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“A car had passed me on the road and a little further on they were stopped,” Ms. Hepp tells me from her mother’s home in Ashern, Man. “You are in the middle of nowhere. I thought maybe they were having car trouble. I pulled over and off in the distance I could see a wolf. He was maybe a mile away, and this being wolf country, bear country and coyote country, I thought nothing of it.

“I talked to the people. And they were fine. And I like to talk. It is my nature, and so I kept talking and as I turned back to my truck all of a sudden this wolf jumped me, and all I could feel was fur on my face and jaws around my neck. There was no growling. He was just suddenly there, wrapped around my neck. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t yell. So I put my arms by my sides and relaxed.”

Remembering the words of her father, Wayne, who passed away about a decade ago, she remained utterly, unbelievably, remarkably calm.

Calm. With a wolf clamped around her neck, a Canis lupus with “sad green eyes,” big front teeth and a belief, presumably, that he had stumbled upon lunch.

“He dug deeper with his teeth,” Ms. Hepp says. “I had my coat on, and so when he went to get a better grip he let go — and then I gave him a look.”

A look of reproach for a furry beast that said: How dare you? And then Ms. Hepp, who doesn’t own a cell phone, because she would never use it, turned on her heel and calmly walked back to her truck, the wolf trailing behind.

“If you can imagine a timber wolf…,” she says, in a bid to describe his size.