The Postmaster’s Dog
by Harvey Hahn

Many of our scheduled stops were designated Post Offices by Canada Post and we had the happy task of dropping off and picking up numbered blue nylon mail sacks on a regular basis. Twice per week at smaller settlements and three times per week at the larger and more populated stops. As these stops were done on a contract basis, they were only supplemental to our regular business of flying people. As was quite often the case, the only reason for stopping was the mail and sometimes these stops were a real pain-in-the-ass.

The appointed Canada Post contractor usually comes down to meet the aircraft and after exchanging mail sacks and perhaps sharing the latest gossip, a helping swing out from the dock and you were on your way. At this one particular stop, the Postmaster’s black Border Collie would leap onto the aircraft float, oftimes before you were even docked, and would bark and chew the trail ropes and run up and down the aircraft pontoon for what reason I cannot even imagine. When you were ready to leave and even sometimes after the engine was started, old Rover would bail off the aircraft and run up and down the dock barking his fool head off. He did this every time and with such excellent timing, that everybody soon ignored him, including the Postmaster.

It was inevitable that someday his timing would be off and he would get stuck on the aircraft pontoon and not be able to make it back onto the dock. One very windy day, one of our number made the perfunctory mail stop in a well-loaded single Otter on his way to the North Coast. After the exchange of mail bags and the friendly howdy-do’s, the wind swung the Otter smartly out from the dock and the pilot made a speedy take-off. After settling down into the climb for the North Coast, a passenger stuck his head up into the cockpit and announced that there was a non-paying passenger riding tourist on the left float. Sure enough, there he was—head down behind the left float strut, black hair flashing in the slipstream, like perhaps he did this all the time.

A serious problem now arose. How was the pilot going to get the dog back to the dock without him falling off to an almost certain death? Would he fall off if he turned the aircraft around? If he flew back over the departure point, would the dog recognize his home and stand up or even open his mouth to bark? Anything of this nature would certainly result in his being blown off the float with disastrous results. How would the dog react to a change of power and flying speed? When the pilot slowed down to land, he would have to pump down the wing flaps to slow down for a landing. How would the dog react to the float he was laying on being pitched down some ten degrees for the landing? And last of all, how would he react to the choppy water coming up to just a few feet from his face at sixty miles per hour?

All of these things went racing through that pilot’s mind as he carefully nursed the clumsy Otter with its two-thousand pound payload around for a very careful and gentle landing. He confessed later that he did not hold out any more hope for Rover to survive his ride than a snowball’s chance in hell, but he would make the effort—if for nothing else than for the sake of his friend, the Postmaster, who was very fond of that dog. Strange as it seems, Rover had the common sense to lie still in that one spot on top of the float, where the airflow was burbled enough from the big strut and float fitting in front of his nose. Any other place, a foot in any direction, and he would surely have been blown away, literally.

As soon as the aircraft landed and got near the dock, even while the engine was still idling, Rover completed his historic flight with a mighty leap onto the dock and beat a hasty retreat to his den under the Post Office. Never was he seen again running up and down the aircraft float, biting the trail ropes and barking. When the pilot who gave him the free ride went up to see how he was doing at a later date, he was promptly bitten for his concern.

Sugar’s Dump

Norene Reedel: Rheta always brought her little dog ‘Sugar’ with her to work and all the guys would give her a rough time. Danny White, one of the pilots, was driving to work one morning and sees this big dog taking a dump by the side of the road. He pulls over, grabs a bag and scoops it up. When he gets to work he offers to take Sugar outside for a pee. This wasn’t unusual because he’d done this in the past. When he gets outside he spreads around this huge bag of poop he collected on the way in. Next thing you know he’s calling for Rheta to come outside, “Rheta, come out here. Jesus Christ! I think there’s something wrong with your dog.” Keep in mind Sugar is this little, tiny Lhasa Apso who barely went poop at all. Well, Dan had her convinced and said, “You’d better phone the vet.” She started dialing when someone told her the truth. She was so mad. It was just the craziest bunch of people with all these different personalities. Danny was such a fun guy. I really miss him. He was one of the pilots that died in that Otter crash.

Remote Flying

Lee Frankham: I used to love giving Rheta and Ev Crumb a hard time. One day, I had this jerk sitting next to me in the airplane—I think he was coming from a local logging camp, he was sort of gullible. He was sitting beside me and it was a nice sunny day, no problem at all and I was coming down around Snout Point—there’s a rock that sticks right out where you make a 90 degree turn. He was sitting there, watching me and I’m watching him and I was trying to fill out my time. I mean, my God, I was getting 3 cents a mile and I didn’t want to miss anything like that and I was doing my little bit of paperwork and he said “Aren’t we getting too close to those rocks?” and I said “Yup” and he says “Well, can’t you do something?” and I said “Nope – they’re doing that from the office” “What??!” he says. I said “The girls are doing it, the bloody dispatchers are doing it” and I kept this up. The guy’s saying, “Well, aren’t you a pilot?” and I said “No…I work down there but I’m not a pilot. Cause we don’t have pilots anymore—these things are all done on the radio…” and then when we went around the outcropping, I’m just sitting there doing my books, steering the thing with my feet, and he kept needling me about this and I said, “Well, look…You just better talk to the bloody girls in the office. Langdon doesn’t pay anybody enough money to come and work here, any pilots, so we’ve gotta do it and the girls are driving these things from the office…” And the guy’s mad as hell about this, and I’m agreeing with him…So anyway, we landed and old Ev Crumb was the dispatcher and this airhead goes up to the dock and goes in there and he raised particular hell with the dispatcher. Frank Roberts was in the back office and comes out, wondering what the hell is going on here. This guy is reaming the poor dispatcher out. Oh, it was crazy! It created some hell for a few minutes, but it was all good fun.

Airport Fire

Len Crawford: My dad built the airport—the first 4500 feet. After he was finished building, he was left with 4000 feet of debris right down the middle of the airstrip that needed to be burned. He sent his buddy, Don Roper, down to the forestry department to get a permit. Keep in mind that this was in September and it was drier than hell that year. Dad sees Don come back and says, “Did you get the permit?” and Don says “Yep!” So Dad sticks the permit in his pocket and gets to burning. Well, Jesus Christ! They had that fire roaring—sparks flying 500 feet in the air! They just got it nicely going and they see this truck come flying down the road. It’s the Forestry Department, and the guy jumps out of the truck and starts yelling at Dad, “What the hell are you doing!!?” “I’m burning!” my Dad says. The forestry guy says, “Didn’t you read that damn permit?” “Nope,” Dad says, “‘I never bothered!” “Well,” he says, “the damn permit says one fire at a time!”— to which Dad promptly responds: “It is one fire at a time!” It was a pretty funny situation. It was a dead calm day—not a breath of wind and hotter than can be, so it’s fortunate everything turned out OK.

David Foster

Phil Bergman: A number of years ago David Foster was on his yacht with his family over in Teakerne Arm and for some reason they had to go to Vancouver. He found us on the internet, called, and the next thing I know I’m talking to David Foster—which in itself was kind of cool. We picked them up in Teakerne Arm, brought them to Vancouver, waited while they did their business, and then flew them back to their yacht. A week later, he called again from his yacht and he asked for me personally. He broke his toe so he wanted an airplane to take him to the hospital. We go and get him and when the plane lands he comes into the office, introduces himself and shakes my hand. The fellow I was talking to after David left says, “Was that David Foster?” And I said, “Yeah, I’ve known him a long time.” I thought it was neat that someone of his stature, with a sore foot, on his way to the hospital, took the time to introduce himself. The look on my co-workers face when David Foster walked in was actually pretty good.

Lights Out

Jack Kirk: We go over to these camps and pick these guys up, and sometimes they’re loaded. And that’s at sea level. John’s favourite trick was to take ‘em up about 5000 feet, turn the heater on full blast. They’re all out like lights. An ounce of liquor at sea level is one thing, an ounce of liquor at say 1500 or 2000 feet is something else.

Heavy Load

Don Thompson: I remember a wedding on Freshwater Bay. The couple getting married were well-known to many people in the area, so there was a big party going on. One of the uncles who lived on a floathouse at Minstrel Island drank too much champagne or something and decided he wanted to go home. I got a message that there was a passenger at Freshwater Bay going to Minstrel Island. I arrived in my Cessna and the uncle was an absolutely immense man – so big I had to slide the front seat all the way to the back of the track just to get myself in the plane. Meanwhile, all the party guests had gathered down at the dock to see him off. As he stepped onto the float of the airplane to get in, his bulk caused the wings to go careening off to one side and at the same time, the dock collapsed under the weight of all the party guests standing it. It was pretty funny! Here’s all these women gussied up to the nines in fancy dresses, standing knee-deep in water, and some of the guests are flattened underneath the wing of the plane, so they’re not just standing in the water, they’re laying in it. It was quite a scene! Anyway, I eventually got him to Minstrel Island. He pointed out his house when we arrived and I was amazed that this guy was full of booze, yet could navigate three or four green, slimy boom sticks to get home. If you’d made him walk a straight line, he probably couldn’t have done it, but greasy boom sticks? No problem.

Alpha Men Behaving Badly

Jim Creighton: I’ve had grown men screaming—“Let me the #%$! outta here!!!” They’re just totally out of control and their friends are holding them down. It was common. You really had to feel for these guys who worked in camp—camp life sucks. There was quite a few of them who were absolutely terrified of flying. They wouldn’t come up to you and actually admit they were scared though. Instead, you’d get their behaviour ‘bass ackwards’ – they’d start being really bitchy before the flight, calling you down, macho stuff. And I’m thinking, “What’s going on?” Getting you involved in arguments—weird stuff like that. And then you’d realize that the whole thing is because they’re shit-scared of aircraft. There’s all kinds of colourful characters. If you were a new pilot on the job, it was difficult. Hairy ass loggers will give you a rough time anyway, but their life is in your hands and they were really cautious if you were new. They’d really watch you to see how you were manoeuvring.

 Passenger Bails

Stan Kardaal: I left Vancouver in a Grumman Goose going to Ucluelet and Tofino, and in those days, we didn’t have an intercom or co-pilot, so I’m up front and a little Japanese tourist was amongst the passengers. And at Ucluelet you land in the water—you leave on the runway in Vancouver and then you land in the water there. I landed in the water—he thought we were crashing. He was out the door and in the water. After that, we had to brief our passengers that we’d be landing in the water, we’re not crashing.

An Ode to the Husky, it’s down where it’s dusky … At the bottom of Ripple Rock

Frank Roberts: Way back in the sixties, Island Airlines determined that we needed an airplane a little bit bigger than the Beaver because we were competing with BC Air Lines and Norseman aircraft, which were bigger than the Beaver. So we purchased a Fairchild Husky. I think there were only 13 of them built. Unfortunately, we had an accident in 1965. The airplane was damaged beyond repair. We could have salvaged a few parts off it, but we never thought we’d see another Husky. Anyway, once the investigation was finished, we put it on a log float and we got Andy Dobson, the tugboat operator, to tow it into Seymour Narrows. Bob Langdon and I were on the raft with this airplane and we dumped it over the side, right above where Ripple Rock was. We thought that was the end of it, but we made a mistake. Many years later, in the 70’s, we acquired another Husky and by this time, someone had come out with a conversion in which they rebuilt the airplane and put a more powerful engine into it and we acquired one of these. Dave Nilson did the conversion here. At about the same time, West Coast Air Services had acquired another one, SAQ, so there were two of these on the coast. West Coast decided that it was too much trouble to maintain this oddball airplane and thought we’d be further ahead if we had both of them, so we ended up with the two Huskies. That’s when we often thought of that original one because there were times when we could have used a tail feather, or a rudder or something for one of the others and what had we done with it?? We’d dumped it into Seymour Narrows on top of Ripple Rock…

Save the Curling Iron

Norene Redeel: I’d been up in Port Hardy visiting my friend Grace and Villi Douglas. Villi ’s an amazing guy. He started out with Alert Bay Air Services when they were headquartered in Alert Bay, and then he ran the Port Hardy base for several airlines including: Alert Bay Air Services, Air BC, Gulf Air, and finally Pacific Coastal with whom he still works. Anyway, I had to get back up to Campbell River to work. It was great in those days because Gulf Air owned both the Campbell River base and the Port Hardy base. My boss in Campbell River said, “Norene, I’m heading to Warner Bay in the Beaver. If you can get a ride over to Warner we’ll pick you up.” I thought, “This is too perfect. I should make it to work by the afternoon no problem.” So I hop into this Cessna 185 and off I go with my little overnight bag, my co-worker Tommy Makenson and one paying passenger. The flight was great, we landed no problem and then things got interesting.

Warner Bay is funny because you have to taxi a long ways to get into it. I’m sitting there enjoying the trip when I happened to glance out at the floats. I thought, “Jesus Christ, these floats are almost under water.” As we were doing this lovely taxi way, the little waves were lapping and filling up our floats. Honest to God, it was like they were sinking. Tommy pulls up to the dock and says to me, “Okay, try and hold onto her. I’m going for a bigger rope.” I couldn’t believe it! We get to the dock and all I can think to do is save my curling iron. The plane’s sinking and the most important thing to me is my curling iron, so I dug it out and scrambled out of the plane. At this point the dock is abuzz and people are running around. Tommy and Keith were there, along with the Olsens and a few other workers.

This poor passenger and I were trying to hold onto the wing while Tommy ran for his bigger rope, but there was no bloody way we could handle the force. Whoosh, over it went and promptly sank! “Oh my Christ! Now what do we do?” At that moment we look up and lo-and-behold it’s the boss Don Braithwaite and two of his buddies from Campbell River taxiing in on our old Beaver. All he can see is the tail end of this bloody airplane sticking out. After some colourful discussion, it was decided they needed to get some buoyancy under the wing. At some point our manager Villi Douglas had flown into help and probably soon regretted it. Someone had to get into the water so Villi drops his drawers and volunteers to get wet. I’ll never forget the sight of Villi with his little scrawny legs, white boxer shorts, his goddamn cowboy boots and his Gulf Air T-shirt with the “Fly Gulf Air. We Care” slogan splashed across the back. Oh my God, it was priceless! Here’s the tail end of this plane sticking out of the water with this crazy man in cowboy boots trying to rescue it. It was just so funny. I still laugh about it with Grace. I don’t know how, but they did manage to get the thing out of the water and I eventually got back to work. I thought I might get the day off after all the excitement, but no dice. I remember being so pleased that I rescued my curling iron.

Bob’s Close Encounter

Jackie Langdon: This was perhaps in August, 1950 shortly after we were married. I was helping dispatch out of the Willows Hotel. On the long summer days, they could fly almost up until 10 o’clock at night. Bob was on a final trip taking a logger to a place not too far away. This fellow was pretty liquored up when he got into the plane and he had liquor with him. He was pretty drunk and I guess he was just snoozin’ and sleepin’ in the plane. But the SeaBee blew a prop and Bob had to set down.

He was up on the north end of Quadra on the east side when he set down. This is when the drunk woke up. He wanted to go to camp and was wondering why they weren’t in camp and when was he going to get him to camp. So Bob just gave him some more liquor so he would go back to sleep. Meanwhile, the shore on both sides is close there. Bob had no power on the Seabee but he was hoping he could just drift in close enough to be able to paddle and get to shore. But the currents kept taking him out and taking him out. This fellow woke up again and became quite obstreperous. He was angry that he wasn’t in camp and he couldn’t understand what had happened. He was getting a little antagonistic towards Bob.

Then Bob reached the point where they were getting closer to the Straight of Georgia where it widens out, and he knew he wasn’t going to make shore. He was trying to radio all the time too. I don’t know why they didn’t pick his signal up at base at Campbell River. I’m on dispatch, it’s getting dark, and I don’t know why he hasn’t come home. And the other pilot who was there was reassuring me saying, “He’s run out of daylight. He’ll overnight in camp. We cannot pick up their radio signal, but he’ll be back first thing in the morning. Nothing to worry about.” It was flat calm. No wind or anything like that. But the logger got so obstreperous in the aircraft that Bob crawled out onto the top of the wing. He left the logger in the SeaBee. Meanwhile, the Comox tower picked up his signal.

The following morning, I am at the office bright and early and I get this phone call from Comox, “Why isn’t someone out there with a boat rescuing this plane who’s heading towards Mitlenatch?” The wind is picking up by this time, and the SeaBee was filling up with water and sinking. We got the police boat from Campbell River and out we went. We tied a line on them and the drunk was still drunk. They drifted all night long and ended up heading towards Mitlenatch. I guess that is the most dramatic thing that Bob ever went through. He said he was more nervous of the logger than he was in the airplane. I think they got to them just in time because the SeaBee was sinking. They towed it back to Campbell River.

Learning to Fly

Ted Turner: Lee Frankham was a real prankster. He’d be flying from Cortes Island with a plane full of little old ladies and he’d take a handful of nuts and bolts, throw them on the floor and then yell, “Hey, can you pick those up, I think they came outta the wing!” He also had a book entitled ‘Learning How to Fly’ and he’d really get a kick out of flying the plane with this book held out in front of him so his passengers could read the title from where they were sitting. I knew Lee and his first wife from the Winnipeg Flying Club. Lee was the first one I met when I walked into Island Air on my first day. It was great to know someone from my early days.

Reverend ‘Goosedem’

Norene Reedel: There were people on Cortes that would not fly with Lee because of his bullshit stories. He’d say, “This plane’s leaking gas,” and things like that. Honest to God, he had them so scared. He was a bugger. He was always pulling pranks on people. Once in a while I’d start to buy his bullshit, then I’d think, “Oh, shit Norene, smarten up.” He’d tell Rheta stories and she was so gullible. You would tell her a joke and about half an hour later she’d start laughing. Lee would tell her the craziest bloody things. One day Rheta’s dispatching down at the Spit out of Western Straights funny looking brown office building. Lee calls her from the airport and says, “Rheta, I’ve got a charter for you.” She says, ‘okay’ and she writes down the information. I came down for coffee a while later and Rheta says, “Do you want to read this?” and I said, “What?” And she said, “Well, you know Lee. I don’t believe anything he says.” So I read the name for the charter and it said, ‘Reverend Goosedem and the Bend Over Choir’. He had also given her the name of the contact person which was ‘Ivan Rotyourcockoff’. I said, “Rheta, how could you fall for this? Any time he asks you to write anything down, don’t!” And Joanne laughed and said, “Oh Rheta, you didn’t fall for that, did you? You know Lee, for Christ’s sake!”

The Couch, the Skiff, and the Still

Harvey Hahn: One fellow was a custodian at the camp. When everyone was working, everything was fine. He was kind of a boom man while the camp was working and when they were not working, he’d be in camp looking after the place. He was another guy that had a drinking problem. His wife knew this, so she’d take the keys for the camp boat from him so he couldn’t go over to Minstrel Island for booze. He was pretty well restricted. She caught the sched one day and she told him, “Stay here!” And he said, “I can’t go anywhere, I don’t have the keys.” “And you aren’t getting them, either!”

The wife was going to be in town for a day or two, buying groceries and everything. So, I’m flying over there one morning and look down. Here he is going across the inlet on his skiff with very little clearance above the water. There is a big orange thing on the back of his skiff. I land and ask, “What’s going on? “Go away, go away,” he says. The big orange thing turns out to be a couch. “Don’t make a wave, or you’ll upset me.” I said, “What’s going on?” He tells me the old fellow across the inlet makes home brew and he will trade his stainless steel still for the couch.

Anyway, to make a long story short, he traded the couch for the still. I ended up going over with him. While he is there, he gets sampling all the stuff. There are gallons and gallons of it there. I had a shot and it was really quite good. It made my heart go like this. Primo! Anyway, we get drinking and talking and storytelling. After that, I left to go deliver his wife on the evening sched.

The wind is pickin’ up a bit so he decides he better get this still home before his wife comes in on the sched. So, down he goes to get the still. They take it all apart and these two guys load it in the skiff. When I got there with his wife he is standing on the dock there looking like a wet dog - he’s soaking wet. His wife gets out and says, “Just bring the stuff up and put it in the fridge.” I said to him, “What happened?” He told me he got the still and started coming back but the wind came up and made things a little choppy. Well, the skiff started taking on a bit of water. So he would row, then bale the water, row, bale the water. He got a little careless, and in the end he thought he would just make a run for the dock, but he never made it. The boat sank on him. He turns to me and says, “Yup, he’s got my couch and my still is on the bottom of the inlet. It’s a real calamity.” I said, “That’s the least of your problems. How are you going to explain to your wife where the couch is?” “Oh ya,” he says. I never quite found out what happened. She was still hanging in with him. He was a character.

Woman in Peril

Dr. John Ross: It was way back in about 1962 . . . a Sunday afternoon about this time of year. (January) I was on call that day and somebody came running out saying there was someone in Gold River bleeding heavily and they wanted a doctor. A woman had had a baby over there, an Indian lady, and she had retained the placenta. And when that happens they tend to keep on bleeding. She had been delivered by a couple of nurses who were over there that night for a big party they were having in Gold River. There was no town there then. There was just a logging camp. The road that goes to Gold River now was not there then, you could only get there on the logging roads. There was some urgency because the woman was bleeding and had lost a lot of blood.

So they had a plane lined up for me. I went up to the hospital and I got the lab tech in case I had to cross match some blood. We got on the plane and took off from the Spit. It wasn’t a perfect day. There was some low overcast. We got up over Upper Campbell Lake and we were going to fly up over the Elk River and then into Gold River. There is a pass there. You have to go up fairly high but the clouds came right down to the ground. The pilot, Frank Roberts, said, “I can’t take you in there because I can’t see where I am going. It’s too dangerous. I can turn around and land you on the Elk River Estuary.” The estuary is right across from Boulding’s Lodge. He said, “I can land you there. I saw a bus.” Although it was a logging road, they did have a bus that ran in there about once a day. “I saw the bus coming along and if I put you down on the estuary, I think you can scramble up to the road and flag him down. He will stop for sure.”

He landed on the estuary and taxied into the rock shore. The girl and I scrambled up the bank. She had a white coat on and I had a suit on. We flagged the bus down. The bus driver stopped and we explained what had happened. We hopped in. We got over there and the woman really had bled a lot. The two nurses were both good nurses. They had saved all the blood in a big basin and it was about two thirds full of blood. I think they had about half her blood volume in that basin. I didn’t dare move her in such a shocked state because she was quite shocked. To move her to Campbell River could have been disastrous with the bumpy road. We lined up all the loggers and got seven pints of blood. The girl cross-matched them all and we transfused the lady. That took several hours. We restored her blood pressure and we transported her to Campbell River and got there about midnight. I removed the placenta and she did fine.

Hippies

Bob Early: I was running a sched one day, and I went into Blind Channel to drop off the mail and I didn’t have any passengers at that time and this couple comes walking down the dock—hippies. The guy comes up and says to me “Can we get a ride out with you? My wife is very sick.” And I looked at her and she looked terrible all right. They had all kinds of stuff going with them too. So I told them I had the room and to hop in the plane. They climbed in, and nobody sat up front with me, they sat in the back. The girl was all wrapped up in blankets, and I don’t know whether she was crying, or had a cold, or was maybe just pretending, but she was sitting back there snivelling and sniffing. It wasn’t a month after that that the police came around and checked all the records and found that they knew this guy, they had arrested him. They’d found bodies around Shoal Bay and this guy was an axe-murderer. The police asked if I remembered him, and I told them ‘Yes’, I remembered these hippies, the wife was sick, and I gave them a ride out. I ended up having to go to court along with Mrs. Richter. Her husband owned Blind Channel. Her and I had to go to court in Nanaimo as witnesses to identify these people.

Other Tales
By Harvey Hahn

On a cloudless, sparkling summer’s day, with myself and five passengers onboard a trusty old de Havilland Beaver, we set off on a multi-stop sched to the West Coast and return. The trip promised to be most enjoyable for we were not troubled by weather and we could climb up and enjoy some of the finest scenery in the world in a direct flight ‘over the top’. This particular sched called for numerous drop-offs and pick-ups along a prescribed route.

How quickly and efficiently one accomplished this determined how much money you and the company made, so any delay due to weather or other causes was most unwelcome.

At the first stop, they had a very large and disagreeable St. Bernard who was very friendly to visitors or residents of that camp. However, he had an abiding hatred of pilots; he had developed a fine taste for them and indulged this vice on an almost daily basis. This dog had an almost perfect attack record. There was none of the usual warning that one would receive such as barking, growling or even baring of his formidable choppers. Just an unhurried stroll through any number of bystanders, even stopping for a pet or two, then a casual stroll up to the pilot and the unannounced gargantuan chomp that was followed by a few jerks to let you know it was not accidental, and then a speedy withdrawal, usually with appropriate screams and curses. One unfortunate pilot required stitches and tetanus shots when he suffered a direct and unexpected frontal attack to a very sensitive portion of his anatomy.

On the occasion of this stop, the owner of the dog just happened to be onboard and, as is usually the rule, the pilot is the first one out of the aircraft and the one to tie it up before deplaning or loading any passengers.

As I was bending over to tie up the aircraft, old Rover caught me, as he had so many times before, totally by surprise. The giant chomp right over my wallet induced a war whoop that would have made Sitting Bull real proud and as I stood bolt upright, I hit my head on the lift strut running on an angle up to the wing. Unconsciousness was very brief and when I awoke, I was flat on my back on the dock and Rover was sitting on my chest, no doubt gloating over his surprising victory. A good wallop on the back of his head sent him in full retreat back up the dock.

Anger is one of the best ways to compose yourself in circumstances like these and after checking the goose egg developing on my head, I informed the dog owner in no uncertain terms that if he did not tie up that damned dog or, better yet, get rid of him, he was enjoying the last vestige of air service he was going to see for quite some time.

As he unloaded his white cotton duffel bag, some rather fragile baked goods and some assorted parts, he began a long-winded and condescending discourse on what a wonderful dog old Rover was and how misunderstood he was and it was our own fault we were always getting bitten. According to him, we had no respect for this dog and, consequently, the dog had no respect for us. A distraction caused by the snickering of the passengers remaining on the aircraft got my attention and when I looked inquiringly in their direction, the front seat passenger, with tears of suppressed laughter streaming from his eyes, urged me to “check out the dog”. Sure enough, Rover had returned and, as his master lectured me, was relieving himself in rather shocking quantities all over the duffel bag and baked goods on the dock.

Everyone broke out into laughter; we just could not repress it. The dog’s owner turned around and the mood changed instantly from patient reproach to immediate anger. “Damned dog!” and a mighty boot to his backside sent poor old Rover scooting up the dock and out of sight. This was an appropriate time to leave as I felt my revenge was complete and anything added here would have been superfluous. Later stops by others revealed that Rover was nowhere to be found and inquiries of his whereabouts were met with stony silence. Strangely, we never saw that dog again and he was soon replaced by the most affable and affectionate Golden Labrador-Retriever I had ever met, much to the joy of a large number of relieved bush pilots.