Our helicopter pilot to Bylot Island is a forty-year veteran. He got trained in 1973 and has been flying the Arctic ever since. So our little excursion across the frozen sound is like a picnic for him, I guess. When he shows up to ferry us across, he is just back from helping to rescue 31 people who got stranded when a giant chunk of ice broke off from the floe edge and started floating away with them aboard.
Fred has a three-legged dog named Mukluk who goes everywhere with him, including up in the air. Mukluk has a little blanket set up down on the floor in the copilot seat. Not that we have a copilot, instead, I get to ride shotgun, because John is hogging all the space in the back, with a harness on and his tripod ratchet-strapped down, shooting out the open door. Bet it's cold back there. It's nicer up front, especially with a warm dog on your lap.
As soon as we get back from a fairly long day on the island, and in Fred's case a fairly long day in the air, Fred gets a call. A bunch of hunters he rescued a week or two ago went back out onto the broken ice trying to retrieve their skidoos and stuff, and now they have to be rerescued.
The next morning, I expect Fred to be in the mood to make some kind of sharp comment about idiots that do the same life-threatening thing two times in a row, but he says nothing of the sort. He says he feels for them. They're people who have almost nothing, those skidoos are an important part of their lives and will be very hard for them to replace, and by the time he got there they had been out on the ice for a week and were basically starving. Fred doesn't see it as foolhardy behaviour, he just has compassion for people in a really difficult situation. Fred's a nice guy. Like a flying Dalai Lama.
We tell him we want his direct line. If I do something really stupid, endanger myself, and need rescuing, I want to be rescued by Fred.
And Mukluk. Who is also very non-judgmental.
Fred has a three-legged dog named Mukluk who goes everywhere with him, including up in the air. Mukluk has a little blanket set up down on the floor in the copilot seat. Not that we have a copilot, instead, I get to ride shotgun, because John is hogging all the space in the back, with a harness on and his tripod ratchet-strapped down, shooting out the open door. Bet it's cold back there. It's nicer up front, especially with a warm dog on your lap.
As soon as we get back from a fairly long day on the island, and in Fred's case a fairly long day in the air, Fred gets a call. A bunch of hunters he rescued a week or two ago went back out onto the broken ice trying to retrieve their skidoos and stuff, and now they have to be rerescued.
The next morning, I expect Fred to be in the mood to make some kind of sharp comment about idiots that do the same life-threatening thing two times in a row, but he says nothing of the sort. He says he feels for them. They're people who have almost nothing, those skidoos are an important part of their lives and will be very hard for them to replace, and by the time he got there they had been out on the ice for a week and were basically starving. Fred doesn't see it as foolhardy behaviour, he just has compassion for people in a really difficult situation. Fred's a nice guy. Like a flying Dalai Lama.
We tell him we want his direct line. If I do something really stupid, endanger myself, and need rescuing, I want to be rescued by Fred.
And Mukluk. Who is also very non-judgmental.
No comments:
Post a Comment