o' canada

This Story About a Canadian Woman Escaping a Wolf With the Help of a Bear Is a Better Version of The Revenant

Photo: Darren Baker/Getty Images

Last year, The Revenant — a movie about Leonardo DiCaprio fighting a bear, sleeping in a horse carcass, losing his vape pen, and traveling through the wilderness to exact revenge on the man who killed his son — won many prestigious awards. The story of Canadian woman Joanne Barnaby is a much better version of it.

Barnaby was out picking morel mushrooms with her friend Tammy Caudron last Friday in the Northwest Territories when they became separated. Once she had filled her mushroom pail, she turned to head home, but says she came face-to-face with a wolf. “I heard this growl behind me. There was a long, tall, very, very skinny wolf,” Barnadby told CBC News. “A black wolf. And his legs were spread and his hair was standing, and he was growling, and baring his teeth.”

Her dog, Joey, tried charging the wolf, but the wolf was unfazed. As they walked away, the wolf continued to follow them — leading them farther and farther away from Barnaby’s car in an attempt to separate Barnaby and her dog. This went on for 12 hours. Yes, for 12 hours, this woman kept her wits and her strength while being stalked by a goddamn wolf.

Finally, around 4:30 a.m., Barnaby says she heard a mother bear making noise and a cub responding from farther away. Instead of panicking more, because now she was surrounded by two bears in addition to the wolf, she said, “I realized that there was a chance that the mother bear would tackle the wolf if she felt that the wolf was a threat. So I made the choice of walking towards the cub.”

Barnaby says her terrifying plan miraculously worked. “I heard this big crashing behind me and realized that the mama bear had attacked the wolf, or maybe the other way around, I don’t know, but they were fighting and I could hear the wolf yelping and I could hear the mama bear growling and I could hear all this crashing and I just took off!”

No word yet on what happened to her pail of mushrooms.

Canadian Woman Escapes Wolf With Help of Bear