Hunted - Hardcover

David-fletcher

3.14

93 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1841194956 ISBN 13: 9781841194950

Publisher: Constable, 2002

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'From the first moment I stepped off the highway and entered the wilderness, I knew that something was watching me. It was the most primitive hatred imaginable reaching out towards me, seeking to burn me from the face of the earth.' When British climber David Fletcher decided to explore the remote Hayes group of mountains in Alaska he was wamed about soloing so far from rescue. Never could he have imagined that he was about to enter into a battle as fierce as Captain Ahab's with the great whale. But this is real life, not fiction, and Fletcher's adversary is the most feared creature in the Alaskan wildemess, a grizzly - a 10-foot high, 3-ton, furious mother bear whose cub he has accidentally killed in a moment of panic. Fletcher is appalled at his own mistake and full of sorrow for the bear, but he knows that unless he can kill her, she will certainly destroy him. Hunted is the true story of how the vengeful bear, each of her paws wider than a man's chest, with talons five inches long, stalks her human quarry over the rugged Alaskan terrain, cutting him off from his food supply, nearly comering him time and again, her claws raking his climbing boots as he hangs from a rope inches above her reach, once trapping him in a crevasse which threatens to collapse in on him under her shifting weight as she reaches to hook him out. Man and bear are partners in a deadly game, a strange intimacy. Seldom has the remorseless contest between man and beast been so vividly portrayed.

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About the Author:

David Fletcher is a mountaineer who spent nine years in the Royal Marines, and now lives in Hull, with his family. He tells his elemental story with a stark total recall and an intensity of emotion which defies the reader to put the book down until it is finished.

From Publishers Weekly:

Fletcher, an experienced climber and adventurer, recounts 10 days of terror in the Alaskan wilderness with this rather unspectacular telling of an otherwise spectacular tale. Fletcher offers a step-by-step account of his ultimately successful attempt to hike into the backwoods of some of America's roughest terrain and reach the summit of Mount Hess. Early on, he is startled by a grizzly cub and reacts by hurling his ice-ax and killing the animal. From there, he is ruthlessly tracked by the cub's mother. As if that weren't enough, his life is also put in danger when he is nearly entombed in a sinkhole of rubble and, later, when he pushes to the summit in the face of an approaching blizzard. The best parts, however, deal with Fletcher's encounters with the enraged grizzly, particularly in the final confrontation, which occupies the last quarter of the book; the story of his battle with the mother bear makes for some good page-turning nonfiction. While the travails of Fletcher's summit attempt pale in comparison to the intrigue of the predator awaiting him on his descent, readers will marvel at the author's ordeal with the bear and his resourcefulness, determination and, perhaps most of all, good fortune.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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