Boy Lost For Days Claimed A Bear Kept Him Safe. Who Was He To Question It, Writer Asks?

ACROSS AMERICA — Like too many people around the world to count, William Rowan read with delight, but also spiritual wonder, the story of a 3-year-old North Carolina boy who survived being lost in the woods for several days because a bear took care of him.

Casey Lynn Hathaway was in great peril after he disappeared from his grandmother’s eastern North Carolina home on Jan. 22, 2019.

It was the time of year that temperatures dipped below freezing at night. By the time he was found days later, prayer chains linked the community, and the FBI and Marines from the Camp Lejeune and Cherry Point bases had joined state and local officials in the search. People were that worried about Casey’s chances of living through the ordeal.

When he was found tangled in briars two days and a few hours after his disappearance, he was a lethargic, but unharmed. And though Casey couldn’t say quite how he was able to survive, he said he had a friend in the woods that was a bear that saved his life, Sheriff Chip Hughes said at the time.

Some of Casey’s relatives said at the time his story that he “hung out with a bear” was easily explained. “God sent him a friend to keep him safe,” an aunt said, according to a Fox News report at the time. "God is good. Miracles do happen.”

In Lansing, Michigan, Rowan agreed.

There were too many holes in the boy’s story for it to happened that way, Rowan told Patch in a telephone interview last week about the short story he recently penned that tells the tale from the bear’s perspective.

Boy Lost In Woods: ‘Bear Saved Me’
Whether it's the fancy of a child's imagination or something that actually happened, the story of a North Carolina toddler who was lost in the woods for several days in frigid temperatures and heavy rain has a twist that's perfect for a children's story: The 3-year-old told his rescuers that he had been taken care of by a bear. ... » Read the news story.

“The child could not have survived, or at the very least, should have been in bad shape,” Rowan, 70, said. “The curious way he was found — he couldn’t have gotten through it by himself.

“There were so many elements that suggested what was going on, but what was not obvious to the adults in charge,” he said, adding, however, that “it’s possible, but not plausible, that a bear helped him.”

Such human and animal partnerships forged for survival aren’t unheard of — a squawking parrot that alerted a sleeping family of a fire, a pod of dolphins that protected a swimmer from a shark, a gorilla who cradled a 3-year-old boy who’d fallen into the gorilla habitat in her arms until paramedics arrived for help.

A deeper examination of young Casey’s story, Rowan believes, “suggests supernatural involvement in the child’s survival, working through the bear.”

So, thinking like a bear, Rowan spun a tale of a mother bear Blackberry, who along with her two cubs was jarred from hibernation for reasons she couldn’t explain. Wondering if they hadn’t properly prepared for winter, the bears were foraging for berries and such when a ray of light drew them to a place on the forest floor where a “small human cub lay whimpering softly.”

His short story concludes with a quote from Meister Eckhart, a German Catholic theologian, philosopher and mystic: “Every creature is a word of God.” But rather than spoil the story, click the link below.

The Bear And The Boy
By Wiliam Rowan
Blackberry was baffled that she had awakened from hibernation while the winter was so young. Her two bear cubs, Holly and Poppy, had stirred awake as well, and were struggling to open their crusted eyes. ... » Read the short story.

The story is “the first thing I ever wrote,” said Rowan, who tried to convince his granddaughter, who he says has a gift for prose, to write the story, but other pursuits appealed to her more. “So I had to start over from scratch and write the story myself.”

His wife, Juanita Castillo-Rowan, the director of a preschool, suggested it as a children’s fable, but Rowan said the more he wrote, the more he realized the need to more deeply “explain all these bizarre things about Casey surviving” broadened the story’s appeal.

Rowan doesn’t doubt the forces at work to keep Casey safe. He’s retired from a 35-year career as a church music director, most recently at St. Mary Cathedral in Lansing, but he also retired in December from a second career calculating federal grants for the Michigan Department of Education.

“I’m a pretty big believer in angels,” he said. “I’ve always sort of, even as a child, believed that angels are in our lives in subtle ways.”

He loves photographing statuary of angels. Among his favorites is the 12-foot-high, 1,800-pound bronze monument “The Price of Freedom” at Arlington National Cemetery.

“It’s a really powerful sculpture of an angel cradling a soldier who had just died,” he said. “It depicts my image of angels — really, this subtle, unseen involvement in our lives.”

He looks for it, deliberately, whenever he is. If there’s one takeaway he like to leave with people when they finish his story of the boy and the bear, it’s this:

“Be open to all the mysterious good that’s out there,” he said. “My wife and I, especially because of our love of photography, we’re out in the world a lot and, boy, we just see amazing things, inspirational things, so much goodness in the animals.”

A tangible example — his own bear caring for the boy — was found in a family of sandhill cranes Rowan and his wife followed at a park near Lansing.

“They had adopted a Canada goose gosling,” he said, “and, boy, they were just marvelous parents to this obviously different species of animal, but the goose had ended up in their nest, and they took it upon themselves to raie it in their family.

“Every creature is a word of God,” he said again.