A man says he feels “disgusted and wronged” after he was denied help to airlift his father’s body out of a rugged and remote area off the province’s south coast.

Lloyd Fudge, his father, Lloyd Senior and two other relatives were moose hunting in Facheux Bay when his father suddenly took sick. The older man collapsed on a mountain side. Efforts to revive him through resuscitation failed, and he passed away.

Lloyd Junior of McCallum says he and his cousin stayed with the body while another cousin took their boat to get help.

With the help of an operator at Cooke Aquaculture, they traveled 9 miles out before they could get a cell phone signal and called 911.

That’s when they were denied a request for a helicopter to airlift the body out of the remote location.

Lloyd Junior says they were told it was a recovery and not a rescue and a helicopter would not be provided. He says it’s hard to grasp why they were left on the side of a mountain with his father’s body for hours trying to figure out what to do next.

Fudge wouldn’t leave his father’s side for fear of bears and coyotes which had been seen in the area.

Cooke Aquaculture supplied his cousin with a basket-type gurney and they used it to carry the body back down the mountainside, an ordeal that Fudge says took 12 hours in total.

He says he had a lot of time sitting with his father’s body to think, and it’s something he can’t get out of his mind.