by: Charles Wilkins photos courtesy of Anne Klisanich & Hockey Hall of Fame The Last Fish He Ever Caught Forty years ago next month, the remains of missing hockey hero Bill Barilko were finally discovered—11 years after he vanished during a fishing trip to James Bay. Amid the mystery surrounding his disappearance, the story of what really lured him to his death has never been told. Until now. A muscular young man in tailored black slacks and a Toronto Maple Leafs windbreaker skipped up the staircase beside Killeen’s Electric on Third Avenue in Timmins, Ontario, and poked his head past a door marked “Dr. Henry Hudson: Dentist.” He flashed a Hollywood smile at the receptionist, Helen Ferrari, and asked if he could speak to the doc. Miss Ferrari would not normally have interrupted her boss at work, but on this occasion she slipped into the recesses of the office and told Dr. Hudson that Bill Barilko was in the waiting room. All-round sportsman: Bill Barilko the angler near his hometown of Timmins, Ontario (ABOVE); Barilko the hockey star in his Toronto Maple Leafs uniform (BELOW)      It was August 23, 1951, and just four months earlier Barilko had scored the overtime goal that gave the Toronto Maple Leafs and their fans a Stanley Cup victory over the Montreal Canadiens—the Leafs’ fourth Cup since the Timmins lad joined the team in 1947. “You have to understand that Bill Barilko was a huge national celebrity in the summer of 1951,” says Helen O’Neill, the former Miss Ferrari. “Everybody was glad to see him.” And that included her boss.      “When are we going fishing, Doc?” piped Barilko as he greeted the dentist.      Hudson had raised the possibility of a summer-ending fishing trip—a “real” fishing trip, in his words—a few weeks earlier after 24-year-old Barilko muttered about his measly catches of June and July. At best, he had landed a pike or two in the Mattagami River and a few walleye at Night Hawk and Waterbeg Lakes. There’d been nothing to fire the imagination, and certainly nothing to brag about in the inevitable exchange of fish fibs that would take place when Barilko and his teammates, most of whom were northerners, convened for training camp in a couple of weeks in Toronto. Even Barilko’s mother had gently razzed him when he’d brought her a pike one evening instead of “something decent” for the table.      During the doldrums of an uncommonly hot July, Hudson had tantalized Barilko with his descriptions of a magnificent, lonely landscape on the east side of James Bay, and of wide tidal rivers in which populations of brook trout and Arctic char were as plentiful as they had been centuries earlier. For Barilko, the prospect of such a trip appealed not just to a summer’s deprivation, but also to a lifetime of unremarkable fishing.      “Bill had never really been anywhere as a fisherman,” says Anne Klisanich, Barilko’s sister, explaining that much of the angling he did locally was out of necessity rather than sport. “We were poor,” she says, describing how their father emigrated from Russia at the turn of the century and supported his family—just—by working six days a week as a mine cook. “In the fall, Bill would go out and shoot partridges with an old .22 rifle. His fishing pole was just a stick with a length of string on it.” The jewel of Barilko’s fishing gear was a small, grey, metal box—salvaged from a local gold mine—in which he kept a ragtag treasury of hooks, line and sinkers, along with lures retrieved from the shallows of local lakes and streams.      Hudson, who owned a three-seater Fairchild 24 floatplane, had made it clear to the Maple Leafs defenceman that, if he was still in Timmins in late August, the two of them would fly up to the Seal River on the northeast coast of James Bay. By then the Seal’s char would be beginning to spawn, offering a weekend of fishing the likes of which Barilko had never experienced.      As it happened, Hudson and his brother, Lou, a local medical doctor, had planned a trip of their own and were scheduled to fly north the next day, Friday. Hudson invited Barilko to come along, and the following morning the three men met just east of town at Porcupine Lake, where Hudson kept his sunshine-yellow airplane. Barilko carried his boyhood tacklebox, its contents now expanded by a spinner or two and perhaps a few spoons and plugs. Otherwise, his fishing gear had improved only slightly from the days when it featured butcher cord and hand-whittled rods. He shoots, he scores: Barilko hits the ice after finding the top of the net in overtime to clinch 1951’s Stanley Cup      “Even while Bill was with the Leafs,” recalls his long-time friend Gaston Garant, “he fished like the rest of us, with a plain little rod and reel that he probably bought in Woolworth’s or Kresge’s.” The Hudsons, by comparison, were toting high-end Pflueger reels, True Temper rods, Mitchell spinning reels, plus a who’s who of small tackle of the day: Daredevle spoons, Mepps spinners, Pikie Minnows, Williams Wablers, Zara Spooks. They also packed camping gear, groceries and heavy clothing.      Around 9:15 a.m., the little Fairchild taxied down Porcupine Lake into the morning sun, turned upwind and roared across the lake. At what should have been the liftoff point, however, the floatplane was nowhere near takeoff speed. Hudson tried again, with the same result, and concluded that there was too much weight on board. Something—or someone—had to go.      Several days later, Lou Hudson would report that as the trio taxied back to the dock, Barilko turned to him and unfurled another of his Hollywood smiles. “You’ve been up there before, Lou,” he said to the older man. “How be you let me go this time?” Hudson complied, and with just the two fishermen on board, the plane shuddered into the air, climbed above the spruce tops at the west end of the lake—above the headframes, tailings and ore piles surrounding Timmins—and arced off into the north. Read more on Bill Barilko`s Final Fishing Trip: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4