There’s only one reason Stanley Connors agreed to answer questions when a Wiscasset Newspaper reporter showed up at his Lowelltown Road door on November 23.

The Wiscasset man wanted to stop all the talk around town that he was attacked by a bear. Actually, the bear he happened upon in the woods two days earlier had every opportunity to attack him, but didn’t, Connors said.

Connors, 50, did get his arm scraped, he believes, by the young bear’s back foot when the bear jumped over him and ran off.

“The poor thing was just trying to get away from me,” he said.

Connors said he doesn’t want word of his experience to make people in the area be afraid of bear attacks.

“This was something that was a total accident.”

He didn’t call police about the incident or seek medical treatment for his arm. He put cloth and duct tape on it until it stopped stinging.

Connors had gone walking in the woods off Foye Road the afternoon of November 21, looking for a dead or wounded buck a friend thought he had shot.

Connors entered a dip in the land and as he continued onward, he encountered the bear. He believes he spooked it.

He estimated it weighed about 140 pounds.

The encounter lasted about seven seconds, he said. First, the bear bumped him, probably with its head, as it tried to get past him, he said; Connors fell, putting the two face-to-face.

“I thought I was about to die,” Connors continued.

He grabbed the knife he had been carrying on his belt and stabbed the animal somewhere on its neck.

“He could have bitten me if he wanted. I was right there. But he never bit me.”

Instead it let out a “blat,” jumped over him, and kept going.

Nearby brush prevented the bear from retreating some other way.

“The only way out for that poor bear was over me,” Connors said.

“I feel bad,” he said about the animal’s knife wound. He hopes the wound will heal.

He also hopes people will stop asking him about the experience. A photograph of him with the arm injury was supposed to be just for family members. But it hit Facebook and traveled, along the way picking up a description stating that the man had been attacked by a bear.

When he went to Shaw’s supermarket, a lot of people were asking him about it, he said.

Connors’ close encounter comes a little over five months after at least three black bears were spotted around town. In each case, the people were safely indoors or in a vehicle when they saw a bear sitting near their flower bed, walking across their driveway, eating from a bird feeder or running across a lawn and into the woods.

Eliminating food sources like bird feeders and food remnants on a grill or open compost pile will usually take away a property’s appeal to a bear, a state wildlife biologist told the Wiscasset Newspaper last spring.

Bears don’t go looking to interact with people, and are not anxious to be seen, regional wildlife biologist Keel Kemper of Maine’s Inland Fisheries and Wildlife Department said.

Wiscasset Police Officer Perry Hatch said on November 22, he was not aware of any local bear sightings since the string of them last spring.

Connors noted that he was well into the woods when he and the bear crossed paths. He thought that’s where his friend’s deer would have headed to rest if it had been hit, he said.

About him and the bear, he said, “We were just in the same place at the same time.”