A Vancouver Island resident is thanking heavy metal titans Metallica for her narrow miss with a cougar on Tuesday evening, reports KelownaNow.

Dee Gallant and her husky Murphy, were out for their usual evening stroll on a logging road just outside of Duncan, BC in the Cowichan Valley, when she said she felt "like something was watching” them.

Their usual route takes them about five kilometres into the trees but Gallant said they only made it roughly two km in before they saw the animal. “I looked over to the right and there it was, I couldn’t make it out at first and thought ‘oh that is a strange colour, that’s not a tree,'” she recalled.

It wasn’t until the predator was creeping toward them that she realized what it was. “It was crouched down, doing that kind of prowl, predator walk that they do - that was when I waved my arms and yelled ‘hey, you stop!’ and it did.”

According to Gallant the animal “froze like a statue” keeping its eyes fixated on her and Murphy. “Murphy hadn’t even seen it yet, he was just kind of sniffing around and didn’t know who I was yelling at or what was going on,” she said. “The wind was going in the wrong direction so he couldn’t smell it, which I am actually glad for because if he had, he would have started barking and likely charged it.”

At first, Gallant was more surprised to see a cougar only about 50 feet away from her, as prior to this she had only caught glimpses of them in other areas. “Initially I wasn’t that scared, I remember thinking ‘cool that's a cougar,’ and then it was ‘why is it still there?’ before turning into ‘oh my god it’s coming toward me, I need to make it stop,” she said.

Once paused in its tracks, Gallant pulled out her phone to record the ongoing situation and proceeded to yell at the animal telling it to “get out of here” and calling it a “bad kitty.” “It didn’t respond to that either, it just stayed locked on to me and seemed really interested, so that is when I decided to stop recording and try to do something else.”

Find out what happened next at KelownaNow.