A MAN fatally shot by authorities in Alaska was a moose hunter who found the body of a young wanderer whose story was featured in the movie Into The Wild.

Gordon Samel was shot last Sunday night after he backed his pick-up truck toward a Wasilla police officer north of Anchorage, Alaska State Troopers say.

An investigative report will be provided to the state Department of Law to determine if deadly force was justified by a trooper and a Wasilla police officer, according to troopers.

Samel, 52, was among three hunters who discovered the body of Christopher McCandless in an abandoned bus on the Stampede Trail near the interior Alaska town of Healy in 1992.

McCandless was made famous by the book by Jon Krakauer and subsequent film directed by Sean Penn.

Remo Samel, Gordon Samel’s nephew, said his uncle signed a copy of Krakauer’s book a few years ago after giving a ride to German visitors looking for the bus.

They were among scores of travellers who have been drawn over the years to the place where the 24-year-old Virginian starved to death after more than three months alone trying to live off a harsh landscape.

Like many others, the visitors couldn’t reach the site because of the swollen Teklanika River.

The Germans had the book on them and asked Gordon Samel to autograph it after learning he had discovered the body of McCandless.

“They were actually surprised that they’d actually seen the guy who found him,’’ Remo Samel said, adding his uncle was glad to comply.

Remo Samel said his uncle was a good man, as well as a talented mechanic.

According to Krakauer’s book, a couple from Anchorage was standing about 15 metres from the bus when the hunters arrived.

The couple had not gone inside the bus, becoming unnerved by the smell of decay and a note taped onto the back exit of the bus that included the phrase, “I am injured, near-death and too weak to hike out of here.’’

Samel looked inside a window and saw a sleeping bag that appeared to have something in it. He stood on a stump, reached through a window and gave the bag is shake.

Peering in from another window, Samel saw a person’s head. It would turn out that McCandless had been dead for almost three weeks.

More than two decades later, the discovery was not a big topic of conversation for Samel, according to his nephew.

Originally published as ‘Into the Wild’ hunter shot dead