4

“I walked around to her side of the car and got her up and out of the seat. Then I took her back around behind the wing strut—she’s still handcuffed behind, you know—grabbed her by the arms and let her put her feet up on the step and walk herself on in and then she sits down. Once she’s inside the plane—again, she’s pretty much confined, can’t move.

“Then I have to go back out and get in my car and just move it fifteen feet. I told her what I’m going to do, you know, that I’m going to be watching you, so please don’t start getting out of the airplane, because I don’t want to shoot a bunch of holes in the side of it. And she didn’t even blink an eye. I got back in and started the airplane and taxied out.

“I got out there on the Knik River, you know, I landed there and it was all fine. Right away I reached in and got her loose. It was awful hard for me in the first place to get her out of the airplane when she was still handcuffed, so I just reached in there and unhooked her handcuffs so she can grab the back of the seat and window supports in front and step on out. I grabbed her after she stepped down.

“The spot where you land out there is all gravel, then there’s some woods over here and a shack —it was a frame for a tent cabin; in other words, the walls are only about so high. And they have a meat shack out here, which is the same way. It’s only half walls around, but then it has a roof on it, and is screened in with a door on it. And there’s a bar through the middle of it so they can hang moose meat and stuff in it so it can cool down without flies getting to it.

“Anyway, I got her out and got the handcuffs off and just took her by the arm. I said to her ‘This is where we’re going to spend the day…’ Just as we was walking in here, a damn plane comes down the river, going down around and in big circles over. He made a pass around and I thought, ‘Oh shit, that son of a bitch is going to stop.’ I’m still holding her by the arm and I say, ‘Don’t say a goddamn word to him. If you raise hell and he starts for me, I’m going to have to shoot the son of a bitch, and if I’ve got to shoot him, I’m going to shoot you, and you don’t want that, do ya?’

“Oh, no, no, no, no.”

“I said all right, let’s go in here, and we went to the meat shack. Next to the screen door there was a nail that was bent over to hold the door shut. I twisted that down, got her inside and I backed her up against an iron pipe running across the top of it where they could hang meat from. I said, ‘Hey, I’m going to make sure the guy don’t land, or if he does land, I’m going to make sure he don’t come up here. You stay here and keep your mouth shut and we’re going to have no problems whatsoever.’

“So I handcuffed her hands behind her, around that post, and as I walked back out to my airplane, this guy made one more pass—they were quite big turns, you know. and as he was coming around one more time he dipped his wings at me, and I just waved to him. He waved a couple more times and leveled off and went back down the river. That scared me a little bit there.

“But I had the .223 in my airplane, and I carried that back and I leaned that against the shack. Then I went back in to her in there and got her freed.

“Up until the time when that guy first flew over, everything was just right. As a matter of fact, when the plane came over the first time, I said, ‘There comes a plane. let’s get out of sight.’ And, boy, you know, she just right away got behind some bushes and done everything she could to keep out of sight.

“But the problem was, I think, maybe I shouldn’t have called it a meat shack to her. maybe that’s what got her thinking. I thought about it a lot of times, but I don’t know the answer. All I know is when I started walking out of there with her, she started screaming.

“You’re going to kill me, aren’t you? You’re going to kill me.”

“I said, ‘No, I ain’t going to kill you. The problem is over with. The guy is gone.’

“Oh, no, no, you’re going to kill me.” She slapped me and started running. I caught up to her and stopped her. I said, ‘Now look, it’s over. There is no problem, the guy is gone.’ But she had got hysterical and I couldn’t get her calmed down. The more I tried to talk to her—and maybe it was because I was getting excited—the more hysterical she got and she broke away from me again and started to run.

“I took a couple steps back and grabbed the rifle. Then I ran and caught her again and I said, ‘Now look, don’t make a bad thing worse. Don’t. Stop. It’s okay.’ But then I had a gun in my hand and she said, ‘You’re going to kill me right now.’

“Then she—it just went completely, things just went completely bad again. If that son of a bitch hadn’t circled in there it would never have happened… ’Cause as a matter of fact I’d never had one that tried as hard to keep it under wraps, you know. But I think when she was by herself in the meat shack, she just—confined there—that’s when things went bad.”