"I Told Her I Loved Her"

"Her family blamed me for murdering her.  They said I shot her or something.  They said my family helped hide the evidence.  I was shocked... I think I deserve an apology."  Andrew Cardinal

 She was there, beside him, and restless and annoyed, and then suddenly, when he looked up, she wasn't there at all.  Gone, and he assumed she'd just stubbornly retraced their steps to return to the remote camp they had vacated earlier in the day, seven kilometres back, in dense brush.  They had finished their rabbit-trapping trip in Northern Alberta, and were preparing to decamp.  And that's when he discovered, at that juncture that the keys to their ATV weren't in his possession after all.

Which prompted him to kneel down to sift through the detritus at their feet - pine needles, decaying leaves - to see if he could find the keys.  "Next thing you know, I'm talking to myself.  I thought she took off back to the cabin."  And that was July 31.  Andrew Cardinal was unable to find his wife, Rhonda.  Not that he didn't look everywhere he could think of, but she was nowhere he could determine.

He halted his search for the missing keys, and set out on foot.  He thought he'd just come across her by retracing the steps they'd earlier taken.  She wasn't at their hunting camp.  He went back to where they'd ended up when he discovered his keys to be missing.  Not there either.  So out he went on foot again, to the highway and rescue. Two weeks went by and no sight of her, nothing at all. 

The RCMP used ATVs, a search helicopter, and swept the area with the help of community volunteers and members of their family.  Ah, yes, the family.  Some of them, very upset about Rhonda Cardinal's absence, accused her husband of having murdered her.    When she was eventually found, she had no explanation for having gone missing; simply that she had "blacked out", woke up lost, and began her wandering.

As for Rhonda Cardinal, she said later she had heard a helicopter, but since she was in dense woods, knew she couldn't be seen.  She kept walking, through muskeg, eating berries where she could, falling asleep every night under trees, exhausted with the effort.  At one point she found an isolated cabin, broke into it, found canned food, water and a change of socks for her blistered feet.  She remained there for several days before setting out again.

After another short walk she found herself on a road, and a few minutes later a truck appeared.  Which brought her back to Calling Lake, where her husband was waiting.  "I told her I loved her.  And I told her I was happy she was alive", said her husband.  The moral of that story: stay put.  Two heads are better than one, and two bodies clasped together at night are both warming and comforting.