Trained hunters are in the business of playing the long game when stalking their prey, learning its movements and behaviour to gain an advantage.
This skill – attained only through years of experience – proved useful in an highly unexpected way for a group of Siberian hunters trekking through the undergrowth of a forest in Tynda, in the Amur region of Siberia.
As they traipsed through thick foliage, they stumbled upon a horrific discovery that shook them to their core: a woman torn apart by a bear and buried under leaves, left alone and afraid to be consumed at a later date.
But perhaps what they found next was even more shocking. The woman, a 55-year-old postal worker, was somehow – miraculously – still alive.
Mother-of-three Natalya Pasternak had been in the woods collecting birch sap with her elderly friend, 80-year-old Valentina Gorodetskaya and her dog, when the monstrous beast appeared.
Mother-of-three Natalya Pasternak (pictured) was buried underneath leaves by the bear that attacked her
A group of hunters were luckily walking through the woods Natalya was attacked in
Though the pup tried scaring the bear away by barking and growling, the bear, many times the dog’s size, charged straight at the two women.
Natalya, filled with primal fear, immediately ran before remembering that her elderly friend would never be able to outrun the beast.
‘When I saw the bear, I tried to escape. Then I remembered about my friend and stopped. That was the moment when the predator attacked me,’ she told The Siberian Times in 2015.
The bear’s sharp claws ripped deep into the woman’s flesh, cutting deep into her head, arms and legs and leaving thick scars in its wake.
She was scalped, and her legs chewed to the bone.
Natalya and her friend tried desperately to fight the enormous animal, throwing punches at its head and eyes that simply bounced off.
She was found with deep cuts across her body
Hunter Sergei Ivanov (pictured) shot and killed the bear (pictured) that attacked the mother-of-three
The postal worker admitted she quickly made peace with her own death almost as soon as the bear began attacking her.
‘A quick thought hit me: “If the bear takes my legs, I’ll be disabled for the rest of my life. It’s better to die then to be a burden to my children”‘, she said after the attack.
There was no point both of them dying, Natalya thought, before screaming at her friend to run away as fast as she could.
Petrified, Valentina sprinted to the nearest building, a water treatment facility, where she called for emergency services to find her friend, not knowing if she had survived.
Natalya, meanwhile, was left alone to suffer the bear’s vicious claws and teeth with no one there to help her.
Even in such a dire situation, however, she said she didn’t lose her mind.
The massive bear was killed by hunters
The bear attacked the two women and the dog as they collected birch sap
She somehow made a miraculous recovery after weeks in hospital
‘Despite such a nightmare I didn’t go mad. A prayer that I was screaming out loud helped me’, she said.
After what must’ve felt like a eternity the bear decided that it had done enough damage to its quarry.
Natalya was impossibly lucky that on that particular day – the bear wasn’t feeling peckish enough to eat her.
Instead, it dragged her away and buried her underneath some leaves to – it is believed – save her for a later meal.
But while the bear opted not to eat her straight away, it still guarded her body jealously for hours like it would with any prized food it had secured for itself.
That is until the hunters finally came along.
Armed with a powerful rifle, Sergei Ivanov saw the bear ‘guarding its prey’ – Mrs Pasternak.
Natalya miraculously recovered in the weeks after her 2015 bear attack
She admitted she had made peace with her death as the bear attacked her
‘I looked and saw a woman, almost completed buried,’ he said in the aftermath of the incident. ‘Only her bloodied face and one arm was sticking out, but she was alive and breathing.’
Hunting instincts kicked in, and he put a bullet through the bear – ending its life in an instant.
Still petrified as he came over to help her up, a terrified Natalya asked: ‘Did you kill the bear?!’
Now safely out of the bear’s claws, the mother was rushed to hospital in a state of severe shock.
There, she spent several weeks recovering from the horrific attack, unable to walk for most of it.
Despite all her trauma, she was grateful for her friend’s aid.
‘It’s terrible to imagine what could have happened if it wasn’t for Valentina.’