Originally Posted by Gardyloo

An old Combi tale...

Years ago a friend was riding in a -200 combi on the ANC-OTZ-OME-ANC loop. He sat next to a tourist lady going to/coming from one of those towns (I forget which one it was.)

At a previous stop, some caribou had been loaded into the cargo bay, but were invisible to the boarding or through pax in the back. As the plane started taxiing, the animals (which were in crates or somehow restrained) started banging and snorting and bumping around in front of the movable bulkhead, which prompted the tourist lady to ask my friend (who was a state bureaucrat commuting to the north all the time) what the noise was.

He replied, "Well, you know there are some remote mining camps up the Kobuk River valley, and those miners haven't been in human company for quite a while. So they put them up there until they can adapt back to civilization."

Wide-eyed she was for the rest of the flight.