On Wednesday morning, Deb Freele woke up suddenly when she felt something enter the tent she was sharing with her husband at a Montana campground.
A grizzly bear was right behind where she lay, and was moments from attacking.
"I opened my eyes, I hadn't moved and then I felt the bear crunch down on my arm," Freele told CTV News Channel during a telephone interview from Cody, Wyoming, on Thursday.
"He was behind me when he was biting me, all I could see was stars…I was pretty well blind with pain."
The attack happened in the early hours of Wednesday morning when Freele and her husband were camping at Montana's Soda Butte campground, near the famed Yellowstone National Park.
Freele was one of three victims who were attacked at the campground in the early hours of the morning.
The same bear killed 48-year-old Kevin Kammer of Grand Rapids, Michigan, and injured another male in separate attacks that wildlife officials said were the worst such incidents in the Yellowstone area in more than 20 years.
When the bear clamped down on Freele's arm, the veteran camper from London, Ont., began to scream at the bear, which kept on chewing.
Her husband slept through both the screaming and the silence that followed.
"The bear was very quiet," Freele said. "Even when he was gnawing on me, he didn't make any noise," she added, referring to the bear.
Freele then made a choice to go silent and play dead.
"I'm going to die if I don't do something differently," she recalled thinking.
Asked about the challenge of remaining silent, Freele said it's "hard to refrain from screaming while he's chewing on you, but you can do it."
On Thursday morning, wildlife officials reported that a female grizzly and two of her cubs had been captured inside Soda Butte.
Fish, Wildlife and Parks Warden Capt. Sam Sheppard said officials are confident they have captured the bear that attacked the Soda Butte campers.
He described the incident as an unusual, predatory attack by a grizzly bear.
"She basically targeted the three people and went after them," Sheppard said. "It wasn't like an archery hunter who gets between a sow and her cubs and she responds to protect them."
Sheppard said the mother will be killed and officials must still determine what will happen to its cubs.
Jim Pissot, with the WildCanada Conservation Alliance, called the episode "an extremely rare, unusual, abnormal attack."
"There are a lot of unanswered questions," he told CTV News Channel. "Most bears, including the bears in Yellowstone, are largely vegetarian and so there's no reason for them to be attracted to people at all.
"This is a female bear with cubs," he added. "But this doesn't explain why the bear apparently aggressively moved into three tents. This is what's very odd about this circumstance."
In a separate interview with ABC's Good Morning America, Freele said she remembered attacks that happened in Yellowstone years ago -- and that playing dead was the recommended course of action.
"It was something that I had remembered reading, to play dead," Freele said from Cody, Wyoming on Thursday morning. "I remembered the attacks in '68 that happened in Yellowstone and that was one of the points, I think."
Don Wilhelm was camping with his family in the campsite next to Freele.
He first heard the scream of another camper, deciding that it could be teenagers, or possibly a domestic dispute.
A few minutes later he heard the nearby screams of Freele.
"First she said, "No!' Then we heard her say, 'It's a bear! I've been attacked by a bear!" said Wilhelm's wife, Paige.
The couple then grabbed their two boys, ran to their SUV and drove around the campground honking and yelling to alert other campers about the bears.
Along the way they met with a truck leaving the campground with a teenage boy whose leg was chewed by the same bear. The youth had punched it in the nose in an attempt to scare it away.
An estimated 600 grizzly bears and hundreds of black bears are believed to reside in the Yellowstone area.
Authorities are unsure what prompted Wednesday's attacks, as all of the victims had stored their food properly while camping.
"They were doing things right," Sheppard said after the attacks were reported. "It was random. I have no idea why this bear picked these three tents out of all the tents there."
The Soda Butte campground has 27 sites in total, spread across 10 acres of land in Gallatin National Forest.
Now recovering from severe lacerations and crushed bones, Freele said she will still go camping in future -- though she admits it will take time to get over the horrifying experience.
With files from The Associated Press
