An Edmonton man was attacked and injured by a bison at the Elk Island National Park during a morning run on Saturday, May 19.
Craig Neilson was running back to his Astotin Lake Campground on a main road when he came across the large animal.
“Right after I stopped running and after I saw him, he looked up, saw me, and like immediately charged,” Neilson told CTV News.
Neilson became terrified, but he had to act quickly. He looked around to see how he could get away, spotted a “cluster of trees” past the ditch, and began to run.
“But as I started to run, I slipped and fell,” he said.
The ultra-marathoner tried to get up but he continued to slip, and the bison made up the distance.
“My thoughts were, ‘Holy crap, he’s actually gonna hit me.’ And then like, ‘How much is this gonna hurt? Like how much damage is this gonna cause?’ And then he hit me.”
The bison gored Neilson in his left butt cheek with one of its horns. The animal then tossed him towards the trees he tried to get to before he fell, which allowed Neilson to scurry away before the bison hit him again.
The trees were close to each other, so the bison couldn’t get to Neilson. Once he felt safe, Neilson checked the extent of his injuries. He said his whole left side was numb with pain, so he touched his backside and felt a hole in his shorts, a flap of skin and a lot of blood.
“That’s when I knew, I was like, ‘This is serious. I can’t just walk back to the campground, back to my wife,’” Neilson said.
Neilson lost his cellphone as he tried to escape the bison, but luckily, people in a passing vehicle had stopped to take photos of the animal and he flagged them down and asked for help. They went off to the park’s main gate, and while Neilson waited, he found his cellphone and phoned his pregnant wife, who was sleeping in their tent nearby and didn’t answer. Then he called 911.
Before the ambulance arrived, a sheriff sent by the people in the vehicle found Neilson and helped him with a first aid kit.
Neilson’s wife, Amberly, phoned him back and her husband told her what had happened. When EMS arrived, the sheriff picked Amberly up and brought her back to the ambulance.
“I went into the ambulance and I saw Craig and there was blood all over him,” she said. “I didn’t know if I was gonna pass out. I thought, ‘Oh, crap, I’m going to go into labour.’”
Neilson said he is recovering well. At first, doctors were concerned about the cleanliness of the injury or potential nerve damage, but no issues have surfaced.
He hopes to heal in time to run a 100-mile endurance race in six weeks, but for now, Neilson is glad the attack wasn’t much worse.
“The fact that I only got hit in the butt, the fact that a passing car came within minutes after, and the sheriff happened to be on the road, paramedics came relatively quickly. Although it was a bad situation, I feel pretty lucky,” Neilson said.
With files from Angela Jung
