The Twenty-Ninth Day by Alex Messenger

The Twenty-Ninth Day: Surviving a Grizzly Attack in the Canadian Tundra
By Alex Messenger
Blackstone Publishing, 2019

The premise of Alex Messenger’s debut The Twenty-Ninth Day is as inviting and cinematic as the pre-credits movie opening it will certainly be before you or I are much older: cute teenager Messenger and five equally-cute young friends smiling and paddling for days down the Dubawnt River into the heart of Canada’s Nunavut wilderness, catching their delicious suppers in the river and dealing with the wonders of nature as it’s encountered in one of the most beautiful, forbidding places in North America. They face ice floes, freezing temperatures, and what Messenger describes as the “powerful, indiscriminate force” of wild lightning strikes, and they do it all with name-brand gear, tasteful product placements, and the wind whipping picturesquely through their unkempt hair. 

About half-way through this northern adventure, while he’s exploring up on a ridge away from his fellows, Messenger unexpectedly encounters the one thing that’s absolutely guaranteed to ruin such an idyll: a grizzly bear. 

He describes the encounter in vivid, needless-to-say cinematic detail (this will, after all, be the inevitable movie’s Revenant moment): both he and the bear are surprised, and both experience a spike of excitement:

Time didn’t slow. My life didn’t flash before my eyes. I was struck with clearheaded awareness, accompanied by dramatically decreased reaction time and increased speed, both mentally and physically. My fight-or-flight response was in full throttle, whining at the red line of my tachometer. I was choosing to fight. Unfortunately, so was the bear. We were two bull-headed youths, both terrified - but one was four times the other’s size. 

Alex does exactly what you’re supposed to do in such an encounter: he keeps up a steady stream of conversation in a low, calm voice, all the while backing up slowly and avoiding direct eye contact. It’s not much when balanced against a giant Pleistocene killing machine with linoleum knives for finger nails, but it keeps the tourists a bit reassured.

It doesn't work, of course. If a grizzly bear wants to attack you, no amount of calm, non-confrontational behavior will stop it – and grizzly bears almost always want to attack you. In minutes, Alex finds himself dealing with a powerful force that's anything but indiscriminate. After a few corrida-style dodges (perhaps ironically, Alex has in his pocket the whole time a copy of Mary Karr's The Liar's Club, in which, if memory serves, she, too, manages to duck-and-dodge several times an enraged animal capable of sprinting at 45 m.p.h.), the bear starts to do some damage with its enormous paws:

The impact was like being hit with a board wrapped in leather and driven by a hydraulic arm. It was fast, relentless. The paw lost no more momentum hitting my face than it would have lost batting a bug from the air. Everything echoed in sharp staccato. I grunted with the impact, my head careening to the side from the might of the blow. Now I had felt the sheer power of the creature. It was huge, fast, and impossibly strong.

When Alex wakes up, he's torn and bleeding but still alive, and the bear, though nearby, is departing. He drags himself to his feet, staggers to his camp, and collapses into the care of his fellow hikers. What had been a fresh outdoor adventure now becomes a tense race across frozen tundra to get the badly-wounded Alex to safety and medical care.

The whole thing is told in exactly the same kind of upbeat (Alex survives, obviously), turbo-charged prose that filled, for instance, Aron Ralston's Between a Rock and a Hard Place. And unlike that book, whose title had to be changed to 127 Hours for its movie adaptation, this one already has its movie title conveniently in place. All that's left is for Stranger Things' Finn Wolfhard to step into the role of Alex and do his best with a CGI bear.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Historical Novel Society, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Washington Post, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.