When Jim Hamm survived a savage mountain lion attack, it made nationwide headlines for days — and the outpouring in Humboldt County went on for months. Now, almost 13 years later, his wife wants that community to know that he remembered their kindness until the end.
Hamm, 82, died over the weekend, just a few weeks after a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer.
“It’s important to me to let people know that Jim passed away and that he was so grateful for everyone in Humboldt County’s support,” said Nell Hamm in an interview with the Eureka Times-Standard. “Jim had so many surgeries after the attack and was close to dying so many times. The letters and cards and support were very, very special in his recovery.”
The Hamms, who moved several years ago to Santa Maria, continued to receive Christmas cards from people they had met in the aftermath of the 2007 attack, in which Nell used a branch and a ballpoint pen to help her husband fight off the lion.
At that time, the Hamms lived in Fortuna, a place they chose for retirement because of its natural beauty. They were avid hikers, and on Jan. 24, 2007, they set out on a 10-mile loop at Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park. Around 3 p.m., they were on the Brown Creek Trail and almost back to their car when Nell, walking ahead, heard a commotion behind her. When she first saw the mountain lion, it had her husband’s head in its jaws.
Nell Hamm screamed and started beating the lion with a large branch. It wouldn’t release its grip.
“Jim was talking to me all through this, and he said, ‘I’ve got a pen in my pocket and get the pen and jab him in the eye,”‘ she said in an interview with the Associated Press. She tried that. The pen broke.
“That lion never flinched,” she said. “I just knew it was going to kill him.”
As Jim continued to try prying the animal’s jaws open, Nell tried again with the branch, this time aiming for the lion’s nose. That got its attention. It stepped back, flattened its ears and — after a tense moment in which Nell was sure it would go for her next — it slipped back into the ferns.
The attack, they later estimated, had lasted four or five minutes.
Worried that the lion would return, Nell urged her husband, who was bleeding badly from the head, to try to make it back to the road. About a quarter-mile away, they found a four-man forestry work crew that went for help, summoning an ambulance to take the Hamms to Arcata.
Jim Hamm underwent surgery for serious lacerations to his scalp, his mouth, his ear, his legs and his arms and hands. Three days later, he took a turn for the worse, developing a dangerous infection, and he was airlifted to San Francisco. There, in a six-hour surgery, doctors at California Pacific Medical Center used parts of his back muscles to cover the area on his head where the scalp had been torn off, then grafted skin from his leg.
Meanwhile, the day after the attack, game wardens killed two mountain lions in the park. It was determined that one, a 70-pound female, was the lion that attacked Hamm. It was not rabid.
On the day before Valentine’s Day — four days after the couple’s 50th anniversary — Jim was finally released from the hospital.
“When you go through something like that, words can’t describe what you go through,” Nell Hamm said. “For me, it was terrible fighting that lion. I really thought Jim was going to die.”
Last month when Jim Hamm learned of his cancer prognosis, his only worry, Nell said, was that he was leaving her. They had been married almost 62 years, and together had made it through not only the lion attack but the death of their son in 1988 from cardiac arrhythmia.
“We had such a great marriage,” she said. “I told him whatever woman I’ve become is because of him. He encouraged me to do all the things I loved to do.”
That included hiking, which they took up again a year after the attack in the redwoods.
“He used to say, what’s really fantastic about hiking is you never know what you’re going to experience,” she said. “There’s really nothing else like it.”
The Eureka Times-Standard and Mercury News archives contributed to this report.