“He could have stomped me, he could have gored me — could have done anything,” Carl Isom-McDaniel said from his hospital bed

A grandfather is recuperating at the hospital after surviving a shocking bison attack at Yellowstone National Park earlier this month.

Carl Isom-McDaniel’s otherwise tranquil day at Yellowstone with his grandson on July 10 suddenly took a violent turn when a bison they were observing from afar abruptly attacked him, flinging him several feet in the air. The shocking moment, which was caught on camera by photographer Mike MacLeod at Bridge Bay Campground, quickly went viral online.

Now, Isom-McDaniel, who broke his femur in four places after the incident, is recovering from surgery. In a video taken in his hospital bed at Bozeman Health in Montana, the grandfather recounted the harrowing encounter with the bison.

“We saw the bison, and he was down. He wasn’t showing aggression or anything like that,” Isom-McDaniel said, “until he picked a target. That target happened to be me.”

At that time, Isom-McDaniel was with his grandson, whose safety was his priority. In an earlier interview with CNN shared on July 13, the grandfather said he and his grandson split up, with the hope that Isom-McDaniel could draw the bison away from the child.

In the video from Bozeman Health, Isom-McDaniel said he instructed his grandson to get himself up to the amphitheater away from the bison, while he “deal[t] with this down here.”

“They move faster than you could ever imagine,” Isom-McDaniel recalled. “He just kept coming, and he was more aggressive, and as soon as he got off that tree, he launched me in the air.”

Isom-McDaniel added, “Even though I was on the ground, he could have stomped me, he could have gored me — could have done anything.”

Isom-McDaniel told CNN he and his grandson were about 100 yards away from the bison before the moment turned dire. MacLeod, who captured the event on camera, emphasized that neither the grandfather nor the grandson were at fault and were being “very respectful” of the wildlife surrounding them.

The bison was reportedly set off by a white pickup truck that passed nearby, prompting the animal to get up and charge.

“You can tell he was agitated, pissed off, and charging anything and everything,” MacLeod previously said of the bison. “I’ve been around bison for a while, but this was really weird. Why did it pick those two? There were so many people around, and most of them were closer to and behind the bison. It was really weird.”

Source: https://people.com/grandfather-details-bison-attack-that-broke-his-femur-12023770