The hunted event is pretty bad. Even when you escape the circle, they STILL spawn IN FRONT of you, so escape isnt really a good bet. Barring unusual circumstances.

Due to their speed and damage, all you can do is head back to a safe-ish place to minimize your run back to your corpse.

Sledge does work well, but the -20% speed doesnt help.

I would say you can pillar upward like in minecraft but unless you are a godlike build ninja and can drop a workbench, a roof over it, and jump-raise a few times super fast, that wont work...

Maybe the best bet is to run into the other monsters that are trying to murder you. If in the swamp/plains, then in theory the wolves should fight those monsters which should help you deal with the problem.