223 We find terra incognita* 



been bamboozled. Our helicopter had dropped us in the wrong 

 place. To tell the honest truth, we didn't know where we were! 

 The next move was the unpleasant one of cranking up the 

 radio and asking Fort Smith to search for us by aircraft and tell 

 us our location. That message was hard to send, but there seemed 

 to be no alternative. We finally made contact on the tenth and 

 then we sat down to wait. The following day a message got 

 through to us advising that our old friend Bob Smith of the U.S. 

 Fish and Wildlife Service had arrived with a Grumman Goose, en 

 route to the Arctic Coast. He was taking off to look for us and 

 we were to send up smoke signals. This welcome news reached us 

 around 5 P.M., and within an hour we heard the roar of twin 

 engines and then the plane was zooming low over the treetops 

 above camp. Ward Stevens, who was aboard, dropped us a mes- 

 sage giving our position as less than two miles airline upstream 

 from the mouth of the Sass! Apparently, our helicopter pilot had 

 not allowed for the 32-degree compass variation that must be 

 taken into account in that part of the world. Instead of flying 

 due north he had headed closer to northeast and set us down near 

 the wrong escarpment, more than twelve miles airline from our 

 true objective. In that country it might as well have been one 

 hundred and twelve. 



We were marooned for eleven days in that mosquito-ridden 

 spot, an experience that none of us would like to repeat. Our 

 most philosophical attitudes were at first strained and then forced. 

 Morning smiles and greetings soon took on the heartiness of a 

 service-club luncheon, and only the O.P. rum in our five-o'clock 

 tea saved each day from complete disintegration by suppertime. 

 To pass the time, Bob Stewart, in spite of the awful plague of 

 mosquitoes, laid out two 15-acre plots, one in the upland and the 

 other in bottomland white spruce, and made a breeding-bird 

 population study of each. Ray and I undertook to do most of the 

 camp chores and stuck close to the radio, working every possible 

 schedule on the Wood Buffalo network in a futile effort to find 

 a helicopter that could get us out of there. The weather con- 

 tinued to get more and more like summer. From a temperature 



