Felix Beartholomew is back on his feet.

The resilient cub, who got that impressive name from his rescuers, is now on the mend at a Muskoka bear sanctuary after being struck by a train north of Sudbury last month.

Found concussed and bleeding on the tracks by rail workers, the bear was initially treated for his injuries at Wild At Heart in Sudbury.

Larry Burkholder of Capreol said he and his partner Joe Nadeau, of Garson, were in a high-rail truck performing maintenance duties on Dec. 9 when they spied the animal.

“We came around the curve and saw something between the rails,” he said. “We stopped about 40 feet away and got out and walked up on it, and there were little balls of snow on it, like marshmallows, so it had been lying there for some time with trains passing right over top.”

The cub wasn’t moving and neither man would have been surprised to find it deceased — not too many animals survive a collision with a train, let alone an extended period of time stuck between the rails — but this was one tough little bear.

As they got closer, “it blinked at us,” said Burkholder. “We looked at each other and it was just, you know, our hearts went out to the poor thing. We had to try to do something.”

The cub had a skull fracture and couldn’t use its legs, so the two scooped him up in a jacket — Burkholder said he weighed less than 20 pounds — and placed him in the back of the truck, although it wasn’t long before he was riding in the cab.

“We drove about four miles with him in the box, but there was no movement from the animal so we brought it inside,” Burkholder said. “We made him a spot on the floor of the backseat with my co-worker’s parka and he was compliant the whole way back.”

They had collected the bear near Felix, a train stop about 200 kilometres north of Sudbury. That provided a good name — or half of a good name, anyway — for the animal, but it was a long haul to get him to Wild At Heart.

The co-workers had to pull aside to let trains pass and then transfer the bear to another truck. In all, the trip took about five hours. En route they called Wild at Heart and kept up a kind of conversation with their passenger.

“We made some noises and he would groan back a little,” said Burkholder. “But he had a severe concussion. As we got closer to Lively he wasn’t making much of a sound, and you could tell his breathing was getting shallower.”

Luckily veterinarian and Wild at Heart director Rod Jouppi was there to help right away, stitching up the bear’s head wound and providing antibiotics and painkillers.

About a week later he had improved enough to be transferred to Bear With Us, a facility near Huntsville that specializes in rehabbing orphaned and injured bears.

Mike McIntosh of Bear With Us said Tuesday the cub has made significant strides.

“He’s coming along quite well and I think he’s going to be fine,” he said. “He’s still a bit disoriented but his motor skills have improved a lot.”

The cub was “very underweight” when he arrived, said McIntosh, but is packing on some pounds now, thanks to a steady diet of raw eggs, yogurt and blueberries.

“It will be a month before he hibernates because he still has to put on weight,” he said. “Once he’s fat enough, he’ll be comfortable, curled up in a mound of straw, but right now he’s still looking for food all the time.”

He doesn’t have to look far for friendship, however, as McIntosh recently installed another cub in the same space with Felix Beartholomew.

“I integrated him a week or so ago with another cub I got from Blind River on Christmas Eve,” he said. “The day after I put them together, they were cuddling up.”

McIntosh said he’s had other bears with head injuries that took longer to recover, so he’s quite optimistic about this one’s chance of leading a normal life and making a return to the wild.

“The credit goes to those two rail employees,” he said. “If they had assumed he was dead, he would be dead. It’s amazing he survived with those trains going over, straddling him — if anything was hanging down, he would be whacked. He’s a lucky cub in more ways than one.”

Burkholder said he’s just glad he and Nadeau were able to act before it was too late.

“If the ravens had got on it, the eyes would be gone and it would have been a different story,” he said. “So we were lucky there.”

Starvation would have kicked in, too, if a train hurtling over its head hadn’t struck sooner.

“That’s what really gets me,” he said. “Some trains are 10,000 feet long, and with this poor thing inches away, who knows how close it was to being finished off. But luck was with it.”

Burkholder said he and Nadeau named the bear because it was such a unique experience, and they were moved by its ability to hang on and beat the odds.

They are still following his progress, too, through updates from Wild At Heart and Bear With Us.

“Sometimes you don’t have to be with something very long to get a bond,” he said.