A choke hold is how I think I could maybe handle a small wolf. I’ve play-wrestled with dogs enough to know how they fight. They’re not great at dealing with something that’s behind / on top of them. They’re surprisingly good at maneuvering their jaws to bite at things that seem like they should be out of reach though.

If you could get under that jaw and keep it from biting you while you were also choking it, I think you could survive. But, getting in close without being shredded by the jaws would be the trick. If you were bare-handed but wearing a heavy leather motorcycle jacket to protect your forearms… maybe? In something like a tee-shirt and shorts, you could maybe win in a fight to the death but you’d take serious, maybe life-threatening damage.

I think, in general, people underestimate how well they could do against an animal in a fight to the death. There are plenty of stories of people fighting off sharks, fighting off bears, etc. Often they take horrific damage, but if the alternative is dying, “winning” is still possible.