Wolf Pack Attacks Moose Hunter

The valley where I live used to be called Pleasant Valley. It is a valley surrounded by a vast wilderness area of forests and lakes. Here where I live in British Columbia’s central interior at the little town of Houston, paunchy little hills and snow capped mountains divide small, fish-filled, unnamed little lakes and big lakes with big fish of many species.

Many of the big beautiful lakes such as Babine, 108 miles long and 1700 miles of shore line, and others such as Francois, hundreds of feet deep and seventy miles long, and then Morice Lake: glacier-fed, where glacier mountains reach on places right to the shore line and you can watch mountain goats playing from your boat or see grizzly bears feeding on spawning salmon. I took sightseeing guests from all over the world here and everyone agreed it is second to none of this world’s beautiful areas.

The vast surrounding wilderness area where we live is also wolf country, and even today on some nights here, where I live in Houston, I can hear wolves howling and often see bears, moose and dear in my yard.

Now about wolves: I actually saw a man attacked by a pack of eight wolves and I don’t believe anyone else in the world has had such an experience. I kept pictures and proofs, and from various other true stories I am going to write, I was already sure that hungry wolves would attack people.

The man I saw getting attacked was Leroy Oppen from the little village of Perow, BC, which is central between the city of Prince Rupert on the Pacific coast and the city of Prince George, two hundred miles east in central British Columbia.

It was the 28th day of September 1949. It was a cold night and already one inch of snow had fallen. Leroy Oppen and myself were both living at Perow and we had got a job hauling gravel with my rubber tired wagon and army jeep. This was to fill holes on the old road where cars sometimes got stuck and had to be done by shovelling gravel by hand. Today this is Highway 16 and is all black topped road all the way to Prince Rupert on the Pacific coast some three hundred miles west.

Sometimes, moose were seen where a swamp lay below the road, so I said: “Leroy, take your rifle along, we might see a moose. They are fat and good eating now.”

We were coming down a long slow grade on the road, when we saw the wolves. We saw several running, one behind the other, sometimes making high jumps, swinging their heads from side to side, hunting. They were in a place where poplar trees grew.

I said: “Leroy, let’s go down there, maybe we’ll get a shot at one. I’ll go in the willow thicket below and make long steps, cracking dry willows. You walk real slow in the poplars and they might come to us, thinking I am a moose walking.”

We did just that when suddenly, Leroy shot five shots so close together, only an automatic could do.

I looked up immediately and saw a big gray wolf coming from right beside Leroy towards me. I hollered: “Leroy, there’s one coming towards me, look my way!” I figured somehow he had missed that one. He yelled back real loud: “Come up here! Come up here!” He was running towards a little pine tree. I ran up to him and saw the big gray wolf dead.

Leroy was the most terrified man I had ever seen: he looked like a ghost and was shaking all over. He had shot all his shells and carrying his rifle like a club, he was running to climb the little pine tree. “They damn near got me!”, he shook. “The big one was right on me. I shot him in the chest, you damn near got me killed”, he screeched and then sputtered: “The rest might come back.”

“No way,” I said, “they are no doubt as terrified as you are.” I saw another one laying dead close to where he had been shooting.

His story shook out in spurts: “They just about got me! There were lots of them. They were coming on both sides. The big one was right at me. I jerked the gun down and shot him in the chest, then he ran towards you.”

There was a skiff of fresh snow left and it was easy to see what had taken place. I said to Leroy: “We’ll walk down beside the tracks and I want to bring some reliable witnesses back here, so they can see that you were attacked by a pack of timber wolves, or no one will believe that I saw you attacked. We walked down to my jeep and drove back to the little village of Perow and found three persons real quickly who were anxious to come and see where Leroy had been attacked. There was Vanner Byman, the post office manager, Ted Mills, a sawmill owner and operator, and Henry Bjorkman, a wild horse breaker and trainer.

We then went where I had seen Leroy attacked. The evidence was plain and easy to see. Two wolves came straight at him, the one in front he got by a fluky shot: he shot it through the open mouth and the bullet came out the back of his head, it lay thirty feet away from his shell casings. The second one it seemed had been right behind the first and I presumed it couldn’t stop fast enough and had been shot in the chest at point blank range. We found that there were three coming in on each side a little further back, fanned out, and some were so terrified they had fallen down when turning away and scratched a spray of snow, leaves and dirt getting away.

We took the two dead wolves to a farmer’s place to weigh and skin them. The smaller one weighed eighty pounds. He was the one in the front and was shot in the head. The big one behind that came right on to Leroy, weighed one hundred and twenty-five pounds.

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