She ran toward the bear to escape a wolf
Clash in the night ended 12-hour ordeal
The craziest night of Joanne Barnaby’s life began with the decision to pick mushrooms.
Last Friday morning, Barnaby set out with her friend Tammy Caudron and dog Joey to find morels in the forest about an hour and a half outside her hometown of Hay River, N.W.T.
She was e x pecting a peaceful day in the sun — not a 12- hour confrontation with a wolf that ended only when she sicced a bear on it.
By late afternoon, the two women had spread out to cover more territory. Barnaby was alone with her dog when she stood up to walk toward her truck. That’s when she heard a growl.
“I knew it wasn’t Joey,” she says.
She turned to see a tall, black wolf. The animal was an imposing figure despite the fact it was in bad shape — it was very thin, Barnaby says, and missing fur in parts of its body.
“He was baring his teeth and snarling, and ready to pounce,” she says.
Her first thought: Where the hell’s my gun?
“I was just kicking myself,” she says. “I never go into the bush without my gun.”
Paul Paquet, a biologist and University of Victoria adjunct professor who has studied wolf ecology and behaviour for almost 45 years, says while wolves are generally “pretty polite” to humans, a surprising proportion of human- animal confrontations happen while people are picking mushrooms or harvesting other natural food.
When you’re collecting mushrooms “you’re usually squatted down,” Paquet explains. “Most animals respond when you’re taller than they are.”
When the wolf appeared, Barnaby’s dog, a fairly large Rottweiler- terrier mix, attempted to fight it off.
“Joey has had quite a bit of experience with charging bears,” Barnaby says. “Usually they take right off. The wolf didn’t back down.”
She tried to walk away, but the wolf stopped her.
“He started pacing and crossing my path,” she says. “He started directing me, basically. He kept forcing me to go further away from the road.”
Initially, she thought the wolf was trying to separate her from Joey, though that didn’t work — the dog remained at her side the whole time.
A more likely explanation, Paquet suggests, is that the woman had unknowingly wandered close to the wolf ’s den, and it was acting out of protection for newborn pups.
“It’ s not unusual for wolves to follow somebody,” Paquet says. “Most often this happens in the springtime when wolves have their pups.
“They’re escalating the person away from the den site. From the wolf’s view, it’s not intended to be overly aggressive.”
Unable to return to the safety of her truck, but unable to rest for fear of being attacked, Barnaby was stuck. She was too far away from her friend to call for help, too far into the bush to get a cellphone signal. There was no water nearby.
Around 10 p.m., she heard a gunshot and hoped nearby hunters would find her, but the terrain was too rough for anyone to reach the area where the wolf had led her.
“Nobody in their right mind would walk through what I walked through,” Barnaby says.
At one point she fell, landing on her back across a log. She lost most of her mushrooms, but was able to find her knife and an empty beer can she had kept from earlier in the day.
The night was getting cold. It had been hours since she had had anything to drink, her legs were cramping up, and “the mosquitoes were driving me bananas.”
She thinks the wolf could sense her fatigue. It “was starting to get closer again, getting braver again,” she says. “It was a long, long night.” In the end, she was in the forest for close to 12 hours.
Around 3: 30 or 4 a. m., she heard a sound she recognized as a bear. Then another sound, higher- pitched and not as loud, a cub. They were calling to each other. She never saw the bears, but Barnaby could tell the adult was getting closer.
“Usually bears are pretty quiet, but she must have been panicked or worried about her baby,” she says.
She saw this as an opportunity to lose the wolf. She started moving toward the sound of the cub, the two bear calls getting louder and louder.
“I j ust hoped l ike hell I wouldn’t come between them. But I figured I’d rather die with a bear than die with a wolf.”
The woman’s gamble paid off: she heard a crashing noise as the wolf and the bear collided.
“I knew they were fighting and I had no idea who was winning and I didn’t care.”
She and Joey ran away as fast as they could.
It was another 45 minutes before they found a lake. Barnaby filled the empty beer can many times, though she says the water was disgusting. She credits that can with saving her life.
They made t heir way back to the highway. A Parks Canada worker helped her home, where she reunited with Caudron, who had been out looking for her.
Barnaby doesn’t plan on going back into the bush in the next few weeks, as she’ll be travelling for work, but expects to go back soon after that.
Paquet says even though it’s easy to come across a den by accident, awareness of your surroundings is the most important factor in avoiding a confrontation with an animal.
And if all else fails, it can’t hurt to have a beer can handy.