Product Description

'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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1039717 in Books
• Published on: 2002-04-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Daily Mail, April 12, 2002
'Fans of mountaineering and extreme sports will, no doubt, find...this true story intensely thrilling.'

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.

Customer Reviews

One of the worst books I have ever read.
This is the first review I have submitted, I felt I had to, to warn others so here goes: Its terrible a badly written cimbing story with the bear added to dress it up, Its write up and the story line sounded like a great read but I found it so far fetched it was far from enjoyable,even with my basic climbing knowledge I could pick holes right through this story, and it supposed to be true, Could you imagine an experienced climber making camp inside a crevasse on an unstable glacier right after a section of this glacier as the writter puts it "suddenly explodes" just missing him. need I add more, it must be very very roughly based on a true story,

So far fetched it could be a Sly Stallone movie!
Having spent a fair amount of time in Canada and studying grizzly bears I was intrigued by this story. Basically he heads of into Alaska and is stalked by a bear after he accidentally kills a cub.

The book reads like a schoolboy's diary (he even takes time out to start mini-avalanches for fun) and doesn't really set the scene at all well. However, my biggest criticism is that the story is so far fetched I found myself laughing rather than being engrossed by the hunt and the chase. He endows this bear with the same sort of tenacity as the robot in Terminator and I was beginning to think that sooner or later it would track him into a smelting plant and would meet its death in molten steel! The 'real' conclusion isn't too far from this - I almost expected the words "I'll be back" to be uttered by the bear as it disappeared below the ice.

I was waiting for the final chapter to read like a 'B' movie -'back home in England I was in Sainsburys when my mortal foe appeared from the chiller cabinet - damn the bear must have hidden in that shipment of Alaskan Salmon.......'

If you want to read a book about bears buy by Bear Attacks by Stephen Herrero; if you want to read a book about climbing then read Deep Play by Paul Pritchard; but if you want to laugh with incredulity then you can have my copy of this!

Great adventure page turner
A really enjoyable book. I like books that simply describe amazing experiences without the waffle, this book does exactly that. Exciting, well written and true. Amazing.