Would you run at a wolf to save a fellow being?
The story of the Canadian in Banff National Park who heard screams from the next campsite and rushed over in the black of night to find an American being attacked by a very big very bad wolf … it ended well, very well. My heart is so warm that you could make toast on it. You know, the way you do on the campfire with those little racks. I do miss camping, to a point.
It was the most extraordinary story of courage, and luck. Russ Fee, his wife and two children were sleeping the sleep of the expertly tented in Ramparts Creek Campground when they heard the call for help.
What would your first thought be? Mine would be BEARS, followed by snakes, copycat Gillam killers and the hillbillies from Deliverance. Fee didn’t dwell on such nonsense. He fumbled with the maddening two-layer tent zipper, took the lantern his wife gave him, and ran over, shouting “I’m here, I’m here, what’s wrong?” As one does, or maybe not.
He saw a collapsed tent and a wolf, bigger than any dog could be, with its jaws on a man, pulling him away “as if he were a toy,” Fee later told the CBC. “I had a good run going at the time … so I just kind of kept running at it and I just kicked it sort of in the back hip area.”
The family of Elisa and Matt Rispoli was visiting from New Jersey. Elisa wrote later online, “I laid my body on top of the kids and Matt pinned the wolf to the ground and held open its jaw with his hands, and the wolf started to drag Matt away, while I was pulling on his legs trying to get him back.”
Fee was horrified. “I felt like I had kind of punched someone that was way out of my weight class.” The wolf let go of Matt, covered in blood, but wouldn’t leave. They pelted him with rocks “the size of cabbages” from the ring marking the campsite. Everyone was screaming. They all retreated to the Fee campsite and hid in the car. Park rangers later killed the wolf.
Isn’t Russ Fee just the best Canadian human ever? This Good Samaritan was so calm and unassuming on the CBC, loaded with self-deprecation. He’s perfect for this era, when global heating will mean helping others. We’re all in this together.
Here’s the key. He didn’t make a mistake or even a decision. He did the decent thing by instinct. It’s all the more charming that Fee is Canadian and the Rispolis are Americans, calling him their “guardian angel.” Canada has rescued Americans before, most famously during the 1981 Iran hostage crisis.
Only a Springsteen quote will do: “I seen a young man lying by the side of the road/ He cried ‘Mister, won’t you help me please.’ ” At some point in life, possibly tomorrow, we may find ourselves helpless and desperate. We will beg a stranger to compress the wound or hold us as we die. And there’s karma: We help others in the hope that when our kids go out into the world, someone will do the same for them.
I hope she or he will be a Russ Fee. Every American camping that week rushed over to thank him. The Rispolis are high on Fee, as are many Canadians.
Fee had another kind of close call as well. What if he hadn’t raced over, and became like the title character of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, whose moral failure at a crucial moment haunted his life? Which would be worse, dying by wolf, or not having chanced it?
We haven’t seen humans at their best lately. Think of the Americans who guard children kept in cages. Think of Trump officials refusing to risk their jobs and speak truth to power.
I think of Jessica Trevors, who in 2012 invited a young woman sleeping on a park bench into her Toronto apartment. The woman, Laura Babcock, would later be murdered and her corpse burned by serial killer Dellen Millard. Trevors, whose later testimony left the court in awe, was one of the last kind humans she encountered.
In 2017, Michael Barkhouse heard a woman screaming for help as she was attacked by a dog in Yellowknife. He ran into the outdoor kennel, pulled the 75-pound dog off her and stood between them as the animal circled, then retreated. Barkhouse won a medal from the governor general, as should Fee.
Would you do that? What about the two cops who rescued two men within seconds of drowning in a Toronto elevator during the 2018 flood? Or the women, like the American Moira Donegan, who risked everything to help start the #MeToo fire?
I’m not saying courage is commonplace — it absolutely isn’t — but it exists. There are more instinctively brave people like Fee than there are Weinsteins and Epsteins, even if it doesn’t seem that way right now.