Trapper survives 96-hour nightmare
Ate rotting meat, fended off coyotes
CROWSNEST PASS, Alberta – A paramedic who’s used to saving the lives of others found himself having to eat rotting beaver meat and fend off snarling animals to ensure his own survival while trapped for 96 hours in Alberta bush country.
Ken Hildebrand of Fort McMurray was riding his all-terrain vehicle as he collected animal traps about 80 miles southwest of Calgary, on Jan. 8 when the ATV rolled after hitting a rock and trapped him underneath.
Hildebrand, who has a weak leg from polio, ended up face down on the snowy ground with his machine pinning his strong leg.
“He was stuck there for four days and three nights – almost 96 hours straight,” said Troy Linderman, director of Crowsnest Pass emergency medical services said.
Hildebrand’s injuries aren’t described as life-threatening, but there is a chance his right foot might have to be amputated.
Hildebrand, who wouldn’t give his age, said he kept himself alive – albeit sick – by eating the rotting meat of the animals he had collected.
He said he faced constant harassment from coyotes who were growling and fighting each other a few feet away but was able to keep them at bay by constantly blowing a whistle he had with him.
“It was time to get ready for survival mode,” Hildebrand said.
As a paramedic, he knew people start losing heat quickly from their upper body so he took a beaver carcass and set it by his groin to help keep his body warm. He used another beaver as a bit of a windbreak and part of its skin as a makeshift pillow.
With no water or food with him, no snow close by and nothing but dirt around him, he quickly became dehydrated. He pulled some surveyor’s tape through his teeth to get a little bit of the dew that dropped onto it.
“I ate a lot of dirt to get a little moisture,” he said.
By the second night, he was so hungry he started to pick at the beaver bones an hour after the sun went down.
“I tried to eat pieces of that, but it made me sick, and I threw up,” Hildebrand said.
As Hildebrand was entering his fourth day of being trapped, he began to accept the fact he might not be found before the cold, malnourishment or animals claimed him. His saving grace came when a hiker and a dog from Pincher Creek found him.
After spending a night in the Crowsnest Pass hospital, he was transferred to Lethbridge, where he has undergone several operations to treat frostbite and injuries to his legs.
“It’s amazing that he’s alive. I can’t believe it,” Linderman said. “Ken’s as tough as nails.”
The world’s third most-wanted Nazi suspect, who lived undisturbed for decades after World War II, has been charged in Germany with participating in the murder of 430,000 Jews while serving as a low-ranking guard at a death camp.