Rotting beaver meat keeps trapped Alberta man alive

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 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 north 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 because of polio, ended up face down on the snowy ground with his machine pinning his strong leg.

Doctors said there is a chance one 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.

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 the little bit of dew that had dropped on 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.

After entering his fourth day of being trapped, Hildebrand’s rescue came when a hiker and a dog from Pincher Creek found him.

“He was hiking and he came there because he told me he had this funny intuition and urge to go hiking there even though he’d never been there before,” Hildebrand said.