Forty years ago, Janice Lasater was moving on down the highway and she never saw a package of precious photographs fly away from the truck.

She would have never believed, when she discovered their loss unpacking the moving truck, that somehow in the circling winds of life, they would find their way back to her.

They did, just Thursday.

Their special delivery came in a most unexpected way.

But to tell of their return is to get decades ahead of the story.

It began in the spring of 1966, when Janice and Bob Lasater, of Bismarck, both young professional teachers, were moving all their worldly goods from a small house in Arnegard, in McKenzie County, to Dickinson.

Somewhere on the long western road between the two towns and in a terrible wind, a dresser drawer flew from the truck. In the same wind, away went the contents of another drawer.

They were looking ahead and never noticed what was happening behind them.

In Dickinson, they discovered the loss. Most painful to note was that somewhere on the road behind them was an envelope of photographs of Janice Lasater's young cousin.

This cousin, also named Bob, needed those photographs more than most people would to tell him the story of his life. Bob's mother died, along with twin girls, during a toxemic pregnancy and birth, when he was 4 years old.

He got sent to live with Janice Herrington Lasater's family down on a ranch near Ekalaka, Mont., and then shifted around some until finally their mutual grandmother found a childless couple among their relatives willing to take him in.

Janice Lasater ended up with her grandmother's photographs of that cousin, including a picture of him and his mother and his baby pictures and school pictures through high school graduation. She suspects they could be the only ones existing like it.

She meant to mail them to him when she got settled in Dickinson and instead ended up writing that they'd been lost.

Then, a few days ago, the phone rang.

Thursday, another terribly windy spring day, she and her husband, Bob, drove from Bismarck, where they live, to Arnegard.

Milt Hanson, owner of the Old School Bed and Breakfast at the classic brick Arnegard school, had something for them.

Hanson said he'd been going through the school attic and came across an envelope of pictures, and the envelope was addressed to Bob Lasater, then of Ekalaka, with a forward to Belle Fourche, S.D.

Hanson said he searched, checked with people he knew from that area of Montana and eventually, using an Internet directory, stumbled on a relative in Billings, Mont., who directed him to Bob Lasater.

Hanson said he called the Lasaters in Bismarck and relayed his news.

"Bob (Lasater) said, 'You just put a twinkle in my wife's eye. I've been catching heck for those for 40 years,'" Hanson said.

Hanson said he doesn't know how or why the pictures ended up a cardboard box in the dusty attic of the old school. Perhaps someone found them and, seeing school pictures in the mix, brought them there for safekeeping, he said.

Janice Lasater said she's so pleased Hanson went through the trouble he did to find them. He can't have known that the young boy in the pictures had barely known his mother. She can't wait to mail the photographs to her cousin, Bob Bryan, 70, who lives in Big Timber, Mont., where he replicates antique hunting rifles.

"I said I just can't believe this. I'll mail them and write him a letter," Janice Lasater said. "He's a very, very neat guy."

(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at 888-303-5511, or lauren@;westriv.com.)