A woman visiting Svalbard in Norway caught a very close call on film—a polar bear chasing a man. The man had fired a warning shot toward the polar bear, but it had the opposite effect he wanted. Instead of scaring the bear away, his warning shot caused the bear to charge. Had anything else gone wrong, this scene could have had a very different ending.
“Wild nights in the arctic circle,” wrote Rebecca Baack, the woman who captured the footage and posted it on Instagram. Baack was staying in Pyramiden, an abandoned coal-mining town in Norway’s Arctic, when a polar bear starting roaming around outside the hotel.
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After the man fired a warning shot and the polar bear charged toward him, he dropped the weapon and leapt onto a snowmobile. Thankfully, he got away. The tourists watching the scene unfold from a balcony of the hotel go from terror to relief as the man sped away and the polar bear gave up the chase.
“I have never trusted anything in this world as much as he trusted the starter on that sled,” wrote one person in the comments section of Baack’s video.
Watch a polar bear chasing a man in Norway here:
Here’s a follow-up video showing the same polar bear wandering around after the encounter:
Header image by Raffi Maghdessian via Getty