Chicago cop Gordon Barnhill never forgot the terrible time his buddy was lost for six days on a moose hunt in Ontario.
The friend was found alive through a tremendous effort by valiant searchers, and only lost the toes on his right foot.
Barnhill told the story again last spring in bear camp near Blind River, Ontario, and was struck by his outfitter’s almost whimsical desire for a well-trained tracking dog to pull other stray guests from the bush.
He enlisted the Illinois chapter of the Safari Club to donate a $4,000 trained German Shepherd to outfitter Bill Buckley, who doubles as a Canadian conservation officer.
“The people up here are really excited about having a dog like that around here,” Buckley said by telephone from Blind River, a community of 3,000 about 100 miles from Sault Ste. Marie. “They consider this a gift to the community.”
Highly trained tracking dogs are a rarity in most bush towns, Buckley said, despite the frequency of lost adventurers. Barnhill, a detective on Chicago’s auto theft detachment, was stunned by the numbers. According to Inspector Ed Robertson of the Ontario Provincial Police, between 400 and 500 full-blown searches are conducted each year, mostly for lost hunters and other wilderness travelers, including families.
More than 95 percent are successful, “considering those we never find or may not find for years,” police superintendent Tony Parkin ominously added.
“People don’t realize how big this area is and how little there is in the way of civilization the farther north you go,” Robertson explained. He said the province employs 16 crews of 16 persons each-one for each police district-to conduct a variety of special searches, including searches for criminals on the lam.
“Most people go into the bush ill-prepared to deal with the consequences,” Robertson said. “It’s so easy to get lost. You can’t walk a straight line because of the array of marshes and lakes. If you go in on an overcast day without a compass and topographical map and make a few turns, you can be in trouble. Why, people get lost just picking blueberries. You can encounter a sudden whiteout, or a fog so thick you can’t see the hand in front of your face. You have to be ready to wait it out, which means always carrying some extra food and the right gear.”
Robertson wryly chuckled. “Heck, I’ve spent my life up here and I’ve been lost a couple of times myself,” he said. “It’s embarrassing, but it happens to all of us. You sit down and say, `Now what in the world did I do?’ “
Not even a compass helps neophytes who don’t realize great swaths of northern wilderness are laden with mineral deposits. Encounter a vein of iron or copper ore and your compass may go magnetically haywire.
“People actually have thrown away their compasses under those circumstances thinking they were broken,” said Sgt. Bob Boudreaux of the Blind River detachment.
Bob Skrzypek was Barnhill’s friend who endured an ordeal in 1979. Also a Chicago cop-for three years a bodyguard of ex-Mayor Richard J. Daley-Skrzypek now is retired in Cummings, Ga.
A veteran of hunts in Alaska, Africa and the Northwest Territories, Skrzypek said he was hoping to scout a peninsula near Pickle Lake for signs of moose when he got turned around on a cloudy day. The peninsula was three-quarters of a mile wide where he and a friend beached their boat. Equipped with only a rudimentary map, Skrzypek intended merely to slant into the woods a ways, check things out and return. He was so confident of his woodsmanship that he left his survival pack with his friend in the boat.
Skrzypek encountered the usual maze of water and land, made a few turns, glanced at his compass and blinked hard.
“I didn’t know about those ore deposits,” he recalled last week. “My compass had gone askew. I had no idea where I was.”
His hand-drawn map showed a small lake in the area, and he tried to reach it by dead reckoning. He wandered instead for five days. He soaked his boots and pants crossing his first stream and never had the ability to light a signal fire that would have kept him warm and dry.
He had a good knife that allowed him to cut boughs for shelter, and he disciplined himself to awaken frequently at night to keep his blood circulating. He shot a grouse, but couldn’t bring himself to eat it raw and carried it around. He later learned a pack of wolves had been trailing the scent of his dead grouse.
He found the main lake and occasionally saw planes, but the pilots couldn’t see him. He finally hung the yellow liner of a shell jacket on a long pole over the water and was spotted on the sixth day.
Skrzypek has continued to hunt, but never without a guide and proper equipment.
“That was just my dues into the club, as far as I can figure,” he said.
He believes a dog might have rescued him sooner.
“A good tracking dog would have picked up my human scent and found the places where I stayed,” he said.
Barnhill said donating a dog to someone who participates in rescues is one way the Safari Club can say a belated thanks for saving one of its own.
