In July of 2017, McWilliams was dragged by his head across a campground by a bear. In April, a shark attacked him in Kauai. Images: McWilliams/Facebook
Depending on how you look at it, Dylan McWilliams is either the luckiest man on earth or the unluckiest. In a nine-month span, he’s been attacked by both a bear and a shark… and he’s lived to tell both tales.
Back on July 9th of 2017, at 4 a.m., McWilliams was rudely awoken by a bear who put his head in its mouth. He was sleeping outside in a sleeping bag. At first, the 19-year-old, who was working as a wilderness survival teacher at Glacier View Ranch in Ward, Colorado, didn’t know if he was dreaming. “I just woke up to a loud crunching sound,” he told People Magazine at the time. “I remember a lot of pain and just being drug across the ground by my head by a bear. I kind of thought it was a dream for a second. I didn’t know what was going on.”
The full grown male black bear dragged him by his head about 12 feet from his tent. McWilliams, after he realized that he was not dreaming, starting punching the bear in the eyes and nose. He kept it up for 15 or 20 seconds before the bear had enough and let him go. Other staff, also rudely awoken by the sound of their co-working being dragged away by a bear, were able to scare off the bear and called 911.
“I was very afraid for my life,” McWilliams continued. “After it dropped me and I got back to where everybody was, I just laid down, and the blood was all over my eyes and I couldn’t see. I thought I was blind.”
The teenager had only been a wildlife survival instructor for two months at the time of his attack, but his training kicked in quickly. When I was younger, I worked as a snag faller on a wildfire crew in Northern British Columbia, and each year, we were subjected to ’80s videos called “Bear Aware.” One particular piece of advice about bear behavior still stands out: “If the bear is eating you,” the bearded, flannel-clad man in the video told us, “it is no longer acting defensively.” McWilliams knew that fighting back against the bear was his best chance at living through the ordeal.
He was flown to a hospital nearby, where doctors stapled his scalp back together and released him back into the wild. The bear was not so lucky. It was caught and euthanized soon after. McWilliams, however, didn’t let the attack scare him. Soon after, he was back in the woods with another group of campers.
Now, just nine months later, McWilliams has had another run-in with a large, scary predator while on a trip to Kauai. While paddling out to the lineup at Shipwreck’s Beach off Poipu, he was attacked by a shark. Now 20 years old, McWilliams couldn’t quite believe what was happening. After he felt something hit his leg incredibly hard, he looked down. “I was looking around and saw a bunch of blood,” he told Hawaii News Now.
Some fifty yards from the beach, the reality of the situation set in. He began frantically kicking at the shark, then scratched desperately for the shore. “The scariest part was swimming back,” he said. “There was blood behind me. I didn’t know where it was.” According to a recent post on his Facebook, McWilliams believes that shark that bit him was a small tiger shark.
When he got there, people on scene did the best they could to attend to the deep wounds in his leg before he was taken to urgent care and stitched up again. He’s expected to fully recover, and like the bear attack, his most recent encounter isn’t going to keep him from enjoying the things he loves. “I’m just mad that I can’t get back in the water for a couple days,” he said.
