Believe in the wild

On a research trip, Nastassja Martin is bitten by a bear and seriously injured. In stirring words, she recounts the story of this struggle and her recovery.

Anthropologist Nastassja Martin shares in this gripping autobiographical narrative the tale of a profound injury and her healing. During one of her often months-long research trips to the volcanic peninsula of Kamchatka in Russia, where she studies the customs and cosmologies of the Eveny people, she immerses herself deeply in their culture and begins to dream intensely. After a mountain hike, she encounters a bear: a struggle ensues, it bites her in the face, and the 29-year-old finds herself in a state of fractured identity. What she had previously described as a scientist—the animistic intermingling of everything—she now experiences firsthand. The boundaries between the bear and herself, or what she once was, blur. Dreams and memories allow Nastassja Martin to find profound healing within herself and the wilderness, to which she returns after a harrowing recovery journey in Russian and French hospitals.