Kendall Cummings could feel the grizzly bear’s jaws tearing through flesh down to his skull, but the adrenaline coursing through his body made it a painless sensation.
“I could hear when his teeth would hit my skull, I could feel when he’d bite down on my bones and they’d kind of crunch,” Cummings told Cowboy State Daily on Monday morning.
Cummings and his wrestling teammate at Northwest College in Powell, Brady Lowry,
were attacked by a grizzly bear Saturday afternoon outside Cody. The two survived but suffered serious injuries from the angry bruin.
The bear first attacked Lowry, but Cummings, an Evanston native, jumped into action to pull him off.
Cummings successfully got the bear’s attention. Backing up as the predator reared up toward him, he described the sensation of the bear’s putrid breath filling his nostrils and himself with a sense of dread.
Attacked Again
The bear charged at Cummings with surprising speed, immediately knocking him to the ground. After a short while in the grip of jaws, the bear left him. Cummings’ thoughts were not on his own injuries, but rather that the bear would attack Lowry again. It was when he stood up to look for his teammate that the bear attacked again.