Many metals and alloys have a stress exponent for the creep rate that is considerably higher than the value of three that is typically predicted by creep recovery models. One example is pure Ni. Creep data from Norman and Duran that are analyzed in the paper give a stress exponent of about seven in the temperature range 0.3-0.55 of the melting point. It has recently been shown that the high creep exponent of Al and Cu in the power-law breakdown regime can be explained by the presence of strain-induced vacancies. By applying a creep recovery model that does not involve adjustable parameters, it is shown that strain-induced vacancies can also explain the high-stress exponent of pure nickel.