Woke in the middle of the night from a peaceful sleep, John Frieze found himself staring into a flashlight beam and two frightened faces. One of the two men standing by John’s bunk, Quarfot by name, held up a hand with four fingers dangling free and draining blood all over the bunk. Next to him stood the camp cook they called “Bullcook”
Link to another story “Injured, Sick or Worse on the Highway”
John told Donna Blazor Bernhardt in his interview with her years later that back in the states as a boy scout, he had received some “vigorous” first aid training from “a professor of anatomy who taught first aid by using human cadavers.” Apparently at an isolated Pederson Brothers camp deep in the subarctic north woods, that made John the closest thing they had to a doctor.
Quarfot, the owner of the unfortunate hand, worked the night shift as a drag line oiler and he had, “accidentally caught his right hand in the engine fan blades.”
John and Bullcook rescued some tongue depressors from a first aid kit and taped them to the fingers like splints. They put a tourniquet in place to slow the bleeding and set the hand in a wash basin to soak. That exhausted John’s medical ability. Clearly they needed to get Quarfot to the nearest doctor at a Canadian Hospital 165 miles to the north.
“Bullcook” piled the patient into the back of a small panel truck. Frieze took the wheel and the two headed north through the darkness on the gravel road.
John would stop every hour to open the tourniquet and check the fingers then they would mush on.
When they reached the Canadian Hospital, Frieze left his patient in their care and headed back to camp. In his heart he knew Quarfot had no chance to survive the severe shock and the loss of blood. But he had done his best.
About six months later Quarfot stopped by the Pederson camp on his way home. “He had movement in three of the four fingers.’