For some unknown reason, Cartschenko had suddenly arrived in town , carrying a goat horn . A powerfully built man, with a long flowing beard , he had vacant eyes. From discussions with the man , Bowditch surmised he had been “shell shocked” by wartime experiences . Bowditch took the religiously obsessed man home and offered to help him. Declining the offer , he camped in the Todd River and went about town spreading the word of God in halting English , telling bemused Alice imbibers that booze was bad for them. He frequently blew his horn and sang the Song of David . Children follow him about and laughed when he would slide down a slippery dip. However, some mothers began to worry about this man who attracted children like the Pied Piper. A vegetarian, he mainly lived on bread and honey . Many people regarded him as a" mental defective".
Bowditch was at the racetrack when he was informed that police had arrested Cartschenko. A headlock had been applied to the crying man who was then put in a car , taken to the Ghan train leaving for Adelaide, given his possessions and told never to come back to Alice Springs.
Along the way, he jumped from the train and began to walk into the wilderness . The police who had run him out of town were alerted and formed a search party . The search went on for days and blacktrackers found signs that he had been eating wild paddy melons which would cause severe scouring . They felt he would either be dead or very sick when found. He had abandoned a jar of honey, half a loaf of bread and a bag of peanuts
On being told that Cartschenko would probably die before found , Bowditch went to aviator Eddie Connellan and discussed the possibility of chartering a plane to fly over the desert to look for him.
Bowditch said he raised with Connellan , because no parachutes were available, the possibility of leaping from the low flying plane into the down side of a sand dune, he having read that Russians jumped from planes into snowdrifts during WW11 . Connellan’s account , in a letter to this writer :
“ Jim came to me in my office at the town site aerodrome at Alice Springs and asked to be flown out on a charter flight to find Feodor , then jump out with a parachute and rescue him. He said that if he could achieve this , it would make him as a journalist. I said that unfortunately we did not have a parachute , but that no doubt he would be happy to do what his friends in the Red Army did during training exercises in Siberia -jump out of low flying aircraft and land on the down slope of sandhills . Jim of course at that stage was a Communist. Jim agreed that if they (Russians) could do it , he could ; and I spent the rest of the interview trying to talk him out of it! End of story. ”
In any case, Cartschenko was found sitting in his underpants with a duffel bag containing clothes , singing religious songs . He had walked about 45 miles . Brought back to Alice , he was charged with being a mental defective . However, a local businessman, Jim Richards, told the magistrate he was prepared to take responsibility for Feodor and gave him a job in the building industry. After a while , Cartschenko moved on and Bowditch read newspaper reports that he turned up in Melbourne and then Tasmania ,where he sang to waterside workers. NEXT :The Northern Territory News and the strange letter from Indonesia.
