Gospel Story Finder

Kamla Persand was from the Mauritius island, attending medical school in Bordeaux, France, when we met her in February of 1991. We had prayed as a family to be able to share the gospel with someone who was seeking the truth, and we taught her in our home. I was privileged to perform her baptism, but we were not the most significant influences in Kamla joining the Church. Friends, missionaries, and even family members had been “witnesses of God” in her home country, and one day in France, when the time was right for Kamla, she made the decision to be baptized. Now, 25 years later, the blessings of that decision are all around her, and her son is a missionary in Madagascar.

An anonymous Church member wrote about the continuous heartache her brother caused her parents. He got involved in drugs. He resisted all efforts at control and discipline. He was deceitful and defiant. Unlike the prodigal, this errant son did not come home of his own accord. Instead he got caught by the police and was forced to face the consequences of his actions. For two years his parents supported Bill’s treatment program, which brought about his eventual recovery from drugs. In summary, Bill’s sister observed: “I think my parents are extraordinary. They never wavered in their love for Bill, though they disagreed with and even hated what he was doing to himself and to their family life. But they were committed enough to their family to support Bill in any way necessary to get him through the tough times and onto more solid ground. They practiced the deeper, more sensitive, and extensive gospel of Christ by loving one who had gone astray.”

One of her first experiences as a member of the Church was ridicule by her young acquaintances, and when the family decided to join with other Saints in Far West, Missouri, Bathsheba was disappointed that she couldn’t leave immediately with her married sister, Nancy. While pondering this disappointment, she seemed to hear a voice say, “Weep not. You will go this fall.” And her family did leave for Missouri that autumn.

I would like to thank you for the article “Profanity” (May 1992). I was teaching an investigator who asked me why the Church feels it’s wrong to swear when everyone does it. All that came to mind was this article and these lines: “It’s the same mouth you use to pray, bear testimony, and bless the sacrament.” That’s all I had to say, because tears fell from my investigator’s eyes.
Elder Dwayne VictorFlorida Tampa Mission

Although I was active in my Catholic faith, I felt that something was missing in my life. At 16 years old I have investigated eight different churches as I searched for the truth that would provide meaning and direction to my life.
I discovered that my friend Clint was a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and he introduced me to the missionaries. They taught me a lot of things: I learned how to pray, and I was introduced to the Prophet Joseph Smith. I read the Book of Mormon and prayed if it was true and if the Church was really of God. I didn’t know it was the Holy Ghost, but I definitely felt the truthfulness as I felt a burning in my bossom.
I was baptized on March 13, 2012, and I fully embraced the Latter-day Saint way of life. I attended Church services and other activities, served and volunteered my time, and really felt like a true disciple of Jesus Christ.
After two years, I was prompted to prepare to serve a mission together with Clint and two other friends. We were glad the announcement lowering the mission age to 18 was given two years ago, and we felt worthy and ready to serve.
I was motivated by one of my goals: to bring my family to the Church and someday be sealed in the temple with them. That is why I went ahead and served a mission despite the many educational opportunities I was getting. There were scholarship offers and family friends offering to sponsor my education, but I decided to put the Lord first and serve Him. Thank goodness my father was supportive of my decision although he has not been baptized yet.
I served in the Philippines Tacloban Mission and fell in love with the people of Tacloban and Samar. My friends and I all learned so much, and though we served in different missions, we supported each other and we all felt the Lord’s watchful gaze upon us.
I experienced every missionary’s dilemma: I missed my family and wanted to see them as soon as I went home, but I enjoyed serving so much I didn’t want to leave my mission... My family was glad to see me, but pretty soon the temporal concerns we faced began to overwhelm me.
I needed to pay for my education and help with the needs of our family, and soon I became the breadwinner. I worked in a fastfood restaurant, was in construction, took odd jobs, and accepted any offer that would help put food on the table. I began to miss Church, and my RM friends would visit and remind me of my covenants.
I realized how hard life was when I didn’t put the Lord first, so I talked to my bishop, and he helped me with my repentance process. I began to truly understand the power of the Atonement of Jesus Christ.
All the emotional and spiritual pain went away, and I was blessed because when I came back to Church my two younger siblings also joined the Church. Feeling stronger spiritually, my desire to marry my girlfriend in the temple also grew.
I met my wife in 2011 and at the age of 15 I somehow knew she was the one for me. I waited patiently and remained a good friend, growing together in the gospel. We were finally married in the temple on December 15, 2022. It was a very simple wedding since we were barely out of the pandemic, but the peace and joy that we felt was beyond compare.
On November 11, 2023, my father was finally baptized. My dream of our entire family being sealed in the temple finally came true.
I know I am still young and there is still a long way to go as I journey on the covenant path, but my life so far has taught me so many lessons that now guide and help me. Whatever problems we may face, staying on the covenant path is still the safest way to live our lives.

As a young college student, fifty years ago, my member friend was bold. She asked me directly the golden questions: “What do you know about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? Would you like to know more?” As I learned, understood, and gained a testimony of the gospel, I wanted to share it with my family—even though I knew that many of them might not be receptive. And indeed, they were not! But my desire remains strong to be bold. I am constantly thinking of ways I can boldly but gently invite them to come unto Christ.

The two eagles gulped altitude with their broad, golden wings until the cliff line was far below them. Then they closed their wings and dropped out of the sky, spinning downward at a wind-warping speed of almost 200 miles per hour. Just as the juniper and sagebrush rushed up to crush them, they spun the world on end with a flick of their seven-foot wings and shot upward again. Spiraling up on a thermal, they banked away from each other and were soon a valley apart. Then, pivoting in midair, they rushed together like two warring biplanes, their wingbeats cracking echoes off the cliff face. Just inches short of disaster they casually palmed the air aside and brushed feathers as they blasted past each other. They flashed together again, flipping on their backs and displaying their talons in mock combat. They soared and dived, playing the wind like a violin, spinning gravity like a yo-yo. One moment they were sailing ships, running with the breeze or tacking against it. The next they were jet fighters, dive-bombing their shadows. They were more free in their ocean of air than any fish in water or any man on land.
But one man on the land watched them—with his eyes hardly comprehending, with his camera clicking like a telegraph, and long afterward with a notebook and pencil, remembering. Kent Keller, of Orem, Utah, had seen golden eagle courtship flights before, but like any reasonable person, he could only fully believe it when he was seeing it.
Perhaps it is partly this aura of impossibility that draws Kent to eagles, just as it has drawn poets, prophets, and emperors for centuries.
Actually, it all started with snakes. From the day he was born, Kent seemed to delight in all wild creatures, but snakes were his first real love. As a very young boy, he turned his backyard into a reptile menagerie with cages full of crawling snakes, gila monsters, horned toads, lizards, and just about any other tail-twitching belly-crawler he could find. As soon as he learned to read, he went hunting for reptiles in the library too.
But a new love was waiting in the wings, and at 12 years of age, Kent was to have his eyes snatched from the delightful snake-harboring ground to the wide, blue, eagle-bearing sky.
One day on a camping trip Kent’s Scoutmaster pointed at a dead cottonwood tree and said, “Hey, guys, there are two eagles!” The two golden eagles perched on skeletal limbs burned their image into an unexposed surface of Kent’s brain and filled his life’s appointment book all in an instant. He came. He saw. He was conquered.
But finding eagles isn’t all that easy until you learn where to look, and it was two years before Kent was able to make a house call. One rainy afternoon in early May he stepped onto a tiny protruding ledge that overhung more than 150 feet of sheer emptiness. As he peered over the edge, the sun burst through the rain clouds, spotlighting the golden hackles of a female eagle on her nest about ten yards down. Seeing Kent, she soared silently away but left behind two eaglets who sat cheeping at him in a blaze of downy sunshine.
Kent says of that instant: “At that moment I was so inspired by the beauty and majesty of the eagles that I felt more alive myself. The air smelled fresher, and the stream far below sparkled more brightly than before. I had simply opened my eyes and had really seen and felt what was around me.”
From eagles Kent’s love spread to all raptors (birds of prey). The fierce independence and aristocratic bearing of these aerial hunters caught his imagination and sent him out during every spare moment to follow their flight and study their habits.
He went to the library too, hunting these feathered sky-riders among the quiet stacks of books. He learned, both from books and experience (he doesn’t believe a book until he has proved it in nature) about the different raptors—where they nested, where they hunted, how they hunted, what their prey was, how they mated, and even how they flew. Before long he could see a bird silhouetted gnat-small on the horizon and name it by its flight pattern. Every time he saw a bird or visited a nest, he took careful scientific notes of everything he observed. He has several PhD dissertations lying unwritten in his notebooks.
During his junior year in high school, Kent dropped out of football and basketball to allow more time for raptor study. He traveled miles and miles searching out nests and roosting areas. He developed the climbing ability of a mountain goat and the stamina of a mustang. Leaving home Friday night after school or well before dawn Saturday morning, getting home well after dark Saturday night, and spending much of the time in between climbing steep mountains at a brisk trot, he found many raptor nests and gradually became a legitimate expert in the field. Weekdays after school also found him in the hills as often as possible.
One of his most rewarding experiences came one winter after a month-long search when he found the winter roosting grounds of bald eagles from Canada and Alaska. “I stood alone in two feet of snow near the bottom of an isolated canyon in west-central Utah, my eyes searching the sky for signs of life. Suddenly, as if by magic, they came, one by one, in pairs, and in small groups. Bald eagles dropped from the tall pine trees to the south and were gradually caught up in thermal drafts of air. Slowly circling higher and higher, traveling on wings of up to eight feet in length, they drifted west in a steady stream of traffic across the sky.”
That summer he carried back-breaking loads of wood and canvas up a towering mountain in order to build a blind from which to observe these eagles during the coming winter. When the snows were deep on the mountain a few months later, he spent hours watching them up close. “I have often crawled out of a warm bed at 3:00 A.M. and hiked up tall mountains through three feet of snow in the dark. Then I have sat cramped and numbed in a dark blind until mid-afternoon. By that time I have begun to wonder what is wrong with me. Suddenly, only 30 feet away and halfway up a scraggly old pine tree, a beautiful bald eagle has landed, and I wonder no longer.”
Kent interrupted his eagle watching to accept a mission call to the Kentucky Louisville Mission, but on his return he was on the road again checking nests.
Kent, like other students of raptors, is especially interested in the predators’ nesting behavior because this is the cycle that stands between the species and extinction.
There is also the mystery of the eternal interplay between the flight and the nest, freedom and responsibility. “An eagle’s freedom is exciting. They can leave the ground any time they want and ride the wind, and yet, like people, they’re tied down with responsibilities. When an eagle has eggs, she’s on the nest for 45 days, and she may leave it for only an hour a day. Eagles must follow their food supply too. They have certain laws they have to live within, but when they get up there and ride that wind, there’s not much that can touch them.”
In Utah, golden eagles begin their courtship flights in January or February, lay eggs from late February through March, and then incubate them from 42 to 45 days, after which the eaglets stay in the nest for from eight to ten weeks before taking to their wings. Kent warns that anyone interested in eagles should simply stay away from the nests during egg laying and incubation because during that period adult eagles are most prone to abandon the nest. Whenever a human being approaches her nest, the female eagle will invariably leave it until he is gone, and even if she returns, exposure to heat or cold can easily destroy the eggs. After the eaglets have hatched, the nest can be safely visited for very short periods of time, but after the eaglets are about seven weeks old, there is serious danger of frightening them off the nest before they are able to fly.
First flight is as breathtaking an experience for eagles as it is for people, and the proud lords of the skyways start out as bumbling, incompetent aviators. They too often crash and break a wing on the first flight and become easy prey to starvation or some four-legged predator. Kent once saw a ten-week-old eagle make its first flight and remembers: “He hopped off the nest as if he knew what he was doing, but all of a sudden he was speeding down toward the opposite cliff and losing altitude fast. You could see the shock in his eyes. His wings were spread out, his primary and secondary feathers flapping back and forth in the breeze. His head was moving back and forth watching the ground and looking back up at the nest—looking everywhere at once. He looked as if he was wondering what he had gotten himself into, whether he had really blown it, but you could also feel his exhilaration and the thrill of his first flight. He dropped down to the mouth of the canyon and hit an updraft that just pushed him right up out of sight. I found him the next day sitting on a tree unhurt.”
Kent realized from day one that it would be unthinkable to put an eagle in a cage like his childhood pet lizards, so he found another way of capturing the wild, free beauty of these magnificent creatures—photography. He seldom goes anywhere without his camera and his 400, 150, and 50 mm lenses. Over the years he has accumulated a fine collection of raptor slides and has organized them into several slide shows guaranteed to make you sad you were not born an eagle. He presents these shows to many groups and enjoys sharing them with people in rest homes and with handicapped children. It is his way of giving wings to people who are the most earthbound.
“I love eagles,” he says, “but people are the most important part of that love. It wouldn’t mean a thing to me if I went out there and filmed all those great things and didn’t have anybody to share it with.”
In photographing raptors, Kent has developed a skill that few people share. If you don’t believe it, go out sometime and photograph a bird moving in and out of focus at eye-blurring speed across blue sky, white clouds, black mountainsides, and blazing patches of snow, all in a few seconds. You’ll be very lucky even to find the thing in your telephoto lens, much less focus it and get the right exposure.
Kent’s delight in all living things has never faded. He still can’t pass up a lizard without stopping and watching. A porcupine is still a miracle. A turtle is still a masterpiece. A raven or a meadowlark is still breathtaking, and snakes still make him shiver as good as they make most of us shiver bad. There are no commonplace animals for Kent; they all bring him joy just by being. It is significant that on the gun rack in his pickup he has hung only a pair of binoculars.
But in spite of his reverence for all things, those binoculars are filled mostly with raptors right now, and Kent has been repaid for his thousands of hours of work with some heart-thumping experiences—a squadron of bald eagles on a winter day, the soaring rise of a Swainson’s hawk, the screaming dive of a prairie falcon, the puppet-like unreality of baby owls. And speaking of owls, he had the privilege of being knocked backwards off a 30-foot cliff by a frightened great horned owl and of having his face bloodied by the fierce attack of another not-at-all frightened member of the species.
He especially remembers one top-of-the-world moment on a peak high in a remote canyon. The granite walls were so buffeted by a tree-toppling wind that day that he had to lie flat to avoid being blown away like a leaf. A golden eagle came floating down onto the highest point on the peak, sorting out the changing, punishing wind with his wings, and somehow keeping an even keel. He stood there a moment looking regally around at the whole world lying beneath his talons as if inspecting his kingdom. “He only touched down for a few seconds, and then he simply opened his wings and turned them back into the wind. He shot up and out of sight like a rocket without ever flapping a wing.”
No one but Kent can say how many hours of sleep or basketball games or TV shows that experience was worth to him, but he isn’t complaining.
There is another aspect to Kent’s studies beyond the intellectual and aesthetic. Living with these magnificent birds has strengthened his testimony of his Creator. One winter day he took an atheist friend to a canyon where he knew there would be eagles. As they stood in the snow watching some 50 bald eagles soar above them, Kent looked at his open-mouthed friend and said quietly, “That didn’t just happen by accident.”
“Boy, I know it!” his friend said, his voice small with awe.
If anybody wants to know why eagles are worth saving, maybe that’s why.

It was Christmas Eve, and large, soft snowflakes were gently falling. Three small girls—Mary Ellen, Caroline, and Sarah Amelia, who was often called Pet—were home alone while their widowed mother was at work. The three girls were worried about Santa not being able to get down the chimney, so they decided to sweep a path for him from the outside gate to the front door. Mary Ellen, Caroline, and Pet were excited as they finished and went inside their home.
In the house was a very large rocking chair, and all three girls cuddled up in it. They were beginning to get tired, when they heard their family cow, Boss, mooing and mooing. “Poor old Boss,” Pet said. “She must be hungry.”
They were quiet for a minute; then Sarah said, “It’s Christmas, and Boss doesn’t have one Christmas present, not even something to eat.”
Caroline came up with a wonderful idea: “Our mattress is filled with nice dried grass. Let’s feed it to Boss.”
So Mary Ellen, Caroline, and Pet pulled the covers off their bed, struggled to get a good hold on the mattress, and pulled it into the front room. They put on their coats and gloves, then dragged the mattress through the doorway and over to the barnyard. They ripped open the mattress and dumped the grass out. Old Boss stopped mooing and got busy eating her Christmas Eve supper. The very tired girls returned to the house. They curled up in the big rocking chair and were soon fast asleep.
When their mother got home, she awakened the girls and told them to go to bed. Mary Ellen, Caroline, and Pet told her that they couldn’t because they had fed their bed to the cow. So that night their mother let them sleep in the big rocking chair.
Sometime that night, Santa came and filled their stockings with yummy things to eat. And the next morning a good neighbor came with a load of hay and straw. So old Boss got a second Christmas present, and Mary Ellen, Caroline, and Pet got a new straw bed.

I was six years old the day I discovered I was alive. It was a clear morning in late spring, and I was on my way to catch the school bus. I was about halfway through a small field when I heard an unseen voice call out. “I’m a pretty little bird,” the voice sang—at least that’s what my mother told me meadowlarks sing.
At the sound, I suddenly felt a strange emotion pass through me. I stood still and for the first time really noticed the world around me. I looked up. The sky was a sea of changing color in which clouds floated like feathered ships. The air itself smelled clean and young, and the grassy field where I stood was filled to translucence with sunshine—wild flowers of gold and yellow.
Somehow the meadowlark had awakened me to the beauty of the earth and to the fact that I was part of it. I still can’t put into words all that I felt, but I think that day I came about as close as I’ve ever come to feeling God’s presence.

One night after I came out of the church, my new silver CTR ring fell out of my pocket. My dad and uncle shined the headlights of their cars into the bushes, but I still couldn’t find it. I was feeling sad. My mom said we should have a family prayer. After the prayer, I walked through the bushes and felt a prompting to look down. There was my ring under a bush! I know that my prayer was answered and that yours can be, too.Brian Seegmiller, age 10Fairfield, California

One time President and Sister Harold B. Lee were in our home. Sister Lee put a handful of pennies on a table before our young son. She had him slide the shiny ones to one side and said, “These are your tithing; these belong to the Lord. The others are yours to keep.” He thoughtfully looked from one pile to the other and then said, “Don’t you have any more dirty ones?” That was when the real teaching moment began!

When I was a mission president, one of my responsibilities was to interview elders and sisters who had completed their missions and were returning home. I always asked what they were taking home as a result of their mission. I didn’t want to know what was inside their suitcases; I wanted to know what was inside of them.
One elder said, “I am going home liking myself.”
“What do you mean by that?” I asked.
He said, “All my life I have wanted to be someone else. I was envious of the guy at high school who was popular with the girls. I wanted to be him. I was jealous of the guy who owned the red sports car. I wanted to be him. I wanted to be the quarterback of the football team.
“And when I arrived in the mission field, I had the same problem. I wanted to be the assistant to the president or the elder who could always quote the right scripture at the right time. I was always wishing I could be somebody else.”
“However, as I have served these two years, I have realized who I really am. I am a son of God. I have a good relationship with my Savior and my fellowmen. I have a greater love for my parents and my family. And I realize that I have talents I can develop and share and that others have their talents. I’m grateful for what I’ve been given. I’m no longer envious of what others have that I may not have. I’m going home feeling good about myself.”
I too had a good feeling about this elder and what was inside of him. How happy I was that he had come to appreciate himself and make that appreciation part of his life’s philosophy. Over the years, it has been a joy to see how this young man has developed and matured by sharing himself and his talents with others.

The story of two equally fine young men will illustrate the PEF’s impact. They have recently served missions in a less-advantaged country. Both of these elders served obediently. But when one returned home, he enjoyed the means to attend a great university, thanks to parents who have saved enough through self-reliance and provident living to pay for his education. He would not even have to work during school. The other missionary, equally worthy and obedient, returned home to face the same poverty from whence he came.

Anguished at the situation, the returned missionary from better financial circumstances sent a letter to the PEF office. Following inner promptings, he took the money his parents provided for a year of college, donated it to the PEF, and found a job to earn his own way through school that year. Clearly he sought to become one with the Savior by becoming one with his brother. (See D&C 38:25–27.)

As Kelly says, staying close as a family starts with spending time as a family. One of the ways they enjoy spending time together is to get up close and personal with some of the biggest animals on the planet! “We go on safari rides several times a year,” Kelly says. Plenty of great memories have piled up during these rides.

“The funniest memory is when it was pouring rain one time,” she says. The safari ride was going full speed, which made those raindrops sting. So her family huddled close together, laughing, to form a sort of human shield against the rain. And it worked! “We made each other warm!” she says.

My second example concerns my father, Michael Herbut, who passed away in August 1999. Throughout his life Dad liked to buy things. Shortly before he died he purchased several rosebushes from a catalog and, since he had no garden of his own, bequeathed them to my sister. Although Alberta is Wild Rose Country, domestic roses are very hard to grow there. But my sister wanted to try, and that spring I went up to help her plant the rosebushes. Being a good gardener, she did all she could to assure that the roses would survive. And they did, for a while, in what she named the Michael Herbut Rose Garden. The summer after Dad passed away, while I was visiting my sister, one of the rosebushes was coming into bloom. It was at least the second season that the bush had flowered. Never before had a flower on that bush been anything but pure yellow. At this particular time, however, the rose that was blooming was tinged with pink around the top of the petals, and subsequently the yellow flowers on this bush continued to bloom with pink edges. A tender miracle? I think so.

One night my young cousin ran away from home, so I hurried to go look for her. As I drove, I prayed for the Spirit to help me. I knew that God would answer and direct me, and I tried to listen to the Spirit’s promptings. But when I couldn’t hear anything, I began to feel desperate and felt that the Spirit was not prompting me.
Although I wanted to go farther away to search, I felt that I should stay in the area around my cousin’s home. So I decided to drive around the area once more. As I stopped at an intersection, I saw the silhouette of a young girl walking. I had found my cousin!
As I got out of the car and ran to her, I realized that the Spirit had been directing me all along by helping me feel that I should stay in the same area. Because I had been listening for a quiet voice, I nearly ignored the Spirit’s promptings. I then understood that many times we will not hear a voice, but we will feel impressions in our hearts.
I was so thankful for the Spirit’s guidance. Truly He is always there! As the scriptures say, “The Holy Ghost shall be thy constant companion” D&C 121:46).

Years ago I served a mission in the Eastern States Mission. I loved it. My companion and I taught a young girl named Susan Casey and her family. You can imagine how thrilled we were when Susan and her family chose to be baptized. Not long ago—nearly fifty years since my ­mission—a woman and her husband approached me at a Scouting event. It was Susan! Can you imagine what that reunion meant for us? The scripture when Alma met up with the sons of Mosiah came to mind, for he “did rejoice exceedingly . . . ; and what added more to his joy, they were still his brethren in the Lord.”23 So it was with Susan and her husband.

The girls have seen a number of friends come into the Church, and many others have come to appreciate and respect their standards. On one occasion Sheila was surprised when a young man she knew from school approached her about the gospel.
“I’m going to tell you some things I’ve heard about your church,” he said, “and I want you to tell me if they’re true.”
“He asked me a lot of questions,” Sheila recalled, “many of them based on misinformation. I explained the best I could and then asked him if he was interested in learning more. He said, ‘Yes, but not from the missionaries. I want to hear it from you.’ That really motivated me to study and find out more for myself.”
Still, they have been exposed to much opposition. Each family member has had soul-searching experiences that have forged individual testimony.
As Stacy said, “Once you know what the truth is, it doesn’t matter anymore how many people tell you you’re wrong.”
Hollywood is a challenging place to grow up in—the cultural standards are very high; the life-styles and philosophies are incredibly varied. But to the Phelps Family Musicians, the gospel is the harmonizing element. It is what helps them to keep a balanced perspective in meeting the everyday challenges of life in Hollywood.
Editor’s note: Since the time this story was written, Brother Phelps has passed away.

I met Natalie on the first day of sixth grade. I noticed that she wouldn’t hang out on Sundays and that she carried her scriptures around at school. One day I was at a carnival with Natalie, and I said, “I want to join your Church.” I’m not sure what Natalie was thinking at the time, because it came out of nowhere. But from that point on she began sharing more of her faith with me.
Later that year, I went with Natalie to a youth conference. One of the last activities at the youth conference was a testimony meeting. Natalie shared a special testimony that motivated me to want to learn more.
As I studied the gospel, I prayed to Heavenly Father to gain a testimony. Soon, I knew what I had been learning was true. That summer, I became a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

We had committed ourselves to traveling over the rapids. The current was so powerful that there was no other choice but to take whatever the river had to give. Then suddenly the churning, splashing boiling subsided. Everything seemed to stand still for an instant. The wind calmed, the river smoothed itself, the pace of our heartbeats slowed a bit, and our breathing returned, almost, to normal. What we saw in the next instant frightened us much more than the rapids had—a smooth line of water reaching from one bank to the other, a line that could mean only one thing: waterfall!
There had been no indication of a waterfall on our maps, but it was a little late to worry about that. In this largely unexplored area of Canada’s Northwest Territories, there were often surprises. About all we had time to do was pray and go over.
Luckily, the fall wasn’t too severe. But the huge waves and their back twist at the bottom were more than our canoe could withstand, and we were thrown into a 3.3 degree Centigrade bath of ice water. We both knew that we had less than ten minutes to get to shore or we would freeze. It was a tremendous test of strength, endurance, and determination, but somehow we dragged ourselves and our boat onto the rocks before we collapsed.