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Strait. A quarter of the way across they were stopped by open water. There wasnothing to do but go back. Six days passed, and only dog food remained. The men began to fight among themselves. One of the expedition’s pilots, Stan McMillan, wrote, “It has often been said that even among the most enlightened peoples of this earth, the veneer of civilized behaviour is thin. We didn’t suffer any conspicuous peeling of this veneer, but incidents did occur where one might say fractures developed.”
    The Inuit had left to resupply the group and returned on November 1 with caribou, fish, flour, sugar and tobacco. The next day, the MacAlpine group set out again, threading a course across ice floes. Sled travel was difficult as they had to shove the sleds over huge hummocks of ice without losing their footing. When they hit areas of thin ice the Inuit tested it with their spears. If it withstood a sharp throw, the chances were that it would hold a man, at least for a short time. November 3 was the final and most fearsome day of their trek. In a -27°C (-17°F) wind chill, they fanned out across undulating sheets of ice, running fast and avoiding darker patches that indicated very thin ice or open water. As they ran, they could hear the crack and groan of moving ice sheets, but they all made it across and staggered into the HBC post on November 4. All they wanted were clean clothes, dry footwear and food. The post manager used old wireless equipment on board the ship Bay Maud to send the message “all well” down south. The men were amazed that they were now in better physical condition than when theyflew out on their expedition. There was only one permanent injury among them; one man had three toes amputated because of frostbite. They all agreed that without the help of the Inuit they would have died on the tundra.
    Had all gone well, the MacAlpine expedition would have been back home by September 20. When they had failed to show up at Bathurst Inlet on the Arctic Ocean, 360 miles (580 kilometres) northeast of Yellowknife, by September 24, one of the few northern radio stations sent out word that the group, due 12 days earlier, still had not arrived. An aerial search started that day. For eight weeks, bush pilots flew over 30,000 square miles (77,700 square kilometres) of Arctic Barrens, battling fog, mist, rain and snow, navigating by the sun or the seat of their pants when their compasses were disturbed by the nearby north magnetic pole. The rescuers also became stranded at remote locations when fuel was low, food scarce or equipment broke. It was one of the largest aerial searches in Canadian history to that date.
    The world press was fascinated and, according to MacAlpine’s grandson, “gobbled up every detail of the search” for the missing prospectors. Finally, the search was called off when word came that the MacAlpine expedition was safe. Lieutenant Colonel MacAlpine and his mining associates footed the cost of the search, which was almost $400,000. During their ordeal, the stock market crash of 1929 happened, and a journalist noted, “Such investors aswere on board the two aircraft who had left a buoyant, albeit nervous, stock market situation encountered glum news indeed on their return to civilization.” The members of the expedition were reunited with their planes, but many lost their fortunes.
    The functional Fokker Universal was also the bush plane flown by Walter Edwin Gilbert, another Western Canada Airways (later to become Canadian Airways) pilot. Gilbert had enlisted in the RFC in the First World War and by 1918 was in France as a front-line fighter pilot. Back in Canada after the war, he flew forestry patrols and mapping missions across northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan. In 1929, when stationed in British Columbia, Gilbert had been instrumental in saving the life of H.C. Hughes, superintendent at the Emerald Mine in the West Kootenays. Hughes had been mauled by a