A person who survived more than 70 days lost in a forest on Vancouver Island said they survived on advice from an uncle, eating some canned food and snow and never giving up hope.
Kevin “Bear” Henry, who is a two-spirit Indigenous person and uses gender-neutral pronouns, last spoke to family members on Nov. 27.
They said they were going to visit the camps in the Fairy Creek area where people were protesting old-growth logging.
However, it was dark and raining so hard, Henry said they thought they had gone too far but whenever they tried to back up their 1980s camper van, there wasn’t enough room.
“So I just kept going, trying to find a place to turn around,” Henry said. “Eventually it got to a point where it got even worse. I got to a mountain road and my van was just crashing and bumping and eventually, I hit a bump and my van just turned off.”
They eventually got it started again but there was nowhere to turn around and after coming around a bend, they said the van got stuck in mud.
“It was dark and it was raining and I couldn’t see anything and I was like, ‘I have to go to bed,'” Henry said.
“I knew I had minimal food supplies because I wasn’t going to be (at the camp) that long. I was only going to be there two or three days.”
Henry said they grew up on Vancouver Island and they know logging roads but they could not find the camp.
They have a broken back so walking for long distances was very painful. They were stabbed in the back years ago and were paralyzed for four years before walking again.
“I was always taught to stay where I’m lost so I couldn’t leave, I was so scared,” Henry said.
They even saw helicopters searching for them but they admitted they didn’t tell anyone where they were going.
“Why did I do that,” they asked.
Henry is about 30 kilograms lighter than when they left for the camp in late November.
They said they spent their days napping, daydreaming and trying to stay sane in their van.
“No one could hear me scream, no one knew where I was,” Henry said. “Every day was just terrifying.”
They estimate they were about 60 to 70 kilometres outside of the Caycuse watershed. It took them about 15 hours to walk to the top of the Caycuse Road when they finally decided they had to try and walk to find help.
On Feb. 9, drivers from Gemini Logging spotted Henry on the road.
“Even the two guys from Gemini fallers, they literally got cleared to leave early,” Henry said. “They were like, ‘Man, if you were just moments slower, we barely even saw you. We thought you were a tree’.”
“I said, please help me, I’ve been walking for two days.”
They asked the two guys what day it was and that’s when they found out they had been missing for 74 days.
“They said, ‘Where do you want to go?” Henry said.
“I’m like, Tim Hortons.”
According to Henry, they learned a lot about the land in that remote area while they were lost. They said the logging and clear-cutting is devastating and the land is “dying.”
Henry had been involved in the Fairy Creek blockade, which the BC Green Party has called the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history.
More than a thousand people have been arrested in the southern Vancouver Island area in an effort to stop old-growth logging.
Henry said they survived on the advice of their uncle James who taught them to follow the sun, take rests, sip water and survive off food in the van.
“Cat food, beans, anything I could find,” they said. “There were cans of tomato sauce, raw rice that I had soaked in water for days. Anything. I’m like, ‘I like tomatoes now’.”
They also ate snow once the snow fell in mid-December.
“My uncle said lie down if you can’t do anything else, just get through it.”
Henry said they were surprised to learn they had been missing for so long. They thought it had been a week, not months.
“How did I survive 74 days?” they said, adding that if they had not decided to try and walk to safety they may have never been found.
The workers even gave Henry $20 when they dropped them off at a Tim Hortons in Lake Cowichan.
“That kind of care and support to do that, that’s humanity right there,” they said.