The caller to the Glennallen Alaska Trooper Post was a pipeline worker, fresh from a little R&R with his buddies near the village of Chitina. Something had caught the driver's eye as they were passing over the Tonsina River bridge. Sure, it was springtime, and the waters were fast and muddy. And, yes, they'd had more than a few beers the night before and may have been a little blurry-eyed. But one thing all three men agreed upon was that a hand seemed to be waving at them from an orange bundle silently floating down the river. The spigot of the Alyeska Pipeline had just been turned on the year before and a whittled down workforce was still in the camps. Some of the guys-many from the oil coun- try of Texas or Oklahoma-had decided to invest their earnings by planting roots in Alaska. Others couldn't wait to catch an Alaska Airlines Boeing 727 from Anchorage home. Some just seemed to want to stick around and raise heck, which kept the Troopers busy. Others, like these witnesses, wanted to help. I didn't have a clue where the Tonsina River was, but I knew there was no time to waste.
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