It reads like the plot of a thriller movie or page-turning novel. A man in Alaska was rescued, injured but alive, after enduring repeated attacks by a grizzly bear that kept on returning to his isolated hut in the wilderness, from which he had no way of contacting the outside world. The unnamed man’s ordeal was detailed in the New York Times, which described the story as “a weeklong ordeal that could pass as a sequel to The Revenant”. It ended only when a fortuitously passing helicopter spotted the man desperately waving for help and having written SOS and “Help me” on the roof of his tin shack. The paper said the man in his 50s or 60s had been alone at a mining camp in the isolated region with a pistol when he encountered the bear, which had attacked him and dragged him down to a river. The man escaped but then endured repeated attacks over about a week. “He said that the bear kept coming back every night and he hadn’t slept in a few days,” Lt Cmdr Jared Carbajal, one of the pilots of the US Coast Guard helicopter, told the Times. He was only spotted when the helicopter had changed its course slightly to avoid some clouds. The chopper spotted the man’s distress and swiftly landed to find him with a bandaged leg and waving a white flag of some kind. The door of his tin shack had also been torn off. The man is now recovering from his ordeal.