No bald jokes please. He lost a chunk of scalp to a defensive mama grizzly.

The Otters were carrying bear repellent, but there was no time to react. The mother bear lunged at the two hikers. All Johan Otter remembers seeing were her open mouth and fangs. As she clamped onto his left thigh, he yelled for his daughter to take cover.

“The bear did what it was supposed to do,” Otter says today. “She was protecting her cubs. I have no ill feelings toward the bear.”

He recalls the incredible power of the enraged creature. “I weigh 185 pounds, and I was being tossed right to left.”

He instinctively fell back and rolled about 20 feet down a cliff to a rocky outcropping. The bear ran after him, leaping on his backpack, which blunted the attack. Trying to distract the bear from his daughter, Otter again went down the cliff, tumbling an additional 10 to 15 feet. Once more, the bear followed and attacked.

A harrowing tale — read the whole thing. It’s almost redundant for the story to mention how he’s thankful just to be alive on this Thanksgiving Day.