Ice fisherman Douglas Bulleid was on the verge of death more than 60 years ago.
Bulleid and his fishing partner, Stanley Bolinski, were fishing on Great Slave Lake near Hay River, NWT, in 1950 when they thought their nets were floating away. A moment too late, they realized with horror that they were the ones drifting away.
“We were trapped, it was terrible,” Bulleid recounted to CTV News Calgary.
Bulleid and Bolinski spent the next 72 hours clinging to their lives, their supplies and sled dogs eventually lost on the shifting ice.
Their lives were put in greater danger with each passing hour.
“We managed to stay together that first night, but that ice was getting smaller and smaller, and we were pulling each other out of the water,” Bulleid recalled.
After being marooned on the ice floe for three days and nights, the frightened pair had finally drifted closer to land and saw only one opportunity to save their lives.
“The only thing left to do was to shout at the top of our voice -- and then in the darkness, I saw that someone heard us,” Bulleid recounted.
A young boy heard them and ran to a nearby fur-trading post, where Don Edgecombe was locking up for the night. Edgecombe immediately contacted the RCMP, commandeered a snowmobile and joined in on the rescue.
But the rescue attempt proved to be a very difficult and dangerous operation.
“There was a strong north wind blowing with drifting snow -- it was very hard to see any distance out into the lake. But we started yelling and we got a response back right away,” Edgecombe told CTV News Calgary.
Edgecombe, RCMP officers and two First Nations volunteers spent the next seven hours sliding a canoe and wooden planks across the treacherous ice, toward the stranded fisherman.
Bulleid and his partner were finally pulled from the ice, and the hypothermic pair was whisked to a nursing station for treatment.
Sadly, Bolinski died a few hours later, but Bulleid survived.
“It was a devastating experience, but I went right back out in the lake, fishing. The best way to overcome that ordeal was to go right back at it -- but I never knew who saved me,” he said.
When the now 88-year-old Bulleid retired, he tried to track down his saviour but didn’t know his name. He provided a newspaper interview in 2007 in the hopes of making contact. His search seemed at a dead end until earlier this month, when Edgecombe happened to tell the rescue story to his children.
After hearing the story, Edgecombe’s son, Don Jr., found the article and tracked Bulleid down in B.C., setting the stage for an emotional telephone exchange that was more than 60 years in the making.
Bulleid feels it’s never too late to give thanks.
“I never had a chance to thank anybody or appreciate somebody for helping me.”
