Gerald Marois heard the bear before he saw it.

“I turned around and he was about 50 feet away — one of the biggest bears I had ever seen in my life.

“He looked at me and moved sideways a bit, I start backing up and he just charged me. He came full blast, man.”

Marois, 47, a retired steelworker and experienced hunter from Waubaushene, was mauled by a large black bear last Tuesday evening in a remote wooded area about 30 km northwest of Orillia.

He was airlifted to Sunnybrook hospital, where he gave the Star an exclusive and terrifying account of his near-death encounter.

Marois was planting a food plot in a small clearing about 150 feet inside the bush line, where he planned to hunt deer in the fall — “My Dad taught me that’s where you get the big buck” — when the bear came up from behind him.

“His head was huge, his eyes were really far apart from each other and he had tiny, tiny ears, which is the sign of a huge boar — probably 600 pounds.”

When the bear charged, Marois said he turned around and ran toward a nearby oak tree — “The one I wanted to put my tree-stand in” — and climbed three-quarters of the way up.

The bear followed him up.

Marois shakes as he tells the story from his hospital bed, his arms, legs and face covered in deep gashes.

Marois said he tried to fight the bear off from the trees upper branches, but it kept coming up after him.

“I was hitting him on the nose and on the head, trying to hurt him, and every time I hit him he was scraping me and just pulling on my boots.”

The bear pulled one of his boots off and started biting the bottom of his feet.

“Then he dragged me almost to the ground.”

Marois tried and tried to get away from the bear by climbing farther up the tree, but the bear repeatedly dragged him down.

“I was kicking him with the other boot and he grabbed that boot and he ripped it right off.”

The bear then tried to rip off Marois’s chest waders.

“That was messing him up, because they were coming back like an elastic, eh? And it was hard for him to rip them off.”

But the bear eventually got them.

“Then he started eating my flesh.”

Marois said he watched as the bear started eating into his right calf.

“He was eating my meat and he was licking the blood and licking himself and just enjoying every bite of it.

Marois suffered his worst injuries to his legs, which required a skin graft to repair. They look torn apart and scrawny when he lifts up his hospital gown.

“He ate my whole calf.”

Marois says he made at least 10 attempts to climb away from the bear and it kept coming after him.

“I was trying to get away from him in every direction that I could in that oak tree, but he kept on dragging me down; he wanted me down on the ground.”

Marois, who said he forgot his bear spray at home, then turned to the only weapon he had.

“I got my lighter out” — a regular cigarette lighter — “and I started burning his face.”

Marois said when he shoved the lighter in the bear’s face it clawed him in the head.

“And that was it with the lighter, eh? No more lighters.”

Proof of the bear’s swipe comes in the two long rows of stitches on the top and side of Marois’s head.

“I got really weak from that hit. I had barely nothing left, so I told God I was putting my life in his hands.”

He said he prayed to God to send his guardian angel to protect him, because he couldn’t fight the bear off any longer.

At that moment, the bear threw Marois from the tree — Marois figures about 20 feet — and he landed with a thud and a loud groan.

When he looked up he watched the bear dive out of the tree in the opposite direction.

“It seemed like God scare him, man. People don’t believe in God, but I’m telling you, man, something scare him. Because he got scared, he jumped in the rough and he took off.”

Marois said the attack definitely lasted more than 15 minutes, though he says it “felt like forever.”

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But he knew he still wasn’t safe.

He heard the bear roaming around him, gnashing his teeth and making a guttural barking noise Marois called a “bawl” — the same noise it made before charging at him.

“I was sure I was dead. I told God, ‘Keep your hand over me, protect me.’”

Marois called his wife and then 911, but the rescue team and emergency crews couldn’t find him in the thick bush.

It took rescuers — with the help of Marois’ wife, Louise Beauchamp — more than an hour to find him. All the while Marois could hear the bear nearby.

Eventually the rescuers found him, and with Marois’s legs ripped to shreds, they moved him to a clearing where the air ambulance helicopter could land.

“That’s when I finally could breathe.”

The next thing Marois remembers is waking up in the hospital.

Marois’ health has been improving every day, but doctors tell him he may need plastic surgery to fix his legs. He says he has nightmares about the attack every time he sleeps.“It’s extremely hard for me to rest.”

Though he sometimes struggles to tell the story, Marois speaks angrily about the cancellation of the spring bear hunt in Ontario more than 10 years ago.

“I want (Premier Dalton McGuinty) to reconsider the spring bear hunt, so this doesn’t happen no more.”

Mike Harris’s provincial government ended the spring bear hunt in 1999 after it had been in place for 30 years. Critics called the spring hunt “barbaric” because it often left behind thousands of orphaned cubs. All other Canadian provinces with bears have spring hunts except Nova Scotia. Ontario still has a fall bear hunt, which starts in September.

A spokesman for Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources said Friday that they thought the bear may have mistaken Marois — bent over and wearing chest waders — as a deer.

But Marois believes the bear was tracking him.

“He didn’t mistake me for nothing. That bear wanted to maul me; he was hungry and he came to get me.”

The ministry says bear encounters are not on the rise in the province, but Marois says he and his neighbours have seen different.

“We live up north, the bear are coming in our town, in our kids’ schoolyard. They walk the streets with their babies.

“I want the population of Toronto to be aware that they’re not scared of us. They roam the forest and if they’re hungry, they’ll get you, man. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

Marois said his rescuers — a combination of OPP officers, paramedics and Port Severn firefighters — risked their lives entering the bush the way they did, not knowing if the bear was still in the area.

“I want to thank them from the bottom of my heart.”

Marois, who has been living in the Waubaushene area for more than 20 years, comes from a hunting family in rural Quebec.

“I was born with a rabbit snare and a pellet gun in my hands.”

But now he says he may never hunt again.

“It will be really hard to go back in the bush after this.”