"This is tough," he said at the story-telling segment of last weekend's second Midnight Sun Seaplane Fly-in.

The veteran bush pilot went back to February 1967 when he landed his single-engine Beaver on Samandrie Lake to wait out some bad weather on his way to Yellowknife from Cambridge Bay.

Gauchie was stranded with barely any food in temperatures as low as -68 C, longer than anyone who had survived the harsh Northern barrens. The search was called off on Feb. 17, more than two weeks after he left Cambridge Bay.

"My wife and daughter thought I was dead, and had planned a funeral," he said.

A thin and haggard Gauchie was found April 1 by bush pilot Ronald Sheardown and co-pilot Glen Stevens, who were on their way to a mining camp at Kugluktuk. The rescue was a long time coming for the man who had seen planes pass before, but had been unable to attract their attention.

"The wind would trick me and I'd jump out of the (grounded) airplane thinking I heard an airplane," he said.

The day of the rescue, he saw the aircraft approach and sent up one of two flares he had left.

Gauchie, who was the original owner of Buffalo Airways in 1967, still keeps a time capsule of the letters he received from school children across the territories who raised money for him.

It's in the words of these letters that Gauchie told the story of how he survived the ordeal.

He focused on the encouraging words of more than a dozen young students from Tuktoyaktuk and other communities who wrote to him after he was rescued.

One boy who wrote to him said he hoped Gauchie hadn't lost all his toes.

While reading that letter and several others that followed, Gauchie didn't mention that he did lose five toes from frostbite and spent weeks in hospital recuperating from the ordeal.

"I even have the $3 they sent me -- that was a lot of money then," said the pilot as he pulled the bills out of his pocket to show the audience.

As a woman in the audience wiped her eyes, it was obvious the story hadn't lost any of its meaning after three decades.

Gauchie's story, "The Man Who Refused to Die" can be found in the November 1967 issue of Reader's Digest.