A father fought off a black bear with his bare hands after it leapt on to his eight-year-old son and began mauling his head during a woodland hike.

John Pala, 43, grabbed the bear by the jaws and hauled it off his son, Evan, but had to tackle it again when his son stumbled as he tried to run away and was caught again.

Mr Pala, a health insurance salesman from Florida, had taken his two boys to the Great Smokey Mountains National Park in Tennessee and had just had a meal of fried chicken when the bear attacked on Monday evening.

Evan had just led the way across a split-log bridge over a stream when the bear appeared. “It was staring at me,” Evan said. “Then he just stood up and jumped on me. Before he even got me I called, 'Bear!'”

His father ran to intervene, losing his shoes as he did so, as the bear knocked Evan to the ground and began biting and clawing his head.

Mr Pala seized the bear's jaws and dragged it off, enabling Evan to take flight. But he tripped on a branch, and the bear attacked again.

Mr Pala struggled with the bear again, and the three finally escaped.

Evan suffered a bite at the base of his neck, and had to have staples in his head and stitches in his back and arms. He was kept in hospital overnight. His father had a claw mark across the back of one hand and bruises on his feet from losing his shoes.

Park Rangers arrived on the scene within minutes of the attack and later shot the 6st young male bear dead as it tried to charge them.

The family cut short their week-long holiday after Evan said that he did not want to go back into the woods. His father has nicknamed him “Chief Bear Fighter”.

Bear necessities

— Not all black bears are uniformly black in colour. There are brown, pale blue (glacier) and white (kermode) varieties. Short haired and medium-sized, they often have a small white patch on their chests

— They have a lifespan of 20-25 years and are found in Canada, Mexico and the US

— They grow to a maximum 2m (6ft 6in) from nose to tail, females weigh up to 80kg and males 250kg

— They mostly eat grasses, berries, nuts and seeds, and only periodically feed on small animals

— A lean black bear can run faster than 30 mph. They can swim at least a mile and a half and are adept at climbing trees

Sources: bear.org; Times database

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