"The shock came when I got from under the bear and saw my fingers hanging off by strips of skin," the hunter, who gave his name as Janek, said, adding his arms were seriously wounded."

"That is when I realized it was time to knock off with hunting for the day," he noted wryly.

Janek's next move was to use a rolled up jacket as a tourniquet as he struggled to reach human habitation on his own, while his human and canine companions remained to deal with the bear.

After a spell in hospital, Janek has regained movement in his left hand, though his right arm will remain in a cast until September.

Janek said that after stalking the bear, together with his dog, Ruby, it became clear that the animal was injured and bleeding, and when he and another hunter attempted to drive the bear out of a thicket, it attacked.

Janek said he made a split second decision to stand his ground rather than run, and after trying to shout the bear was upon him, clawing and trying to find a good place to get a bite in – since Janek defended his vital zones with his arms, this resulted in them bearing the brunt of the mauling.

Fortunately Ruby grabbed on to the bear in a strong bite, which took its attention away long enough for him to scramble out from below it.

"The bear is not the king of the forest for nothing," Janek noted, adding that "with a hobby and responsibility like this, you have to take risks; there's nothing you can do about that."

While Ruby got a small scar for their troubles, Janek is unlikely to re-attain completely the full range of movement of his fingers again, but beyond that he is intact – other hunters subsequently shot the bear, something they could not do while it was upon their colleague, for fear of hitting him instead.

There are around an estimated thousand Eurasian Brown Bears (Ursus arctos arctos) in the wild in Estonia, while the permissible hunting quota has been set at 94 for this year, divided up separately across the various counties.

The quota of bears in Ida-Viru County, scene of the incident above, to be culled this season is the highest for any single county, at 17.

Former prime minister and presumed next High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaja Kallas, too, had a surprise encounter with a bear in South Estonia while she was out running, she told Maaleht's sister publication Eesti Ekspress.

Fortunately she was accompanied on the jog by a security guard, and the situation did not escalate.

More information on what to do if confronted with a brown bear in the wild is here, in this case from the U.S. National Park Service and referring to grizzly bears, the more famous sub-species of brown bear.

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