Bulldog Bear

Sightings of surviving short-faced bears are somewhat rare in Canada, but normally occur in the remote Boreal Cordillera forests of Northern British Columbia, the Yukon and especially the Nahanni Valley. They resemble grizzly bears, but almost a third larger, with a flat face sometimes described as cat-like, and have longer front legs then back legs, sometimes described as gorilla-like. Sightings of this cryptid are rare and little information is known about this animal.

In the book, Dangerous River, explorer Raymond Patterson claimed to have encountered a grizzly bear the size of a boxcar. Later in the same area, explorers Gus Kraus and Nazar Zinchuk saw a grizzly bear that was 12 feet long, which is two feet longer than the largest confirmed grizzly bear specimen. In 1965, a missionary named Father Mary wrote, “But if I told you the size of these bear tracks, you would just laugh at me. They were bear tracks all right, and an Indian said they were made by one of those giant brown bears. As far as I could make out from the Indian’s pacing things off between the trees, it would make a Kodiak look like a black bear cub”.

In his 2015 book, Canoe On The Nahanni, Adventurer and explorer D.H Koester wrote about when he paddled through one of the tributaries of the South Nahanni with his stepson, Mark in the ’70s. In the book, he described how he and his stepson capsized their canoe in some rapids. Mark pulled himself onto a ledge, while Koester crawled onto a gravel bar a bit downstream. That night, Koester saw an enormous bear emerge from the forest on the other side of the river, and wade across the rapids onto an island. He said it was the size of an Abrams tank and was bigger than a polar bear in size, reaching 12 feet long. He described the bear’s legs as being as wide as tree trunks.