While walking home from the busstop this week, a
13-year-old Norwegian school boy stumbled upon four wolves. In the
end, it may have been his love of heavy-metal music by the
band Creed that saved his life.
Walter Eikrem listened to music on his mobile phone as he often
does as he made his way home from school in the southern Norwegian
town of Rakkestad earlier this week. The path leading from the stop
where he catches the school bus to his family's farmhouse traverses
a gently sloping hillside. All of a sudden, he made out something
gray on the hillside. "At first, I thought it might have been the
neighbor's dogs," he later told TV2, Norway's largest commercial
broadcaster. What he actually encountered, though, were four
wolves.
"I was afraid they would attack me," Walter told the Norwegian
tabloid VG, describing the incident, which took place on
Monday. But he didn't let his fear show. Remembering his parents'
advice, Walter pulled the earphones out of his mobile phone, turned
the volume all the way up and blasted heavy metal music over its
miniature speakers. At the same time, he yelled as loud as he could
while flailing his arms about wildly to scare off the pack of wild
animals.
"The worst thing you can do is run away because doing so just
invites the wolves to chase you down," Walter told TV2. "But I was
so afraid that I couldn't even run away if I'd wanted to."
Overcoming the Wolves
The plan worked. Eikrem said he was able to drive away the
wolves by playing the song "Overcome" by the American hard-rock
band Creed. "They didn't really get scared," Walter said. "They
just turned around and simply trotted away."
On Wednesday, the local newspaper Rakkestad Avis
reported on Walter's encounter with the wolves and even gave his
mother a chance to tell her side of the story. She said she had
actually intended to pick her son up from school, but got delayed
while shopping in Rakkestad and didn't make it on time.
"I have a completely guilty conscience," she told the paper,
"because I knew there were wolves in the area. The previous
evening, we saw three wolves on the edge of the forest when we were
putting our horses in their stall. The horses were panicky."
Even so, at least she had repeated to her children often enough
just how they needed to behave if they ran into any wolves. "Just
don't run away," she would tell them. "You can even get a little
poodle to run after you if you run away, even if it doesn't even
actually want to attack you. And the same holds true for
wolves."
In the end, the son's memory of her self-defense warnings -- and
a little heavy metal -- appears to have saved the day.
source: Spiegel International