Nunam Iqua boys who got lost in a storm on a snowmachine were chasing a fox

This article originally appeared at KYUK.org and is republished here with permission.

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BETHEL - On Feb. 2, four boys from Nunam Iqua left their home by snowmachine during a winter storm and ended up lost 18 miles south of town. They weathered the storm for over 24 hours outside before searchers found them huddled together in the snow.

They said that they got lost chasing a fox.

Lying on his hospital bed, 7-year-old Ethan Camille looks down at his hands, nine of his fingers wrapped in bandages.

“I only remember a little bit,” Ethan said. “The weather makes me forget a little bit things.”

Sitting beside him is his mother, Irene Camille, who is also the grandmother of the three other boys who were lost. Her memory of that day is clear, the day her son and grandsons left home and didn’t return.

“That day was supposed to be a good day,” Irene said. “It was my birthday.”

But both Irene and Ethan said that the weather looked ugly that day.

“Bad. Storm,” Ethan said, describing the conditions. He turned to his mother and asked, “How come you let us go outside?”

Irene sighed. She’s been asked that question a lot since that day. Part of the reason she let them out, she says, was that the boys had been staring at their phones all morning.

“We don’t like them to be on their phones too much,” Irene said. “We like them to exercise, and play in the snow, and have fun outside.”

And so she took away their phones and sent them outdoors, checking outside her window every now and then to make sure that she could see them.

“Then we just, they just disappeared,” Irene said.

Ethan says that he and the other boys had been riding their snowmachine around town for four or five hours. Just as they were about to head back inside, something appeared and lured them away from home.

“We found a real fox and we tried catch it, but it run away,” Ethan said.

Ethan and the boys chased the fox until they caught up to it and hit it with their snowmachine.

“We rammed it,” Ethan said.

Thinking it was dead, Ethan jumped off to pick it up. But the fox wasn’t dead.

“That’s why it bit me,” Ethan said.

The fox bit his hand twice. When it ran away, the boys continued to give chase, driving miles and miles farther from town.

“So that’s how we got lost,” Ethan said. “Cause we were trying to catch a fox to show my mom and my dad.”

The fox disappeared into the storm’s empty whiteness, which had worsened since they left home. That’s when the snowmachine got stuck, Ethan said.

One of the boys, 14-year-old Chris Johnson, worked so hard to free the machine and pull the younger boys out of the deep snow that he suffered a hernia. They soon ran out of gas and had no phone or compass.

Still, the boys were determined to get home. They abandoned their vehicle and started trudging toward what they believed was Nunam Iqua.

Asked how they knew which way to go, Ethan replied, “We didn’t know.”

At one point, Ethan stopped to go to the bathroom. As he took off his gloves, the wind snatched them out of his hand.

“And I said, 'Chris, help me,'” Ethan said.

But neither boy could find the gloves. They were starting to lose their vision in the whiteness of the blizzard.

“We almost got blinded,” Ethan said. “We almost got white eyes.”

After 4 miles of walking, and no town in sight, Chris decided they should hunker down.

“We tried to dig a hole, but it was too hard,” Ethan said.

Inside the shallow hole, Ethan says, he was originally on top of 2-year-old Trey Camille, and below the older boys. But afraid Trey would suffocate, Ethan joined the outer ring of the huddle, gloveless, so the baby could breathe.

“And I got tired, so I went to sleep. I waked up here,” Ethan said, referring to his hospital room. “That’s all I can remember.”

Irene said that 8-year-old Frank Johnson was the only one who remained conscious through the night. She said Frank kept prodding the other boys, knowing that if they closed their eyes, they may not open them again.

“At the last couple of hours, I think I almost lost hope,” Irene said. “People’s voices were getting further and further. And I was about same, lost as them.”

Miraculously, Herschel Sundown and searchers from Scammon Bay found the boys the next day, Feb. 3, around 4:25 p.m. In a few hours, the boys would have faced their second night outside.

“It was like they were ready to go if we took a little longer, if we didn’t find them any sooner,” Sundown said.

[Searchers found 4 missing Nunam Iqua children huddled in a snow hole on the tundra]

Back in the hospital room, despite having nine of his fingers bandaged, Ethan insists on trying to open a Coke bottle by himself.

Irene says Ethan and the other boys will make a full recovery. And when they do, she says, they can go right back out into the storm.

“I’ll never, ever feel regret that they were outside in the storm. I’ll always let them play out in the storm,” Irene said. “That’s where they were born, that’s where they come from, that’s where they’re gonna be. There’s always gonna be a storm.”

Irene says that if you don’t understand, that’s because Nunam Iqua is not your home.