01x01 - This is Not a Deer!

[bunniefuu]

[music]

NARRATOR: Costa Rica.
Lush, alive, deadly.

One of the most austere
environments on Earth

and home to thousands of
species of plants and animals,

many of which can k*ll you.

Adventure TV producer,
Steve Rankin, is here to scout a remote

part of the jungle for a
survival reality show.

STEVE: I'd been on the road
for about three months already,

in various parts
of the world,

Tanzania, the
Maldives and Panama.

And so I just touched
down in Costa Rica the night before,

got a few hours sleep
and then straight into the scout.

I'm always excited to
be in a new location,

and the biodiversity in
Costa Rica is phenomenal.

Now, this time I'm at
the top of my game.

I've got this amazing
job, and I'm traveling with my fiancée.

We're very much in love.
Jackie wanted to come with me,

so that at least I do get to
spend some time with her,

because otherwise I
am not gonna see her for six months.

It's an amazing time
in both of our lives.

Really making my way in a
brand new chapter in my life.

It's early in the morning,
it's around eight o'clock,

and I'm out there with my team,

looking for potential survival locations
for the cast members on the show.

The crew that I had
were handpicked.

These were my best people.
Chris is our logistics guy you know?

He takes care of our
liaison with the local teams,

transportation, the crews,

so he really is the
backbone of the operation.

CHRIS: So, Steve and I
had a great relationship.

You know, we would joke
around with each other.

We always had a good
time. He quickly becomes your best friend.

Now, our goal was to
wander through the area,

find several places where survivalists on
the show could survive

and then pop out on the other side, close
to where the crew lodge was,

and call it a night and have dinner.
This day, obviously, took a lot longer.

NARRATOR: Local guides Gerhard and Pompeo
lead with machetes, while producer,

Matilde notes the environmental challenges
the cast will contend with.

STEVE: We're hiking through the jungle,
across a steep-sided river valley,

and it's a beautiful day.

I can hear the birds
I can hear the water

in the creek at the
bottom of the valley.

It felt very peaceful,
and I was concerned that it wouldn't be

hazardous enough for
our cast members to survive here.

I thought, Well, this
might be too easy.

CHRIS: This location
was a true jungle.

You know, you'd turn a corner and you're,
like,

Wow! Look at that beautiful waterfall,

but at the same time, every single crack
of a stick and you're,

like, 'What was that?

Is something stalking me?' so you never
kind of knew what the next corner

you turned was gonna
have in store for you.

STEVE: We're in a
pretty remote location. There's no trail.

I'm just following the
guy in front of me,

and there's a fallen
tree ahead of us which we have to cross.

So, I climb up on to
the fallen tree and I glance down

and I thought, Yep,
that looks OK, and I jumped off the top,

and as soon as my left foot
hit the ground,

I just felt this stabbing pain, like, bam!

I just yelled out, "Snake, Snake, I've
been bitten by a snake."

Ah! Snake!

CHRIS: And that's when
I heard Steve yell.

I instantly thought
Steve is joking, so I catch up to Steve,

and he turns back and
looks at me and says.

STEVE: I've been bit
by a snake.

CHRIS: I was kind of caught off guard and
I was, like, Really, dude?

It could have been a thorn or
a stick got into his shoe.

STEVE: If it was a thorn,

I'd have felt it as I
was landing or before I was landing.

It definitely happened
after my foot landed, so something hit me.

I didn't hit it.

CHRIS: And that's when
I saw his eyes turn,

and he looked and me and said, I'm being
serious. I felt it hit my foot.

And that's kind of
when I instantly knew, This is serious.

[rattling]

DR TAYLOR: I'm Emily Taylor, Professor of
Biology, from Cal Poly,

and owner of the Central
Coast Snake Services.

NARRATOR: Dr. Emily Taylor has been
studying snakes her entire life,

and she'll tell you they've got a public
relations problem.

DR TAYLOR: I think that snakes are

probably the most maligned animals on the
planet,

and they're the most misunderstood.

For example, snakes do not want to bite
people. Why would they?

That venom is for
their prey.

NARRATOR: For
scientists like Emily,

the question here is why
did this snake bite Steve?

DR TAYLOR: There's
two reasons why a snake

might accidentally bite a person.
One, because it mistook it for prey.

The second thing is for
defense, because it would think that

this bipedal mammal
walking at it was going to attack it.

STEVE: At this point,
I'm hyper-aware.

You know, my
adrenaline has just gone off the charts.

Everything's happening
in slow motion.

CHRIS: I instantly
thought, Did it get through your boot?

STEVE: And so, I took
off my left boot,

and through my sock there
was a little bit of blood,

and I was, like, Oh, I've definitely been
bitten. And it was one fang.

DR TAYLOR: That's actually
not that uncommon.

When a snake strikes, its
mouth opens, and its fangs,

that are normally folded back
and tucked away into sheaths,

actually spread away
from the head sideways.

If you blinked,
you would miss it.

So, it could be that his foot was only hit
by one of the fangs,

because it kinda went sideways.

It could be that his shoe deflected one of
the fangs away,

because fangs are
actually fairly fragile.

They break off and are
replaced all the time.

CHRIS: I instantly thought, 'Oh, this is
great. It's a super-small little bite.

Both fangs didn't get in.
And then I started thinking,

How did one get through
the boot and one didn't?

We looked at the boot and saw that there
was a tiny little drain hole

on the side of his boot,
so we're assuming that

that's where the one fang got through. I
mean, talk about bad luck.

STEVE: I'm hoping, at this point,

that with it just being one wound through
my boot,

that it might have been a dry bite. It
might have just been a warning shot.

DR TAYLOR: Unfortunately,
dry bites are not very common.

If you're lucky enough to be one of the
rare people who gets a dry bite,

then you've really
just dodged a b*llet.

A dry bite is when
a snake bites,

and actually its fangs penetrate the skin.
However, it does not inject venom.

These snakes can actually
control how much venom

they inject and whether
they inject venom at all.

It's called venom metering, and clearly

that snake does not want to waste the
venom

on something like a human, so they could
potentially bluff by biting that person,

and then not using that venom, which would
be the best possible thing.

CHRIS: We're sitting there hoping it's a
dry bite, that no venom was put into him,

and Pompeo said, "Chris,
look for the snake."

NARRATOR: With 23 different
species of venomous snakes

in the Costa Rican jungle, finding the
exact snake is crucial

for determining what
antivenom could be needed.

CHRIS: I instantly thought, I don't, one,
want to see this snake,

two, I don't wanna get
close to it, and, three,

what do I do if I find it? What I didn't
think a lot about was how many

there were around us, and that's because
you never really see them.

They look like the leaves,
they lay everywhere.

DR TAYLOR: I am a
professional snake wrangler,

and I miss snakes in
the field all the time.

When they're curled up in the leaf litter,
they look just like the forest floor.

They make a living
off of camouflage.

They're just as worried
about being taken out

by a predator as a little bird is.
Sometimes we'll be pointing at one

and showing people and they still won't
be able to see it.

CHRIS: So, I jumped
up on this log

and started looking around in the bush.
And then I saw it.

So, I called over to Pompeo. He looked
down at the snake.

STEVE: And I heard Pompeo say, say,
"Terciopelo, Terciopelo."

CHRIS: I said, What is that? and Gehard
said, Fer-de-lance,

it's a pit viper snake which
is one of the most poisonous

and deadly snakes
in Costa Rica.

STEVE: And I thought, Oh, crap! I've just
been bitten by one of those?

- Wow!
- [laughs]

NARRATOR: Terciopelo, the local name for
the fer-de-lance snake,

commonly found in Latin America.

The fer-de-lance belongs to
the deadly pit viper family,

which also includes bushmasters,
moccasins, and rattlesnakes.

DR TAYLOR: People die from fer-de-lance
bites probably every day.

Because it's a pit viper
it can strike really fast.

Because it's so large, it
can strike relatively far.

NARRATOR: The fer-de-lance has two main
evolutionary superpowers.

DR TAYLOR: So, they have the infrared pits

that allow them to see things that are
warm

at night, which includes a lot of the
rodents they like to eat,

and also, unfortunately,
can include human feet walking by.

And then they also have this venom,

and they can envenomate really, really
rapidly,

and then let go, because a struggling
rodent could injure them.

So, that envenomated rodent crawls away
and dies somewhere,

and then the craziest part
is the fer-de-lance can now

follow the scent trail of
the envenomated rodent,

and can distinguish that
rodents scent trail

from another one that
wasn't envenomated.

It eats a rodent that weighs the same
amount that it does,

without taking any bites,
without using its hands.

It's incredible what
these animals can do.

STEVE: I've been bitten
by a really deadly snake,

I don't know what's gonna happen next. And
I can start to feel

this throbbing sensation
building in my foot.

It's worrying, because I know that that's
a venomous bite.

CHRIS: I think I realized it wasn't a dry
bite when Steve started to panic.

STEVE: My heart was racing. I was panting.
You know, I was terrified.

CHRIS: So, at that point,
the clock starts ticking.

We got to get Steve
outta here.

NARRATOR: Southern California,
one of the most stunning,

scenic areas of the United States, and
also one of the most populated,

where humanity's relentless encroachment
on Mother Nature

can have devastating
consequences.

Former Marine, Anne Hjelle, is meeting
up with her friend,

Debi Nicholls at Whiting
Ranch Wilderness Park,

a popular mountain biking
spot in Orange County.

ANNE: I'm a personal trainer.
I came to live in California

because of having been stationed here
in the Marines.

I love the outdoors, I love being able to
enjoy nature all year round.

The weather was actually really nice for
being an afternoon in January,

and I decided to go
mountain biking.

I called my friend, Debi and asked her if
she wanted to meet me for a ride.

NARRATOR: Anne and Debi make their way up
to Four Corners,

a popular rest area where riders can
catch their breath

before the steep descent
of Cactus Trail.

ANNE: When I got up to
the top, it was all men

and it wouldn't be unusual for some of the
male mountain bikers

to try to make small talk with women that
they see out riding,

but I like to ride with Debi because she
didn't normally stop to chat.

Just as we were getting ready to go, I
noticed two of the guys

getting ready to
leave, as well.

I watched them as they made the left hand
turn on to Cactus.

I said to Debi "You know, let's see if we
can catch them by the bottom."

Cactus is fun and windy. It's
kinda like a roller coaster.

You are riding on the edge, where there's
usually a ravine on one side or the other.

Cactus is definitely the trail if you're
looking for excitement.

I started out ahead of Debi. She was
following pretty closely behind,

but there was several points where I was
out of sight,

just because of going
around a curve.

NARRATOR: Coming around a blind corner,
Anne comes upon a man

stopped in the middle of
the trail, with two bikes.

ANNE: My first thought was
that these were the two guys

who had just taken the
trail ahead of us,

and that perhaps they were stopping and
one of 'em was going to the bathroom.

And then he said, "I found
this abandoned bike."

I thought he was probably
trying to make small talk.

I really didn't take
it very seriously.

Because he was in the
middle of this trail,

I let off my brakes to roll past,

because Debi was barreling down the
trail right behind me.

I really thought nothing
of it at the time.

[dirt crunching]

After I rolled by, I continued along the
trail, when, all of a sudden,

I caught a glimpse of
movement over my shoulder.

I had had an experience several years
before where a deer came out of nowhere,

bounding across the
trail at head height,

so this is what I assume
is happening again.

As soon as I saw that
flash of movement,

I'm knocked off my bike,
slammed to the ground.

It felt like I just
got hit by a truck,

and I knew right away,
this is not a deer.

NARRATOR: Former Marine, Anne Hjelle,

is mountain biking in a
Southern California park,

when, out of nowhere,
something

leaps across the trail and
slams her to the ground.

ANNE: As soon as the
animal body-slammed me,

I became very aware that it had this death
grip on my shoulders.

I've never felt
something that powerful.

It felt like ten people holding me down.
There's lots of animals out there,

but there's no other animal that's gonna
try to grab you.

It had to be a
mountain lion.

NARRATOR: The mountain
lion is a top predator.

It can leap 18ft from a standstill, and
40ft on the run,

to take down an animal
seven times its size.

DR VICKERS: They're amazing predators.
They can leap great distances

and tall buildings
with a single bound.

The sort of Superman of
cats in North America.

Mountain lions are pretty essential to
avoid over abundance of deer and elk.

NARRATOR: But that doesn't explain why
they'd attack a person.

DR VICKERS: So, the decision by a mountain
lion to attack a person

with the intent of k*lling and eating, is
an extremely unique experience

for the mountain lion. They
will have never done that.

If they attack a human they almost
always end up dead.

DR SMITH: They see us running
and jogging and hiking

and mountain biking, and they almost
always leave us alone.

When an incident like
this does occur,

it does make us wonder,
why did this happen?

NARRATOR: But for Anne Hjelle, the
question of why is purely academic.

She's in a life and death
struggle with a top predator,

helpless against its evolutionary
instincts to k*ll its prey.

ANNE: I'm face down
on the trail,

with the animal on top of me, biting the
back of my neck

and dragging me off the
trail, down into a ravine.

Every time the cat adjusted
his grip, he would drag me,

adjust his grip and
drag me some more.

DR SMITH: The mountain lion attacked Anne
the way it attacks other large

prey items, stalking, ambushing, grabbing
on with its paws,

going for the face and neck, and then
trying to drag the prey

to a safe place to
where it can consume.

ANNE: At this point
I didn't feel pain.

I was still in complete shock.

I just could not believe
this was happening.

NARRATOR: Deep in the
jungle of Costa Rica,

reality producer, Steve Rankin, faces
his own reality.

He's just been bitten by one of the worlds
deadliest snakes, the fer-de-lance.

STEVE: At this this point
I can start to feel

this throbbing sensation
building in my foot,

and it's starting
to hurt, a lot.

CHRIS: He's been bit by a venomous snake
Timing is everything.

DR TAYLOR: The only treatment that is
truly gonna be successful

for a fer-de-lance bite
is gonna be antivenom,

which is gonna be administered solely in
large hospitals in metropolitan areas.

People always wanna know how quickly to
get to the nearest hospital.

As a general rule you can
say as quick as possible,

to the point where if they don't get
treatment within hours,

that limb may have
to be amputated.

STEVE: I knew I couldn't walk, because
walking is just gonna keep

pumping that venom through my body, but
there was no option.

We were in the
middle of a jungle.

DR TAYLOR: There's nothing much that you
can do to slow the spread of venom,

except to remain calm
and to not exercise.

That will slow the pumping of the blood
and spreading it through your body.

So, if someone's able
to carry you out.

NARRATOR: Local guides,
Gehard, and Pompeo,

cut down a few small trees, then use belts
and jackets from the rest of the team

to fashion a
makeshift stretcher.

STEVE: At this point, I remember saying to
Matilde "Hey,

Is anybody filming this?"
And she's, like, "No,

we're trying to get you out of here."
I said, "Well, film it."

She said, "We've got no cameras." I said,
"Well, use your phone.

You've got to document this."

- So, I was still producing it.
- [laughs]

- in my head at the same time.
- MATILDE: What's going on?

STEVE: We're walking
over a fallen tree.

I step down, felt a bang on
my left foot. Instant pain.

CHRIS: The hospital that we knew we had to
get him to was in San José,

which was about two hours
and 20 minutes by car,

once you got to the closest paved road,

so I knew I had to get him in a
helicopter.

But everything above us was canopy.

There's no way a helicopter could land
or drop a basket.

NARRATOR: Nor could Chris get a signal on
his satellite phone.

CHRIS: Gerhard and I are looking at the
GPS, trying to figure out

where the closest break in the jungle
canopy's gonna be.

We come up with a few ideas, and start
heading in that direction.

STEVE: Gerhard and Pompie,
they got their machetes out

and they started
cutting a trail.

CHRIS: I was moving, moving, moving, not
knowing how much time we have

until the venom kicks in fully and he
loses consciousness,

or worse, dies.

NARRATOR: In the hills of
Orange County, California,

Anne Hjelle is under attack by one of
North America's apex predators.

ANNE: The cat started out
on the back of my neck,

and once he wasn't able
to get a good bite on it,

he started moving around
to the side of my head.

He bit down over the
area of my left ear,

and separated my ear
from my skull.

He moved around to the front, the left
side of my face.

As he closed his grip, I could feel the
tissue of my face just peel away.

DR SMITH: Mountain lions like a lot of
other cat species,

have short faces,
short snouts,

and so they have very strong bite strength
because of that.

DR VICKERS: They typically k*ll by biting
through the spinal cord

or biting under the neck and strangling
the animals, or they can bite

through the skull
directly into the brain.

DR SMITH: They also have
incredibly strong forearms.

They have claws that are
sheathed in their paws

that they can bring
out of those sheaths.

The claws help them to
grip on to prey,

so that they can get their jaw around the
front of the prey's neck

and deliver a k*lling bite.

ANNE: I knew the cat was trying to get me
by the front of the throat

to choke me out. I had some hand-to-hand
combat training in the military,

and had done martial arts.

I took my right arm and swung over my left
shoulder and hit over and over,

and made contact with something, but it
did absolutely no good.

I really was at the
mercy of the cat,

because it had complete control of
my head in its jaws.

NARRATOR: On a mountain biking
trail in Southern California,

personal trainer, Anne
Hjelle, is on the ground

and in the jaws of a mountain lion.

Scientists wanna know why
this animal would attack.

DR VICKERS: One hypothesis might be that
this was a mistake on the mountain

lion's part, that it felt
that Anne was a prey animal.

Her movement, her shape, her size mimicked
the normal prey of a deer,

and coming upon the
mountain lion quickly,

the mountain lion may not have had time to
make a decision.

We certainly know from the research, rapid
movement, erratic movement,

both tend to be present in a
disproportionate number of attacks,

and especially
fatal attacks.

NARRATOR: Anne's friend,
Debi arrives,

shocked by the horror unfolding.

She throws the first thing
she can find, her bike.

ANNE: What Debi did in that situation, 99
percent of people would not do.

NARRATOR: The bike has no
effect on the mountain lion.

Boldly, Debi charges
it at the ravine.

ANNE: When you come across your friend in
the middle of the trail

with a mountain lion on top of them, and
you, instead of going the other way,

you go towards it,
she didn't freeze.

NARRATOR: Debi grabs Anne's leg in an
attempt to pull her from the lion's jaws,

as other riders
arrive on the scene.

ANNE: I can feel Debi hanging on to my
calf for dear life,

and I just feel like I'm being pulled in
two separate directions.

The cat is pulling me one way, and Debi is
pulling me the other.

- ANNE: Ah, ah!
- DEBI: Help me!

NARRATOR: The other riders
throw rocks at the lion.

ANNE: When I was on the
verge of blacking out,

and the cat had already made its move
around my head

and gotten me by the front of the throat,
I really did not see a way out.

Even with Debi's help, we
were both in serious trouble.

I did get to the point where
I thought, This is the end,

and then I knew to
say, Goodbye, to her.

NARRATOR: As Steve and his team make it
out of the dense canopy of the jungle,

Chris gets a signal on the satellite
phone, and calls for a helicopter rescue.

STEVE: It's getting
hotter now.

You know the day is warming up,
it's really humid.

STEVE: Ah!

CHRIS: If we can just
put him in the shade.

STEVE: It's quite a lotta weight to carry
a prone human for a long period of time.

CHRIS: Oh!

STEVE: And especially on undulating
terrain.

Right now, my foot, really throbbing,
really painful.

CHRIS: We all knew the situation was
extremely serious,

but by cracking jokes
here and there,

trying to lighten the mood,
helped him relax.

Well, the honest truth, Steve's lazy. He
doesn't wanna walk out of it.

MATILDE: It's the oldest
trick in the book.

CHRIS: Yeah! Well, Steve's gonna be back
up tonight at the bar.

[laughs]

NARRATOR: When the helicopter finds them,
it's too steep to land,

so they find the
nearest road on the GPS.

There, they'll meet a truck that can drive
them to the lodge,

where the helicopter
awaits.

CHRIS: There was never an easy stretch. We
were constantly going up steep,

slipper hills, or down steep, slippery
hills, or crossing muddy streams,

getting Steve over
this barbed wire fence.

So, while all this is going on, I see his
pain's increasing.

Every single bump
or bounce of his leg,

- he screams out in pain.
- STEVE: Ah!

CHRIS: That's when I slowly,
secretly started to panic.

STEVE: Ooh! Ah!

The pain has gone from my
foot. It's now spreading up.

It's kind of mid-calf
to below my knee,

and it was like
tiers of pain.

It was, you know, when they ask you about,
"How bad is your pain on one to ten?"

- It was a ten.
- Ah! Mmm!

DR TAYLOR: So, Steve is
starting to experience

the effects of some of the chemicals in
this complex c*ck of proteins

that are snake venoms.

The venom is, at the very beginning, is
sitting mostly inside his foot,

just causing the blood vessel walls
to start collapsing.

And then, slowly but surely, that venom is
gonna then spread

into the capillaries and
into the blood vessels.

Meanwhile, those proteins are moving out,
where, once they get into

the general circulation, they could be
causing systemic effects,

and the pain will probably
spread fairly rapidly.

- STEVE: Mmm! God!
- I was really feeling anxious and worried.

At that point I was thinking, "Well, what
are we gonna tell my fiancée?"

CHRIS: Steve was feeling that he was going
downhill pretty quickly,

so he was trying to tell me things to tell
to Jackie if he doesn't make it out.

I was trying to
change the subject,

because I felt that was leading him into a
darker place

that would increase
his heart rate,

but Steve wanted to talk
about it, so I listened.

Please tell Jackie I love her.
Please tell Jackie I'm sorry.

Please tell Jackie to be happy.

And I was prepared to deliver these
messages to Jackie,

but I also told Steve that he's the one
that's gonna be able to tell Jackie

these things at some point.

Please focus on staying calm and helping
us get you outta here.

STEVE: I did think that it could possibly
be my last words on this Earth.

NARRATOR: With the mountain lion's jaws
clamped around her neck,

Anne Hjelle has lost consciousness,

and her friend, Debi is losing the
battle to save her.

But then a rock thrown by one of the
riders makes a direct hit.

The lion releases
Anne and retreats.

DR SMITH: There's a theory for this called
the Life Dinner Principle.

An animal will generally
choose its life over food,

if it's not starving to death, in a risky
situation,

and so when more
people came to attack

and fight back against
this mountain lion

it wasn't worth it to hang on to Anne,
because it would rather go

and survive and continue
living its life.

DR VICKERS: Risk-reward is part of their
life every day.

It's a reason they don't tackle an adult
elk, necessarily.

It might choose a calf. They
can make that calculation.

At some juncture, something in their brain
is saying, you know, I may get hurt.

DR SMITH: And mountain lions give up food
all the time to wolves, to bears.

They're not always the
apex predator in a system,

and they certainly
know that humans are

the apex predator in
comparison to them.

NARRATOR: Debi and the
other riders carry Anne's

unconscious body
out of the ravine

- and set her down near the trail.
- ANNE: [Gasps] [coughs].

ANNE: When I come to, I can see Debi right
in front of me.

I'm laying on my back, and I
just cannot get a breath.

- MALE: Stay down, stay down.
- ANNE: Agh!

I feel like I am underwater, in a pool,

and I just inhaled a
whole mouthful of water.

I understand that it's probably that I'm
choking on my own blood.

MALE: We got a lady that is attacked by a
mountain lion in her face.

Her face is almost gone. I need people out
here.



MALE: At Whiting Ranch.
She's in bad condition.

- I would get somebody here now.
- 911 OPERATOR: OK.

ANNE: I can feel the weight
of my cheek hanging down,

so, essentially, the whole left side of my
face is attached only at my nose,

and it's almost like
the weight of a steak,

and it feels so
foreign to me.

You know that this is not how your face is
supposed to feel.

My instinct was just to hold it up against
my cheekbone,

so that I didn't have that sensation of
this weird weight hanging down.

NARRATOR: Within minutes, paramedics
arrive on the grisly scene

to prep Anne for an
airlift to the hospital.

ANNE: As soon as the paramedic started to
assess my injuries,

I'm sitting across from him and his hands
are shaking violently,

and I'm thinking to myself, I must look a
lot worse than how I feel, you know?

Because I'm thinking, This is a seasoned
professional, and he is rattled.

I did find out later, that the
paramedics at that time

were aware that the cat was just down
the hillside,

kind of stalking, so they're working under
an immense amount of pressure

in that situation, needing
to get me out of there.

As soon as they slid me into the
helicopter, of course, I was relieved.

I did have a strange
thought though,

that I had been a helicopter
mechanic in the Marines,

and just thinking, I just hope we don't
breakdown.

[laughs]

NARRATOR: Back in the jungle, Steve and
his team finally reach

the dirt road where a vehicle is waiting
to take them to the helicopter.

CHRIS: We're driving down
the dirt road in a 4x4,

and we make the ten minute drive to where
the helicopter was able to safely land.

Being on a dirt road, there was thousands
of bumps.

STEVE: Ah!

CHRIS: And his leg just kept bouncing
around.

STEVE: Oh, oh!

CHRIS: Steve is
screaming in pain.

STEVE: Agh!

CHRIS: But there
wasn't much we can do.

STEVE: Ah!

I'm bracing my right foot against
the passenger window,

and the pain just went through from the
soles of my feet,

- all the way up my leg.
- Agh!

CHRIS: Ten minutes goes by and we pull up
to the helicopter.

I have never been so happy to see a
helicopter in my life.

STEVE: After about
half-an-hour in the chopper,

I can see we're over San José, and we're
approaching the hospital,

and I can see there's a crash team
waiting, and I was, like, "Oh, wow!"

This is like the disaster
movie. Here we go then.

CHRIS: Now I have to go
talk to Steve's fiancée.

- There's been an accident.
- Surprisingly, she was extremely calm.

She went and packed up a bag, and we made
the two-hour drive to the hospital.

STEVE: I remember being
in the Emergency Room,

and they were putting
IV lines into me,

sh**ting me full of all
sorts of stuff,

and feeling at that
point like, "OK,

I'm in good medical hands
here." They know what species

of snake has bitten me,
which is really important,

because they can give the
correct antivenom for that.

DR TAYLOR: Antivenom is
the sera from a large,

like, hooved mammal
that has been exposed

to the venoms of usually
multiple species of snake.

They'll take something like
either a horse or a sheep,

and inject it with really
tiny amounts of venoms

from many different species.

That large animal will produce antibodies
against different proteins

that are present in
the snake's venoms,

so if we take some of
its blood, spin it down,

when we inject it into a patient,

it is going to be able to
neutralize the venoms.

STEVE: I'm in the hospital.

I have been given antivenom. The medical
team are fantastic.

The doctors are really reassuring. At this
point I'm thinking, "I've made it.

I am gonna live." I had no
clue what was coming next.

Things were gonna get
a whole lot worse.

REPORTER: A swift response
to the mountain lion attack,

Debi Nicholls was mountain biking with her
friend, Anne Hjelle when...

DEBI: This mountain lion
jumped on her back,

started dragging her,
so I grabbed her leg.

CYCLIST: The mountain lion had her face in
its mouth and would not let go.

NARRATOR: Anne arrives at
the hospital that evening,

where a team of doctors
assess her injuries.

ANNE: The doctor in charge
of the ER said later

that my injuries were the
worst he'd ever seen.

The mountain lion tore
away my whole left cheek,

it broke my nose
with its fangs,

through the bridge of my nose and through
my upper lip.

It tore away the eyelid, it tore my ear
away from my skull.

I had 20 penetrating
bite wounds to my neck.

One of the wounds went through all of the
tissue to touch my vertebral column,

and black and blue knuckles
from punching the cat.

NARRATOR: Later that night,
as Anne goes into surgery,

deputies come across
a tragic sight.

REPORTER: Responding officers
made another grisly discovery,

the body of 35-year-old Mark Jeffrey
Reynolds, mauled to death by the lion.

ANNE: When I found out that Mark Reynolds
had been k*lled by the same cat,

it put the pieces together for me, because
I realized that that biker I had passed,

who said he had found the abandoned bike,
that was Mark's bike.

[g*nsh*t]

MAN: The animal was stalking three
deputies,

about ready to possibly attack them.

Two deputies fired,
k*lling the mountain lion.

DR SMITH: Unfortunately, we don't find
that it's worth the risk

that the animal could attack
another person and so

any time a person is attacked, that
mountain lion has to be removed.

NARRATOR: Experts confirm that the
euthanized lion

was the one that k*lled
Mark Reynolds,

which raises new questions as to why it
attacked Anne, as well.

DR VICKERS: Knowing that there had
actually been a previous attack

and the mountain lion had even fed, it
does increase the mystery side of things,

by eliminating the need for food.

It kinda takes that
off of the table.

You could theorize that he attacked in
defense of his food.

However, that has rarely been our
experience

when we investigate feeding
sites,

because generally when humans approach,
the mountain lions move away.

NARRATOR: There is nothing normal about a
mountain lion attacking a human

experts agree that this
case is no exception.

DR SMITH: To me, it doesn't look like this
was a defensive behavior,

and, also, it doesn't seem to me that this
is a case of mistaken identity,

because I think if mountain lions mistook
mountain bikers

for deer we would see
more attacks than we do.

I think the best way to
understand this incident

is to think about the mountain lion as an
individual,

rather than as a representative of all
mountain lions.

They have personalities
and sometimes

they do things that we
don't expect them to do.

DR VICKERS: They're not uniform in their
behaviors. We can't know.

We can theorize that it was just that
particular animal's brain.

NARRATOR: For this particular animal, a
two-year-old male, its age

and gender may be the most important
discoveries from the necropsy.

DR VICKERS: Young male mountain lions
because they're compelled to leave home

and explore, 'cause they have to leave
their father's territory, 50 or 100 miles

or further, they have to be
equipped to be a bit bold,

'cause they have to cross highways, and so
they almost always are the animals

that find themselves in backyards or in a
downtown area

or somewhere
they shouldn't be.

They are more likely to
interact with humans in

either what's perceived as
aggression or is aggression,

so they do have this almost teenage boy
character.

Looking at it as a teenage boy here's
something they've never tried,

and, you know, they're
kinda trying everything.

They're out there
exploring the world.

NARRATOR: Anne successfully undergoes 6½
hours of surgery,

receiving over 200 stitches,

and undergoing massive reconstruction to
her face and neck.

ANNE: My surgeons
did a fantastic job.

I still have my vision.

They were able to save the tissue of my
cheek, re-attach the nerve,

so I really do focus on the good parts of
it,

as opposed to focusing on what I
lost.

NARRATOR: After doctors
in Costa Rica

administer antivenom to
Steve's fer-de-lance bite,

he's brought into a recovery room. Chris
and Jackie arrive soon after.

CHRIS: So, we walk
into the room,

and I saw this sense of calm come over
Steve when he saw Jackie,

and they basically just sat there,
held each other,

and didn't say much, and that's when I
stepped out of the room.

STEVE: I think I was quite
scared of being alone

there for a time, in
a strange place,

in a strange country, so I was delighted
to have my fiancée there.

CHRIS: The first time I saw
Steve's foot after the bite,

it was about three times
bigger than his other foot.

STEVE: Do you wanna see my
foot? This is a normal leg,

or one of my normal
legs, anyway.

CHRIS: Which is something we joked
around with, you know?

Now he's gonna have to buy
two separate pairs of shoes,

two separate pairs of pants, and get one
leg hemmed bigger.

STEVE: All that tissue swelling will go
down in the next few days, I hope.

CHRIS: There was a lot of
joking back and forth,

not knowing what it was going to progress
into at the time.

STEVE: On the third and fourth day, I
started to develop these really big,

ugly blisters on
the top of my foot.

I remember the
doctor comes in

and I remember him bending
down and sniffing my foot,

and he's looked up at me and
he said, "That's not good."

We've gotta get you to the
operating room right away.

When I actually looked down and took a
good sniff, it smelt like dead flesh.

It smelt like death.

DR TAYLOR: So, the venom is disrupting the
ability of the blood to clot,

and so that means that there's a lot of
internal bleeding,

and there's the disruption of blood flow
to various tissues.

What happens is that blood,
which carries oxygen,

is not getting to some of the tissues near
the bite site,

and so those tissues die, so when you see
all of that black,

necrotic tissue, it
is dead tissue,

and it starts to smell,
because it's rotting.

STEVE: So, the venom had caused the tissue
in my foot to necrotize, to rot.

And the nurse comes in, they prep me for
surgery, and I'm thinking, "Wow!

I was bitten by a fer-de-lance. I got out
of there.

I got into the hospital,
they treated me.

I thought I was safe. Six days later, I
might not have a leg this afternoon."

NARRATOR: While Steve's hopes
rest with his doctors,

Dr. Emily Taylor suggests a scenario to
explain the snakes behavior,

and tries to determine whether the bit was
predatory or defensive.

DR TAYLOR: A scenario where a fer-de-lance
would accidentally

give a predatory bite to
a human foot would be

if a snake is sitting alone
in a dimly lit rain forest,

maybe tucked up underneath a log, because
rodents run back and forth on that log,

and then that foot swings
by, the snake may mistake

that for a rodent's, and it could bite it.

However, that's not as likely when
someone's wearing shoes,

and the vast majority of bites are going
to be defensive bites.

In the case of Steve, the reason we think
it was mostly likely a defensive bite

is because of the fact that the people in
front of him weren't bitten.

It's the classic thing, which is that the
second or third person in the line

was the one who was bitten, and it's
because the snake doesn't wanna give up

its camouflage, but then it gets
increasingly rattled

as more people move by,

and then finally that third person is the
straw that broke the camel's back,

and it gets bitten. So, all of that
evidence together, combined with the fact

that he was jumping
down off of a log.

So, he jumped down and probably disturbed
the snake that way,

is all leading me to conclude, to the best
of my ability,

without having been there, that it was
probably a defensive bite.

NARRATOR: While it may be clear that
Steve's bite was defensive,

Anne's bite isn't quite
as easy to explain.

DR SMITH: When something really horrible
happens, as scientists,

as people we're drawn to try to explain
why it could have happened.

Was it something about
the mountain lion?

What the person was doing?

And yet none of those things
alone can explain this,

otherwise we would see
it happen more often,

and sometimes we need to accept that
horrible, random events can occur,

and there's not always
a good reason for it.

NARRATOR: But in order to prevent these
attacks in the future,

it's important to understand how human
encroachment on the natural environment

put Anne and the mountain
lion on a collision course.

DR SMITH: The Santa Ana mountains are a
really fragmented habitat

for mountain lions. It's a tough spot
because the Santa Ana's are surrounded

by development or
freeways on all sides.

DR VICKERS: That particular western edge
of the Santa Ana's also

is a migration route for mountain lions
and one of the patterns of development

is to build, basically,
fingers of development,

stretching out
into the habitat.

So, the animals are using
the canyons in between

these blocks of houses
as travel ways,

and that's also where
parks have been planned,

where they allow people
to walk out their door,

hop on their bike or hop right on a trail,
which is great,

but it tends to lead to
closer human contact.

ANNE: In the hospital, when the Department
of Fish and Game person came,

he told me that an animal the
size of that mountain lion

is capable of taking
down an 800 lbs elk.

Honestly, it made me realize how fortunate
I am to have survived that.

DR VICKERS: From a survival perspective,
you can short circuit most potential

attacks by proper behavior.

DR SMITH: Most of the time
when you see a mountain lion

the best thing to do
is just to look big,

look fearsome and
it'll leave you alone.

But in the rare case of an attack, it's
always a good idea to fight back.

DR VICKERS: Statistically, I don't believe
there's ever been

an adult k*lled when
another adult was present,

so it's always good to have a buddy when
you're out in mountain lion terrain.

NARRATOR: After a four-hour surgery to try
and save Steve's leg,

he awakens in the recovery room.

STEVE: I first realize I'm awake when I'm
in the recovery room.

I recall, like, "Will I have a leg when I
come out of here?"

and, sure enough, there's
two bumps in the bed.

That's good news.
I've kept it.

The doctor says, we did a procedure. It's
called a debridement,

and so we had to open up your foot, to cut
away the dead flesh.

He says, "Oh, I've got a
picture if you wanna see it?"

I just had this gaping hole
in my lower leg and foot.

It looked like a prosthetic. I was, like,
"Nah, that's not my foot.

That's like something from
some zombie movie or other."

NARRATOR: Steve returns
home to to Los Angeles,

where he undergoes multiple procedures to
repair the tissue in his foot,

and endures months of rehabilitation to be
able to walk again.

According to Dr. Emily Taylor, preventing
the fer-de-lance bite

may have been as easy as
a footwear choice.

DR TAYLOR: What you really need to have is
full leather boots.

Fer-de-lance's fangs can go through your
average cloth hiking boots, and also,

I think that the
only way to reduce

the chances of accidents like these
happening is education.

We can't teach the snakes
how to avoid the people

but we can teach the
people how to avoid

and how to have this healthy respect for
snakes. They're really, truly, incredible,

majestic beasts and I hope that the next
time somebody sees a snake,

they can, from afar, admire it and think
about what a cool animal it is,

and maybe isn't quite so scary after all.

NARRATOR: Refusing to be held back, Steve
returns to work four months later,

and, thankfully, is able to make the most
important walk of his life.

STEVE: The day of my marriage is a very
special day, obviously.

Being able to walk with her.

CHRIS: Going from a life
and death situation,

to seeing it turn into a fairytale ending,
it was a miracle, in my mind.

STEVE: And this whole experience, I think
everybody did a fantastic job.

The one person that I'm most
grateful to is my wife.

She got me through the
darkest moments,

and she never left my side.

I have no ill feelings
towards snakes in general.

They are incredibly evolved creatures to
live the way they do,

and the thing that
I've found is that

you can never conquer nature.

It will always win.
It's gonna kick your a*s.

It's not your friend,
it's not your enemy.

Nature just is.