When Joe Girves' cousin perked his head up and said he heard a gunshot, Joe put it off to more hallucinations and lay back down in the snow.

Both men had been seeing and hearing things that weren't there for days.

The pair of Anchorage, Alaska, relatives were weak, severely dehydrated and frostbitten after seven days stranded in the bush about 60 kilometres north of Dawson City.

This morning, 19-year-old Brandon Girves was medivaced to a hospital in his hometown, where he's likely to have at least part of his feet amputated due to frostbite. Joe's been told to expect feeling back in his own numb feet in five to six weeks.

They'd set out on a snowmobile expedition from Tok, Alaska, to Dawson on Jan. 2, only to have one of their machines break down just hours into the trip.

The Rangers, out on their annual winter training exercise, stumbled upon the stranded Alaskans on Saturday and promptly set up camp and administered first aid.

Because of the younger Girves' condition, the two men couldn't be transported out of the Clinton Creek area they'd been in for the past seven days. Instead, the Rangers took care of the pair for a day in the bush before a helicopter could transport them to the Dawson nursing station.

Ironically, just two hours after the Rangers inadvertently rescued the pair, Joe's girlfriend flew overhead in a search aircraft. When he'd missed his scheduled Jan. 7 phone call home, she'd notified the RCMP and Alaska State Troopers, who were grounded due to poor weather.

His girlfriend Francine had been flying in the chartered airplane for two days when she spotted the abandoned snowmachine, said Joe, 35, but it would have been another day until a ground crew could reach them.

'By then I don't know if Brandon would be alive or not,' Joe said this morning as he polished off a hamburger and fries at the Wal-Mart McDonald's.

'Those guys are real heroes, real professional gentlemen,' said Joe about the couple of dozen Rangers who rescued them. 'Babied us along, wouldn't let us do anything for ourselves.'

Once Joe was flown to Whitehorse from Dawson, a local ambulance attendant dropped him off at the department store because he only had the clothes he'd been wearing for the last week.

He's currently headed to Vancouver to buy a ticket 'to the nearest warm beach,' Joe said this morning. He's going to take it easy for a while before going home to Alaska.

Joe, an archeologist who works at the Anchorage campus of the University of Alaska, and his young cousin set out Jan. 2 with two snowmobiles: one smaller 'toy' machine, a Skidoo Summit, and a larger utility snow machine to pull a sled with all their winter survival gear.

Having grown up in camps as the son of big game hunting guides, Joe's no stranger to the bush, and the pair started out with everything from stoves to a chainsaw.

They planned to make a camping trip of it, playing on their new machines and in no real hurry to get to Dawson.

However, about four hours out of Tok the larger machine started developing carburetor problems, spewing fuel.

Despite his best efforts to repair the problem, Joe couldn't fix the machine. He decided it would be easier to continue on to Dawson on the other snowmobile, pick up new parts and come back to do repairs, not thinking then that going back over their packed trail would actually be simpler than breaking new trail.

'At least I thought it was,' said Joe of the decision to continue on instead of turning back. He attributes the near disaster to his overconfidence.

'I feel responsible for the whole affair.'

Leaving behind most of their gear, the two men weighing a combined (426 pounds) on the small machine proved too much. The Skidoo was repeatedly stuck and going through fuel faster than Joe had first calculated.

After slogging throughout that first night, the two decided at about 11 a.m. Jan. 3 to stop and build a camp on a sloping valley wall, out of the wind and in the middle of a stand of burned trees they could use to build a fire.

The cousins wouldn't leave the area until the same time on Jan. 11.

They dug a snow pit down to bare ground, leaving themselves a three by three-metre space.

'We were pretty beat up from working all night,' said Joe.

'It's all kind of a blur now,' he said. Throughout the entire ordeal, the men were able to catch only one or two hours of sleep at a time, and it wasn't restful sleep, he said. He slept for five hours once the Rangers found them, but was up all last night organizing his cousin's medivac.

At their campsite, the Polish sausage and box of snack bars they'd brought with them on the second machine was gone in 24 hours. Joe had expected to be in Dawson buying snowmobile parts, not stranded in the bush.

The first several days were frigid, with temperatures in the -45 to -48 range, not including the windchill. They both sported several layers of long underwear, with fleece and snowsuits on top of that. Both men wore heavy winter boots and had several hats and layers of gloves.

They weren't able to get their winter survival tent close enough to the fire, so Joe cut it up to use as a blanket. One man would huddle on one side of the fire, holding a wool blanket around his shoulder to trap in the flames' warmth, while the other did the same with the tent on the other side. They both now have some level of smoke inhalation, said Joe, but they kept somewhat warm.

For the first three days the cousins had lots of energy to collect firewood and melt snow in their pan for drinking water.

But by the fourth day, the energy and their hunger pangs vanished.

'We couldn't take more than 10 steps without taking a break,' said Joe.

Frostbite was also starting to seep in. Both, but particularly Brandon, had burned holes in clothes and boots from sleeping too close to the fire. Brandon also burned his hands and feet while taking his boots off to warm his toes.

As their energy waned, so did the size of their fire. With the supply of nearby wood dwindling, Joe realized quickly they'd have to build smaller, more efficient fires if they were going to survive.

'We made it into a real science of keeping it going with three sticks at a time,' said Joe.

The pair talked endlessly about fire and how to keep warm more efficiently, though it wasn't their only topic. At one point they realized they were the last of the Girvis males, and decided if they made it out alive they had to 'get procreatin'' and produce some children to carry on the family name before they went on any adventures. His girlfriend doesn't know about that yet, said Joe.

For the last three days, the pair didn't talk much. It was just too depressing discussing the same things, said Joe.

By Jan. 8, they knew someone would have realized they were in trouble, but became more despondent as help didn't arrive that morning or the next.

At one point they moved their camp 100 metres to be closer to firewood, but it was 'pathetic' watching themselves try to move. Despite endlessly melting water, both were seriously dehydrated.

For the last two days alone, the cousins alternated curling up together to keep warm between making the effort to build a fire.

'The last day was real bleak,' said Joe.

Both men had been hallucinating for a while, and that's all Joe thought was happening when Brandon heard a gunshot the morning of Jan. 10. But a steady stream of 24 to 25 snowmachines pulled by, ridden by Canadian Rangers who'd seen their helmets the men had propped up in hopes of being spotted.

'I thought it was a hallucination,' said Joe.

The Rangers immediately swung into action, setting up a tent for the exhausted pair and calling the Dawson nursing station via satellite phone for instructions about thawing out Brandon's feet.

It was then the cousins learned that poor weather was grounding rescue aircraft, said Joe. It wasn't until the next day that a helicopter could be flown in for a pickup.

They threw up the food the Rangers first gave them, said Joe, and from there on, the pair were given a regimen of fluids, then soup, then solids.

Brandon, who works in a coffee shop back home, went from 113 kilograms (250 pounds) to 86 kg (190 pounds), while Joe lost about 14 kg (30 pounds).

The Rangers told them they'd not met many people who survived three days in those conditions, let alone a solid week, said Joe. He's paying the Rangers to rescue the two machines and gear, he added, noting the Rangers made the offer.

'Some of the kindest individuals I've ever met.'