Three hours later, the two men slapped down on the Rupert River
at Rupert House—today known as Waskaganish—a few miles
upstream from where the wide, sand-bottomed river empties into
the southeast corner of James Bay. Nearly 300 years had passed
since the Hudson’s Bay Company built its fort on the site,
but it was still in business there. As Hudson and Barilko buzzed
toward the dock, an 18-year-old company employee named Jim Crawford
beat it down to the waterfront to refuel the plane.
“I’d been living in
Toronto when the Leafs won the Cup that year,” says Crawford,
who had been lured north two months earlier by a job ad in The
Globe and Mail. “But I wasn’t much of a hockey fan
and didn’t recognize Barilko, and he didn’t let on
who he was.” Barilko told the teenager he and the pilot
were on their way to the Seal River to catch char. “They
were excited,” says Crawford, now retired and living in
Queensville, Ontario. “Hudson told me char was the greatest
tasting fish there was, and when I told them I’d like to
try it, Barilko said, ‘When we stop on the way back, we’ll
give you a fish.’”
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| Away
from the rink: One of the rare photos of Barilko
the outdoorsman in his element |
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On
the Sunday afternoon two days later, Crawford was again drawn
to the waterfront by the approach of the yellow Fairchild—this
time from the north. He went to the dock, Crawford admits,
because he “wanted the fish he’d been offered.”
When it was not immediately forthcoming, he reminded Barilko
of his promise. “Right away,” says Crawford, “he
opened the inspection plate on one of the pontoons, reached
in and took out several good-sized char. He held them right
up for me—he was proud of them. Hudson told him to give
me a small one, and Barilko said, ‘I’ll give him
a big one!’ and he handed me a nice, big five- or six-pounder—beautiful
thing, bright pink belly, greenish blue on top, spots along
the back.”
When Hudson protested Barilko’s
generosity, the two began arguing. “I guess Hudson didn’t
think Barilko appreciated that these fish were a rare treat
and that it was a big effort to fly way up north to get them,”
suggests Crawford.
The pilot’s mood might
as easily have been explained by the increasingly gusty wind
or by the roiling wall of black cloud that could be seen in
the distance to the southwest. Another Hudson’s Bay Company
employee named Dan Wheeler, who had refuelled the plane, cautioned
Hudson about the approaching storm and urged him to stay the
night. “Hudson told us he was used to flying in the North,”
says Crawford, “and that he had a hundred and twenty
pounds of char that he was afraid would go bad if he didn’t
get it home.” After several attempts at liftoff, the
little Fairchild wobbled into the air, barely cleared the
trees on the far side of Rupert Bay and disappeared into the
southwest.
By Monday morning, the men had
still not reached Porcupine Lake. And by Monday afternoon,
the biggest air search in Canadian history had been mobilized.
In all, 28 military, private and commercial aircraft would
scour more than a million square kilometres of spruce forest,
muskeg and water. Barilko had been a favourite of Maple Leafs
owner Conn Smythe, who helped finance the operation and insisted
on its continuation long after logic dictated it should be
called off.
At the Leafs’ training
camp—and well into the season—Barilko’s stall
in the dressing room was left vacant, his equipment laid out
and at the ready for his return. Meanwhile, the newspapers
brimmed with rumours that there had been more to the disappearance
than was obvious. One of the more imaginative speculations
was that Barilko, because of his Russian roots, had defected
to the Soviet Union to teach hockey players the art of defence.
(What Hudson’s role might have been in the defection
went conveniently unexamined.)
Others insisted that the pair’s
“real” freight on the trip had been gold, not fish,
and that for two years or more they’d been obtaining
high-grade ore from the local mines and moving it into the
U.S., where it could be sold without suspicion. The supposition
was that Hudson, who worked with gold in his dental practice,
was an ideal fence for the metal, and Barilko an ideal courier
thanks to his frequent trips to, say, Chicago and New York.
Still others, such as Helen
O’Neill, insist such stories were absurd. “Dr. Hudson
did fly his plane to New York once,” she acknowledges,
“but it wasn’t about gold. He was a baseball fan
and he went to see a World Series game.”
 The
big question for the family, says Anne Klisanich, wasn’t
about gold or the Soviet Union, or even what had happened
to the plane. Rather, it was the more personal matter of why
her brother had gone north at all that weekend in late August
when all indications suggested he shouldn’t. His mother,
Faye, for one, had been dead set against the trip. Her husband
had died on a Friday, and she was devoutly superstitious about
any event that occurred or began on that day. What’s
more, she had always been spooked by the uninhabited “wasteland”
to the north.
“I tried to talk him out
of it,” says Barilko’s sister. “He had too
much to do. He was scheduled to appear at the CNE in Toronto
in a few days. He had a farewell party in Timmins to attend,
had to get packed, had the long drive down, plus preparation
for training camp. I said, ‘Bill, you can’t do it
all.’ But he was determined to go.”
That Henry Hudson was a risk-taker,
with only 300 hours or so of flying time, might be viewed
as a better reason for Barilko to have stayed home. “Any
pilot who’d put 120 pounds of fish in the pontoons of
a little Fairchild 24 and then fly into a storm had no right
to be in the air,” says a Thunder Bay bush pilot with
some 20,000 hours’ experience. “That’s crazy.”
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