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If a grizzly bear had nearly taken your life, displaying a stuffed bear in your living room might be the last thing you’d consider. Yet, Susan Aikens isn’t like most people.
When she was just 12, Aikens faced abandonment by her mother in a tent deep within the Alaskan wilderness. For two years, she relied solely on her instincts to survive until her mother’s return, who casually noted her daughter’s weight loss.
Aikens did attempt to settle elsewhere, in places like Mexico, Colorado, and Oregon. However, the allure of Alaska kept drawing her back.
She found herself managing a remote scientific and hunting camp within the Arctic Circle, a staggering 500 miles from Fairbanks, Alaska’s second-largest city, when she encountered the grizzly bear attack.
Civilization in the form of Fairbanks, Alaska’s second largest city, was 500 miles away and she was running a remote scientific and hunting encampment in the Arctic Circle when that grizzly bear attack happened.
After the epic struggle, she was alone for ten days, drifting in and out of consciousness, until a pilot friend checked on her and saved her life.
As for Ben, the black bear in her living room? He’s another that attacked her – there have been a handful over the years. She killed him, ate the meat, then stuffed his carcass herself.
Now a 62-year-old great-grandmother, Aikens has written a jaw-dropping book about her life. Even her family can’t quite grasp the epic scale of her existence.
Susan Aikens has written a jaw-dropping book about her life in the Alaskan wilderness
Aikens survived a 2007 grizzly bear attack that very nearly killed her
Aikens is seen with one of several bears which attacked her. In 2007 she almost died in an ambush by a grizzly bear. She’s pictured with a black bear which she shot in self defense
‘People have been asking me for a long time: “Oh my gosh, are you going to write a book? You need to write a book,”‘ she told the Daily Mail, speaking by Zoom from the log cabin she built in 2000, on the same plot of land where she was deposited as a 12-year-old.
It’s negative 35 degrees Fahrenheit outside, and she rose ‘extra early’ to put enough fuel in the generator to have consistent Wi-Fi.
The day before we speak she melted snow to wash her hair: her cabin only has running water from May to September.
Aikens never really thought her life was remarkable until her youngest granddaughter caught an episode of Life Below Zero, the Emmy-winning National Geographic show in which she was featured from 2013 until 2023.
She was visiting her in Portland, Oregon, at the time. Aikens recalled: ‘The show was on and she’s looking up at me and she’s looking at the TV again, and she says: “Grandma, do you really do that?”
‘And I’m on the show getting an animal and making dinner and what the hell is hard about that? I realized, “You really don’t know who I am, huh?” I was like, alright, maybe it’s time.’
Born in the suburbs of Chicago, she never knew her father and was raised by her chaotic mother alongside five much older half-siblings.
Starved of attention and care, shunned and belittled by her caustic parent, Aikens writes that her mother was ‘too busy struggling with her own demons to give me what I needed.’
Aikens is pictured in Kavik, the remote tented camp north of the Arctic Circle which she runs
In between fifth and sixth grade, the young loner was sent by her mother to spend the summer with an acquaintance in North Dakota: there, she befriended an elder from the Dakota who taught her about the native plants and landscape. That education would come to save her life.
When Aikens was 12, her mother, fleeing a violent relationship, shoved her daughter into a car and drove 2,600 miles across the country to Alaska. Aikens’s much older oil-worker sibling, Charlie, lived in Fairbanks and she carried his address in her pocket.
Charlie was not at the half-built log cabin 30-odd miles out of the city when Aikens and her mother arrived, so they pitched their tent in the field that he owned.
Two weeks later, Aikens’s mother told her she was going to the shops and drove off. She didn’t return for two years.
Against all odds, Aikens survived.
Determined not to declare herself lost and end up with a suffocating foster family, she spent the first few months in an abandoned cabin in the woods, surviving on berries, bark and fish before returning to the tent on her brother Charlie’s land.
She found work babysitting local children and the parents agreed to sign her up for school. The kindly school bus driver showed her a nearby army dump, from which she foraged a tent heater.
When, eventually, her mother returned, Aikens writes in North of Ordinary that she ‘waltzed toward me like she’d never left. “Susan!” she exclaimed. “I’m back! You’re looking well. Have you lost weight?”‘
Aikens was furious and stunned. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given their history, Aikens chose not to stay with her mother but instead struck out on her own.
Yet, remarkably, when her mother died in July 2025, at the age of 88, Aikens was with her and without any bitterness.
At the time she wrote an Instagram post in which she showed not rancor but love to the woman who had shaped her life as much by her absence as her presence.
She wrote: ‘As I told my mother yesterday, Hey Woman!! It’s been a hell of a ride hasn’t it?!
‘Truth be told I’m glad it was with you. To have done it any differently would’ve changed both of us and I do love you. Don’t understand you, but I love you nonetheless.’
Thrice married, Aikens now lives alone and takes joy in the solitude of her existence.
Aikens is seen at a temporary structure in Kavik, the camp she runs in northern Alaska
‘People have been asking me for a long time: “Oh my gosh, are you going to write a book? You need to write a book,”‘ she told the Daily Mail
Her first husband died of a brain tumor after mere months of marriage; her second marriage ended in amicable divorce when his life kept him in Oregon.
Her third, disastrous, attempt saw her tie the knot with a man she liked but didn’t really love, so they could move as a couple – required for safety – to Kavik River Camp, a base for scientific research, hunting and hiking 500 miles by plane north of Fairbanks, near the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Several years later he emptied her accounts and ran. She now has a two-mile restraining order against him: he is a mean marksman, easily able to take a shot from over a mile.
It’s a life that would have defeated most people – even without that grizzly attack.
Aikens was alone at Kavik in 2007, preparing to hunker down for the winter, when the juvenile bear leapt on her as she was fetching water from the river.
‘It took me a long time to write that [section] because I think in pictures and movies. How do I accurately express what I went through?’ she said. Even today her eyes well up at the memory.
Aikens knew that there was no point in fighting the 500lb creature, which mercifully was a ‘beta’ male – not yet an alpha. Were it an alpha she is certain it would have killed her instantly.
Instead, it toyed with her for an agonizingly long while, dragging her up from the river and smashing her up and down, leaving her lying helpless on the tundra and ambling away before turning and charging back for more.
‘On the last charge, the beta put his jaws around my head and started to squeeze,’ she writes. ‘To this day I can smell his thick, musty breath as it washed over my face and I heard the sound of my skull cracking in his teeth. It’s a sound I hope nobody else ever has to hear.
‘Because no matter how tough you think you are, nothing on Earth can prepare you for the sound of your own skull cracking in the jaws of a grizzly.’
‘No matter how tough you think you are, nothing on Earth can prepare you for the sound of your own skull cracking in the jaws of a grizzly’
The bear eventually left, leaving Aikens to drag herself back to her tent. Both her hips were dislocated, as well as her shoulder. She had multiple fractures to her arms, legs and facial bones.
Her spinal disk was protruding into her vertebrae. Infection was raging through her body from all the bites and she was covered in blood.
But once there, Aikens knew she had to do the almost unimaginable. She had to go back outside and kill that bear that had so viciously mauled her.
So she retrieved her rifle, and when the bear came back, as she knew he would, she shot him.
‘Relief washed over me as the tears poured out,’ she writes. ‘The immediate danger was over, the beta now still and silent underneath me. At the same time, though, an overwhelming, visceral wave of raw emotion welled up inside me: triumph, loss, guilt, sadness, and exhaustion.
‘Despite everything that the beta had done to me, despite the dislocations and the broken bones, the mangled spine, the lacerations and punctures that would scar my body for the rest of my life, I felt sad at having taken his life. Even in self-defense, the weight of having killed was not lost on me.’
Aikens dragged herself back to the tent and blacked out. She would not be found for ten days, until a passing pilot swooped down to check up on her.
Her injuries required several months in hospital. Who would have blamed her had she never wanted to set foot in the wilderness again?
Aikens spent ten days lying in her tent with massive injuries until she was rescued by a pilot
Yet, as soon as she was physically able, she did just that, returning to the place where she so nearly lost her life.
‘Kavik wasn’t just where I lived; it was where I existed, raw and unfiltered, in a way I never could anywhere else,’ she writes.
Now, almost 20 years later, she still spends her summers running the camp – despite costs spiraling tenfold post-pandemic. It is now $12,000 for a return flight from Fairbanks to Kavik, in a small plane.
Winters are spent ‘south’ in her cabin near Fairbanks.
As the years pass, however, she is confronted by the one thing she can’t defeat: time.
She feels change may be in the air, but it’s unclear what that could look like.
She has no desire to move to Alaska’s largest city – Anchorage – which she refers to, dismissively, as ‘California.’
‘My children have weighed in,’ she said. ‘They want me to be more accessible, and spend more time with their children.
‘As I’m getting older, I’ve officially spent more time on the planet than I have left on it. I had to have the neck fused, where the bear attack happened, and I didn’t know at the time but some of the enzymes caused a big infection in between the skull and the gray matter, and several cysts that ruptured.
‘All I can tell you is I feel change. I’m still as curious as that little kid with a $100 bill in a candy store. And it makes me sad.
‘There’s so much I want to see and do. Logic says, there better be reincarnation, because I’m not going to make it all.’
Is that why she wrote the book – part memoir, part adventure, part philosophy? And, she says, a love letter to the 49th state.
‘People tend to have real gut, large, emotional reactions to Alaska,’ she said. ‘Maybe that’s what I want them to see out of the book.
‘If it’s a football game, you get out of the bleachers. You’re not living if you’re not on the ground running with the ball.
‘Life is large, and you don’t live it on the sidelines.’