Music Hath Charms to Soothe Repel the Savage Beast(s)

Via Dave Barry's Blog comes this unusual story: A kid in Norway managed to repel a pack of wild wolves he encountered on his way home from school by blasting some music through the headphones of his cell phone:

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 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."

I'm not sure that Creed qualifies as "heavy metal" (as the story describes it several times), but hey...it worked. There's one more example of the power of music. (And I guess it's good that the wolves weren't drug dealers or gang members, or Walter might have had to use classical music to repel them.)