“You scared?” asks the fugitive in the camouflage pants as he sidles up to our pre-arranged meeting point in a small Canadian park. He wears sunglasses to hide his eyes and a broad-brimmed hat to hide his face. He scans the park perimeter for police. “Cuz I’m scared enough for both of us.”

It’s a dramatic introduction, but Christopher “Commander X” Doyon leads a dramatic life these days. He jumped bail and fled the US after the FBI arrested him in 2011 for bringing down a county government website—the only Anonymous-affiliated activist yet to take such a step. When I meet him months after his flight, he remains jumpy about getting caught. But Doyon has a story he wants to tell, and after he removes his hat, sunglasses, and backpack, he soon warms to the telling of it. It's the story of how, in Doyon's words, "the USA has become so tyrannical that a human rights/information activist would feel compelled to flee into exile and seek sanctuary in another country.”

And it goes like this.

Cease fire

On December 16, 2010, at exactly 12:30pm, Doyon issued a typed order into an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) room used by the hacker collective Anonymous. "CEASE FIRE," it said in all caps. The command had no visible effect in the Starbucks where Doyon was working, though somewhere nearby the Web servers for Santa Cruz County, California groaned back to life after being flattened by a 30-minute distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack meant to protest an ordinance that regulated sleeping on public property.

Doyon unfocused his attention from his laptop screen and looked up at the coffee shop around him. Real life rushed back—the buzz of conversation, the smell of roasted beans. No one paid him any special attention, but Doyon felt a sudden pang of fear.

“It dawns on me… this isn’t Paypal or MasterCard,” he tells me when we meet in Canada. “This is fucking two blocks away. I just took down a government website two blocks away—and I told everybody I was going to do it. My heart starts to pound.”

He stepped out of the coffee shop and onto Pacific Avenue. Down the street, a reporter from local TV station KSBW was doing a “stand-up” with the Santa Cruz chief of police, asking the chief about the just-concluded denial of service attack. The chief was looking right at him.

So Doyon hopped a bus that took him into the mountains 20 miles outside of Santa Cruz proper, where he hiked up to the “pot camp” he called home for the moment. He stayed in the camp for a full week, scared of pursuit, until he was eating crusts of bread. The winter weather turned cold and wet, and Doyon grew miserable and hungry. He returned from the mountains to his old haunts in town and eventually to his regular coffee shops—despite knowing this “was a bad fucking idea.” He had reason to worry; over the last decade, by his own admission, he has done nothing but cause trouble in Santa Cruz. The cops knew him well.

One day in mid January, Doyon dropped by a favorite coffee shop, sat down, and opened his laptop. The barista was acting odd, giving a strange jerk of his head that made Doyon wonder if the man had a tic in his neck. Doyon logged into his password-protected computer and had just started work on the "operations" that take up most of his time when “a fucking arm comes from fucking behind me” and snatches his laptop by its screen. Doyon looked up to find a local cop holding his machine. The sudden realization of what happened hit him hard.

“I’m fucked,” Doyon says, remembering the moment. “They got the computer running.”

Doyon could be looking at years in prison.

The thought of long-term confinement was intolerable.

He decided to run.

On screen, his documents were open for anyone to read: the press release announcing the attack, the Anonymous chat logs used to coordinate it, the High Orbit Ion Cannon (HOIC) computer attack tool. Out from the back room came a couple of FBI cybercrime agents in their “scruffy-ass fucking hoodies” and blue jeans. Doyon, one of the 40 Anons raided that day in a major sweep across the country, was served with a search warrant. In a press release announcing the raids, the FBI reminded people that "facilitating or conducting a DDoS attack is illegal."

Doyon wasn't immediately arrested on the DDoS charge, but he knew that a net was closing around him. He returned to his mountain camp and “smoked some fucking weed” before considering his options. The feds had all the data they needed to tie him to the Santa Cruz County attack, and he knew that federal charges were serious—"intentional damage to a protected computer” under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) is punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a fine of $250,000. “Conspiracy” to attack a protected computer could add another five years. All that Santa Cruz County would have to show was that Doyon had caused $5,000 in damage (in the end, the county came up with a figure of $6,300), and he could be looking at years in prison. For someone who had lived outdoors for years, the thought of long-term confinement was intolerable. Doyon decided to run.

Within 48 hours, he had stowed his belongings in his mountain pack, hiked down the ridgeline from his camp until he struck Route 1, and hitchhiked north to San Francisco. He “ran in circles around the Bay Area” for a few months, moving from Berkeley to San Francisco proper to Silicon Valley cities like Mountain View. Doyon claims that a source within the FBI’s cybercrime division got in touch and warned him that a grand jury had issued an indictment and that an arrest was imminent. (The FBI did not respond to our requests for comment on these claims.)

So Doyon hopped a Greyhound bus to Helena, Montana. He planned to cross the unfenced Canadian border, taking up a new life as a fugitive. Such decisions aren’t made lightly. “When any person makes the weighty decision to leave their homeland and enter political exile they would be naïve to not accept the fact that they may never be able to go home,” Doyon says, reflecting on his experience. “Have I accepted this fact? Yes. Am I at peace with it? No, the pain of missing my loved ones and my home is with me every day. I don't expect it will ever be different.”

But first, he had to actually cross the border, a long hike through the wilderness. And although Doyon counted on plenty of hardships along the way, his first attempt at crossing to Canada brought a novel one: grizzly bears.

Attack and retreat

Doyon, now in his early 50s, grew up in a rural part of Maine, spending days or even weeks alone in the woods during summer vacations. He had seen plenty of small black bears and knew that even a BB gun could scare them off. While the forests and mountains of the Northwest held grizzlies, Doyon didn’t expect them to pose that much more of a challenge.

The National Forest Service had a different view. After hitchhiking from Helena to Bonners Ferry, Idaho, Doyon crossed back into Montana in order to strike Kootenai National Forest. His research told him the national forest route was safer than simply hiking north from Bonners Ferry, since the Idaho land was private property all the way to the Canadian border. “If you know anything about Idaho, then you know they don't much like trespassers,” he says.

But the rangers at Kootenai weren’t keen on him entering their territory, either.

“I tried to walk through the front gate and the warden of the park wouldn’t let me in,” Doyon says. “I was like, ‘Why?’ and he’s like, ‘You gotta buy bear spray.’ And I was like, ‘No big deal’—I was figuring it was like a little can of Raid or something like that, right? Fucking thing is the size of a fire extinguisher and costs a hundred and fifty bucks. I was like, ‘That’s bear spray? You ain’t got a smaller size than that?’ He was like, ‘Dude, you don’t want a smaller size than that.’”

“Bear spray” is simply a form of pepper spray, generally a two percent capsaicin solution that can reach up to 30 feet away. It can help scare off a bear, but it doesn’t always work. “There have been cases where bear spray apparently repelled aggressive or attacking bears and accounts where it has not worked as well as expected,” warns the government. Outfitter REI has its own, blunter warning: “Use with extreme caution—if not used properly, it can disable the user rather than the bear.”

Undeterred, Doyon left the ranger station without the spray, hiked three miles up the road, and “just jumped the fence.” He set out for Canada, using a small GPS unit to track his progress, walking alone through the backcountry with all of his worldly possessions in his pack. The goal was to make it to Canada’s route 59, south of a town called Creston, where Doyon had arranged for a sympathizer to pick him up. As the sun dropped below the western mountains, Doyon made camp, burrowed into his sleeping bag, and went to sleep.

He woke to the sound of snuffling. Attracted by the scent of Doyon’s food, a grizzly bear had lumbered into camp in the middle of the night.

“I came out of the tent and this thing goes right up on its fucking hind legs,” says Doyon, performing quite a credible impression of a roaring bear. “I got fucking piss running down my leg and shit. I just ran like hell.”

He later crept back to camp and found the bear had left, but not before eating or spoiling much of his food. Doyon gathered the salvageable food and gear, stuffed it back into his pack, and decided to make one more attempt to reach Canada. When the sun rose, he hiked north again but spent the entire day slogging through a few miles of tough backcountry. As night fell on the second day, Doyon made camp again, went to sleep again, and woke again to another bear. This time, the animal wrecked his laptop.

“That’s fucking it,” he concluded. “Fuck this shit.”

He trekked out of the park and hitchhiked back down to Helena, where he caught a Greyhound back to California. 72 hours after facing his second grizzly, Doyon stepped off the bus in San Francisco. It was May 2011. He remained a wanted man.

Listing image by Nate Anderson