Bear Grylls’ 8-year-old son rescues girl from river

Details are scant, but Bear Grylls — host of Discovery Channel’s Man vs. Wild — says that his eight-year-old son, Jesse, recently saved a girl who had fallen into a river. Grylls, the world’s leading connoisseur of raw fish and caterpillars (next to Gollum), was talking with The Daily Mail when he related the story.

Photo of Bear with son Jesse here.

I smell publicity-mongering with this river rescue story, and thus doubt its veracity … but I’m the skeptical sort so pay me no mind.

“They [the children] were in a little base in a stream and she fell in,” Grylls said. “And — I wasn’t there, you know, and the story grows and grows every time he tells me — but he did rescue her and he was proud as punch to have dragged her out.”

Giving an insight into the unique difficulties of raising kids while being a globally recognised death-defying survivalist, the 37-year-old said he worries how his career influences his three children — Jesse, Marmaduke, 5, and Huckleberry, 4.

Yep. Those are his kids’ names. Cute, or tragic? You be the judge.

“Their headmaster took me aside and said, ‘It’s great that they might know how to take the door off a helicopter and deal with a snake bite, but it would be really great if they focused a little more on the mathematics,’ ” he said.

I’d actually like to see what their parents pack in the kids’ school lunches each day. Jesse to classmate: “I’ll trade you my bark beetle larvae for your banana.”

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Bear Grylls’ young son follows in famous father’s footsteps by rescuing girl from river [Herald Sun]
Bear Grylls’ young son follows in famous father’s footsteps by rescuing girl from river [News.com.au]
How Bear Grylls’ son saved a girl’s life — and he’s just seven! [London Daily Mail]