Norman Wells (Sep 22/03) - As the waters of the Mackenzie River rolled by, Rose Andrew and her family finally closed a chapter on their grief that has anguished them for nearly two years.

Forty hours after the plane crash which claimed her daughters lives, Ashley, 18, and, Lindsay, 11, on New Year's Eve 2001, their young bodies, and those of Kole Crook and pilot Dana Wentzel, were retrieved by a search and rescue team but their personal effects: clothing, family photos, and jewelry, were left inside the crumpled plane.

The only belongings taken from the aircraft were those of the well-known fiddler Crook, who was on his way to Tulita to perform that night.

The girls' luggage left behind, an important grieving process in the tradition of the Shutoagotine (Mountain Dene) was cast into limbo. According to the tradition, when a loved one dies their belongings, save one or two mementos, are set atop a funeral pyre and burned.

The family were told an effort would be made to retrieve the girls' belongings shortly after the plane crash but as weeks turned to months they began to doubt this would ever happen.

"We were just waiting so long," says Andrew. "We had no idea when it was going to happen."

But on Sept. 2 a Canadian Helicopters chopper, piloted by Guy Thibault, with base engineer Chris Stewart and Norman Wells RCMP Const. Harvey Pierrot on board, flew out to a rugged hillside 50 kilometres south of Fort Good Hope and brought the girls' belongings back.

A couple of days later, the family: Rose and her sister Clara, from Fort Good Hope, her son Blake and the girls' father, Frederick Andrew in Tulita, met in Norman Wells to go through what was left the dead girls' luggage.

"All I did was cry and cry," says Rose. "Not much of their clothing was salvageable. Everything was wrecked and ruined from being in the mountains so long.

"We just put all their clothing in bags and Frederick and my nephew brought them down to the river bank and did the ceremony of burning the clothing."

Among the items Rose kept were some of Ashley's jewelry and family photos, and a few undeveloped rolls of film. One roll was still inside Lindsay's now broken camera -- frozen to the last frame she ever took.

The jewelry will go to Ashley's daughter, now four, but only "when she's old enough to understand," she says.

Rose says she plans to take the camera and undeveloped film with her down to Edmonton to extract what shots might be inside -- likely happy images of the Christmas they spent with mom in the days before they boarded the Cessna 172 heading back home to Tulita.

Closure only partly complete

Rose says she still thinks about the accident and her girls constantly. Their burial ceremony may be complete, but her wounds are still raw. She often thinks about the lonely hillside where they died. Some day she would like to go there.

"I still want to see which mountain it was because there's so many ridges from here to Norman Wells," says Rose.

"Every time I fly I look at all the ridges and just wonder which one it is. I have no idea."

The mercy flight to gather her daughter's belongings have been on the minds of several people in the Sahtu all summer long. Eventually, a $1,000 donation from the Norman Wells Royal Canadian Legion and the goodwill of Canadian Helicopters' Guy Thibault made it possible.

The crash site lies on a steep incline on a 1,300-foot hill, which made it a difficult spot to land a helicopter and climb down to the plane. Some of the girl's belongings were still inside the downed aircraft, while more had fallen down to the bottom of the hill.

Thibault, who had also taken part in recovering the bodies, says they picked up every article they could find. He had hoped the return trip to gather their belongings would've happened sooner but says bureaucratic wrangling got in the way.

"Nobody wanted to take responsibility for it," says Thibault.

"Right from the RCMP, the coroner's office, the insurance company, the owners of the plane, Transport Canada or even the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs. We had to take our own time off to do it. It would've been nice to see a little more leadership."

One person who did take an active interest in returning the girls' belongings to the family was Const. Pierrot, who spent many frustrating hours of his own time trying to arrange the pick-up.

Having grown up in Fort Good Hope, he knows the family well and wanted to help out. Everyone credits him for getting the return flight off the ground, but says he never wanted to be made into a hero, although he admits it had become personal.

"I can't stand it, everybody's trying to give me credit," says Pierrot. "I don't want to be the hero. That part's really starting to frustrate me. I'm not the only one involved.

"Hopefully they (the family) will be able to put it past them now. It kept coming up: Why didn't anybody take the stuff out of there? I couldn't answer any of these questions but it will be put to rest now in more than one way."

One more chapter to go

On Oct. 27, a coroner's inquest into the plane crash will be held in Norman Wells.

Rose says she has many questions on her mind although she'd rather keep them to herself for now.

One question almost certain to be raised at the inquest will be why Wentzel, against the advice of the other pilots, chose to take off in a snow storm with darkness quickly falling around them?

Another will be why it took 40 hours after the crash for a search and rescue team to reach the location? Even though an emergency signal had been detected more than 30 hours earlier.

In a Transport Safety Board document released last January, it was stated that Wentzel and the two girls likely died from hypothermia and not from the crash itself.

"Since this happened my life hasn't been easy at all," says Rose, who remembers Lindsay as a beautiful little girl with a love for animals and babies. She wanted to be a veterinarian when she grew up. And Ashley, who was thinking about a career in the military.

"I'm not going to be there to blame anybody for what happened. I just want a few questions answered. It's been on my mind since it happened."