d been out longer than he said he would and was about a half mile from the parking lot when the bear attacked. His survival instinct — the desire to be reunited with his family — kicked in.

Prone on the ground, he tried to stay quiet as the bear bit him, convincing her that he wasn’t a threat. But he screamed after the bear first made contact with a bite and slash on his back and right shoulder. The bear bit his buttocks and legs, about three times each. But on the last bite, he screamed, turning the bear’s attention to his head, where his hands were locked behind his neck, bear spray in his fingers.

“I’d love to say, ‘Yeah, I held onto that with pure instinct,’” Burke said. But the hold on the top of the canister is ring shaped and was naturally on Burke’s finger when he took cover.

He was also in “death grip mode.” The can just happened to be in his hands. But it may have saved his life.

The bear went for his neck, and bit into the can.

“When it initially popped, I knew she was biting me, right behind my head,” Burke said. “I really thought that was something in my head popping.

“I was like, I’m dead. That’s it,” he said.

Burke felt a warm sensation going down his back — the pepper spray. He stopped moving and heard the thump of the bear moving. Then, he heard something strange. The bear appeared to sneeze.

“I was like, ‘I might not be dead,’” Burke said.

He looked up, did a light push-up, and saw the bear running in the direction of the parking lot. He turned and ran farther into the woods, trying to get as far away from the bear as possible.

The rescue

How he ran, Burke doesn’t know. But he attributes it to tunnel vision, and adrenaline.

After some time, he tried to call Chloe, but the call didn’t go through. He texted her, “attacked,” but the text didn’t go through. Soon, however, she called him back. She’d seen the call, but hadn’t been able to answer. Burke explained the situation.

Chloe, an EMT, snapped into action.

“It was really surreal,” she said. “I didn’t feel like I had any time to process what was actually happening. I started to think through the things that needed to be done to get him back safe.”

Thinking he was going to be gone only for a short hike, Burke had left his first aid kit in the car. So, he and Chloe talked through how to improvise tourniquets from what he had: His backpack, his fanny pack, and his binocular harness.

To call 911, Chloe knew she’d have to hang up.

“It was such a scary thing to disconnect the phone, wondering if that’s going to be the last time that I talk to you,” she said in a conversation with Burke and the News&Guide a few days after the attack.

But she hung up anyway and called first responders. As she waited, she paced, wondering whether she should just run into the backcountry to find Burke herself. Chloe stopped herself, knowing she shouldn’t become a second victim.

Burke, meanwhile, hung tight. The tourniquets were making it hard to move, and the rescuers had told him to stay where he was. But he didn’t feel safe. He wanted to climb a tree, but lay still instead, his last sense of defense: his knife.

He held the blade in his hand.

In the meantime, rescuers reached Chloe in the parking lot. She was recovering from a moment of panic, and not communicating clearly. Chloe and the rescuers called Burke, but struggled to find him based on the initial coordinates he had sent.

Ultimately, they hung up, and Burke called 911, which allowed the Jenny Lake Rangers and Teton County Search and Rescue to find his location.

Soon after, the Search and Rescue helicopter buzzed overhead, a surreal feeling, Burke said. Seeing the chopper helped him calm down.

“There’s hope,” he remembered thinking.

Then, the first rangers arrived through the woods.

“When I saw the first ranger, and I saw the guns, I was just like, OK, I’m definitely safe,” he said.

His next thought came quickly.

“I was like, ‘Please don’t kill the bear,’” Burke said. “She was just protecting her cub.”

The rangers said they would investigate. A week and half later, officials say they aren’t attempting to find the bear or take action against her. They’ve described the incident as a “surprise encounter,” and have said the bear acted in self-defense.

As the rangers got to work, Burke was in pain. But they talked to him about everything they were doing, including packing his puncture wounds with gauze. Burke, a disabled veteran in the U.S. Army Reserves, was familiar with what they were doing: blood sweeps intended to find where he was bleeding, and tending those wounds specifically.

“Every time they turned me around they found a new hole,” Burke said.

When the rangers’ field work wrapped up, the helicopter dropped a line, and Burke was bundled up with another rescuer, tied in and short hauled from Signal Mountain to a landing zone near the Potholes Turnout a few miles south. There, he was reunited with Chloe and loaded into an ambulance that took him to St. John’s Health, where his wounds were stapled and stitched shut and his dark sense of humor also took over. Within a day he was discharged and drove to Phoenix to rest at his uncle’s house for a few days before heading home to Massachusetts.

The car ride was painful.

Most of Burke’s wounds are below his butt.

In the hospital, Burke called his friend and told him he’d been mauled by a grizzly. The friend asked him when he’d start staying out of the woods.

Burke, however, doesn’t plan to stop.

“There’s risks in every day of life, and you shouldn’t stop living just because there’s risks,” Burke said. “I wouldn’t want to go through this again, but I wouldn’t change it either.”

What went wrong?

More grizzly attacks have occurred as their range expands outside the core of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. However, because more grizzlies are now occupying more densely populated, or more heavily visited areas like Grand Teton National Park, researchers say attacks are down on a per capita basis.

“Bears are actually pretty tolerant of us and these events are actually pretty rare,” Kerry Gunther, Yellowstone National Park’s bear biologist, said in 2023. “A lot of what could be done to prevent them would be human behavior changes.”

Those behavior changes include staying vigilant, carrying bear spray and knowing how to use it, making noise to warn bears of your presence, and hiking in groups of three or more people and staying on trails. Burke did most of that.

But he chose to hike alone, and chose to hike off trail. Experts say that hiking in groups more easily alerts bears to human presence and that bears more easily adjust to regular human activity on trails than less predictable off-trail hiking.

Burke, however, won’t rule out hiking alone again.

“People keep saying, ‘Would you ever go out alone again?” Burke said. “Absolutely.”

Thousands of people do that every day, he said.

But Chloe feels differently.

“You heard his point of view on whether or not he should have been out there alone,” she said. “And I recognize he has free will and the autonomy to do so. But I think if I could have done anything differently, I wouldn’t have left him.

“Maybe he wouldn’t have been perceived as a threat,” Chloe said.

Lessons learned

She and her husband do agree, however, that Burke shouldn’t have left his med kit. And that he shouldn’t have left his inReach, a satellite communication device that can send texts and coordinates in places where cellphones can’t.

Burke was happy that he knew to drop and play dead when a grizzly attacked — in part because he’d been reading information kiosks in the national parks. But Chloe was shocked at how close to the parking lot the attack happened.

“The thing that we say to each other a lot as we’re getting ready for any type of adventure is, ‘I’d rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it,’” Chloe said. “This just opened our eyes as to what it truly means to be prepared.”

After the incident, the couple and their dog were making the most of their time in Arizona and embracing the road on their trip back to Massachusetts. They haven’t ruled out a honeymoon 2.0 and are thinking about Florida, though they laughed when reminded of the Sunshine State’s notorious alligators.

But the Burkes aren’t done with the Cowboy State.

“We will come back,” Burke said. “Absolutely I’ll come back to Wyoming. It was beautiful, and I want to experience it the way I want to.”

This story was published on May 29, 2024.