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Ooooh!  My lungs were burning, and I was gasping for breath.  And the only air I could breathe was what was making the burning sensation!  Only it wasn’t hot – it was cold!  It must have been about 20 below, and I’d been exerting myself with everything I could muster, pushing an airplane.  Finally the plane started to move on its own, and taxied out to take off.  Very slowly at first, then faster as the frost wore off the ski bottoms.  Immediately I ran indoors to get my breath.  Trying to get your breath – panting for breath with everything in you in the cold air is indeed quite a sensation.  It is not really advisable, either!  This was my first experience with cold in Red Lake just a few days after I arrived there in early January, 1961.  A neighbor had loaded his Cessna 180, and was attempting to taxi out for take-off, but the skis were frosted, and the plane didn't want to move.  The normal procedure was to grasp the wing tip or the upper end of the lift strut on the wing and move it up and down, which made the skis “walk”.  Meanwhile, you need to push forward while putting everything you have into it to get the airplane moving.  This, of course, consumes quite a bit of energy.  We finally did get the plane moving, and I immediately went inside, to warm my burning lungs and get my breath.  It felt as though I’d almost frozen my lungs!  They really hurt for a time, until I could get my breathing slowed down and get my lungs warmed up.

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Suddenly everything was quiet.  Quiet, that is, except for the whistle of the wind over the wings.  They say silence is golden, but this was one of those times when that was most certainly not true.  How far can you go with the engine not producing power?  I realized immediately I’d run out of fuel in the right wing tank, but the left tank was still almost half full, so I switched to the left tank.  But nothing changed; the engine did not restart. I pushed the throttle and mixture forward, pulled on the carburetor heat, and everything I could think of to get the engine restarted, but there was not even a sputter from the wind-milling engine.  I had just passed Coli Lake, only 10 minutes north of Red Lake, so I turned to head back to Coli.  It was immediately obvious, though, that it was too far away to glide to if the engine did not restart.  I located the thickest patch of trees I could find, and headed for that, thinking the engine would start at any time.

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The three policemen watched the cabin across the lake intently.  They were tense and alert, possibly wondering if someone was watching them, or maybe even now had a rifle pointed in their direction.   There were many things going through their minds, one of the foremost being that only days before several of their fellow policemen from Kenora had answered a similar call, and been shot when they approached the house where they were intending to apprehend their man.  Now they were in a comparable situation, and felt a great need for caution.  The cabin was just over a half mile away from them.  There was no sign of anyone.  They had approached the island where they were standing in such a way that they hoped to not be seen from the cabin.  But the island was out on the open lake.  Although they had tried to be quiet, they wondered whether someone could have heard their boat coming across the lake.  They needed to plan a strategy to get to the cabin without being seen, and it would be difficult.  The cabin was on a bit of a point.  On one side of the cabin was open lake, and all around it on the back side was trackless bush for miles around – nothing but trees and lakes.

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October 11, 1988 was a very beautiful fall morning.  The kind that makes you glad to be alive – and especially glad to be out flying!  The cooler air this time of year was always a joy with better lift for the airplane, and everything working smoothly.  I was making the rounds of different hunting camps we had out in the bush.  I’d taken the Beaver and checked the guys on Anderson Lake.  From Anderson, I was going to go southeast to Birmingham Lake, just off the south end of Wapesi Lake.  I took off from Anderson and was climbing out through about 1500 feet or so, when very suddenly, without warning of any kind, the Beaver engine started bucking and coughing like something was wrong.  What now?  Something was definitely very wrong.

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The airplane just would not climb and the trees were getting closer.  Hylas and I had tied two big boats on the Otter, one on each side; freight-wise the airplane was almost completely empty.  I had hauled many external loads before and thought this would be no problem.  I had even flown two boats on the Otter before, although they were not quite as large as these two.  Actually, we didn’t have very far to go until one of the boats would be unloaded – just “over the hill”.  But that makes no difference if you can’t get the plane to climb!  It was only about twelve miles from our outpost at Carillon Lake to the outpost at Springpole Lake.  We planned to leave one boat there, and then take the other one on out to Ear Falls.  That is, if we could get this thing to climb over the trees!  But it certainly didn’t seem as though it wanted to gain any altitude, and the trees kept getting closer.