Don't tell 'that' to the judge

Steven Boyd told an incredible story.

Unfortunately for the Great Falls man, the judge didn’t buy it.

Boyd, who pleaded guilty to family member assault and possession of dangerous drugs in 2012, is in trouble again for violating his parole. He admitted failing to stay in contact with his parole officer, but offered a dramatic excuse. According to the Daily Interlake, Boyd told a Flathead District Court judge that he had been attacked by a grizzly bear while picking berries near Choteau last August and it had taken him three weeks to pull himself out of the woods.

“He hit me like a Volkswagen with fur,” Boyd told the judge

He said he suffered a dislocated shoulder and memory loss from the attack and later stepped on a hornets’ nest before showing up at his father’s home in Eureka hundreds of miles away. Boyd never sought medical treatment for his alleged injuries.

Judge Robert Allison sentenced Boyd to two years with the Montana Department of Corrections.

I suspect Boyd may have spent some time last summer in a movie theater watching The Revenant, a film based on the travails of frontiersman Hugh Glass who was mauled by a grizzly in 1823. Abandoned by his comrades, Glass, (portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie) like Boyd, takes weeks to reach civilization.

However, unlike Glass, Boyd apparently bore no visible scars of the attack.

He may have had better luck in court channeling a character from Rick Bass’ short story Elk. The far-fetched yarn about a couple of hunters spending nearly two weeks packing out an elk and then retrieving a buck deer from the bottom of a pond along the way was believable enough to be published in the New Yorker.

Maybe the judge would have believed Boyd had he claimed his berry bucket was so full it took him all month to pack it out of the woods. There was a bumper crop last fall.

Claiming he was picking mushrooms might have worked even better. Someone convicted on drug charges harvesting the “wrong” mushroom and then eating it and waking up weeks later is perfectly plausible.

Hopefully Boyd will be able to put all this behind him. After all, in this day and age there’s a future for folks so able to spin the truth. He was also accused of failing to tell his parole officer that he had lost his job. Not so, claimed the 48-year-old. He’d simply been suspended indefinitely.

Parker Heinlein is at

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