The Rescue of Belle and Sundance (10 page)

Finally, I double-checked the contents of my backpack: my camera, cellphone, salt and electrolytes for the horses, a syringe to make an electrolyte drench (a mix of powdered electrolytes and water), a notebook, a pen and a bottle of water, as well as a lunch, including some of my favourite Christmas cookies. I had finally gotten around to making two kinds.

I’d learned that Tim and Monika were coming as well—a relief since I wasn’t certain that anyone else I knew would be there. Monika asked me to bring some warm gear for her—she didn’t own the heavy-duty winter clothing required for a mountaintop—so I packed another pair of Sorel boots, Marc’s thick, long army coat (which he swears you could sleep in comfortably during forty-below weather), his lined winter overalls and an extra pair of goggles.

From McBride, it’s almost twenty kilometres to the parking lot. Just before the bridge over the Fraser River, I turned off the highway and followed Mountainview Road, which runs parallel to the river before heading northwest alongside the Rocky Mountains for a good long stretch. As I turned into the lot, a few sledders were busy unloading their machines. When I asked if they were here for the horse rescue, they looked amused and shook their heads no.

The cold had bite, and the wind blowing snow across the wide-open field from the east made that bite even fiercer. I walked back to my truck and sat inside. It was too frigid to stand around in that nasty wind.

Finally, someone who was actually part of the horse rescue showed up. Spencer Froese and Joey Rich were the first ones, and I was happy to see their familiar faces. Spencer’s mother, Irene, and his sister Robertta had taken riding lessons from me in the past. They lived just southeast of town on a grain farm and also raised buffalo. Then Lester Blouin arrived, with a borrowed snowmobile and his skimmer—an eight-by-three-foot heavy plastic sled that farmers use to pull newborn calves from the field to shelter. The crew planned to load the skimmer with all the gear needed to get the rescue operation rolling.

Matt, whom I had never met in person, arrived next. He and I had been talking for several days on the phone, and it was nice, finally, to put a face to the voice. Dave Jeck followed with his daughter Toni, who nodded in my direction.

Toni was born into a horse family and has worked in northern British Columbia as a wrangler; she and I have a love of horses in common, but neither of us has warmed to the other. People who are passionate about horses do not always see eye to eye. I once read a vet’s theory on why the horse world is marked by so much
jealousy and antagonism: he observed that riding a horse is about a human controlling an animal who may weigh six or seven times what the human does, so a room full of horse people is sometimes a room full of controllers. However, I thought to myself, this was a time for Toni and me to put our differences aside.

Leif showed up shortly afterward. I met Leif eight years ago when Marc and I first moved to the valley and bought hay from his parents, whose farm is halfway between Dunster and McBride. I hadn’t seen him since he was a young teenager; he was now a grown man. I would never have recognized him.

I felt encouraged by this assemblage of people. Lester wasn’t in the best of health, but he had come. And so had all these others. I was impatient to start, and feeling good about our prospects.

We loaded Lester’s skimmer with the following: two winter horse blankets (they were lined and buckled at the belly so they’d fit snugly over a horse’s torso), two square bales of hay, several shovels and a roll of road carpet. Someone had suggested we try to walk the horses out on it. Until ruled out, all options remained on the table. More hay and shovels were loaded onto the sleds and tied down with bungee cords. Leif, Spencer and Joey took off on their sleds first, with Matt and me not far behind them.

I had never been on a snowmobile before. I had driven lots of four-wheelers but usually just for short trips to feed horses or check
fences. I wasn’t the type of person who used such machines for pleasure. To me, they existed for a practical reason—to make my job easier. So being a passenger on a snowmobile took some getting used to. I slid on the cold and slippery plastic seat and found it difficult to hang on at the beginning. It ultimately occurred to me that the seat wasn’t meant to hold two people. Matt was such an expert driver, though, that I was never worried or frightened. Instead, I enjoyed the scenery. The ride through the narrow valley, along the frozen Blackwater River, was absolutely breathtaking. The deep blue of the mountain sky, the pristine white of the snow and the gleaming silver of the ice on the branches and treetops are some of the brightest and purest colours in creation.

“Have you never been up here before?” Matt asked. He seemed shocked when I said no.

Matt sits a snowmobile the way I sit a horse. We each look comfortable and completely at home on our respective mounts. For Matt, a sled offers adrenalin-fuelled thrills, the chance to cover ground that would take weeks by foot or horseback, and views of peaks and valleys that photographs and video can never really capture. Seeing them with my own eyes, I understood for the first time why sledders came up here in such numbers.

Half an hour into the ride, the valley widened and we drove through several cut blocks—large areas that have been clear-cut by
logging companies. The Rocky Mountains lay before us in all their majesty. At one point, Matt stopped and pointed toward one of the mountains. “That’s where the horses are,” he said.

“Way up there?” I asked. He nodded. It still seemed so far away.

About ten minutes further along, Matt guided his snowmobile off the logging road and started veering uphill. Here the horse trail led off to the left. The trail we took, to the right—the same one the horses’ owner had mistakenly taken—was known by locals to be impassable in summer due to thick downfall and bog. The ascent was quite steep at times, and I had to hang on tightly to Matt to avoid sliding off the back of the snowmobile.

When we reached the Mount Renshaw warming hut, we briefly stopped and went inside. Leif sat alone in the cabin, munching on a sandwich. Matt steered me to the back window and pointed. “That’s where we’re headed.”

We didn’t rest there long. I really wanted to see the horses. Beyond the cabin, the trail was no longer groomed and the terrain was wide open. The scene struck me as unforgettably beautiful, but wild and rugged, even menacing, and the depth of snow defied belief. The average winter snowfall on the Renshaw is ten feet. To traverse the mountain with a passenger and avoid getting stuck in that depth of powdery snow, a snowmobiler has to be very skilled. And Matt is that. He instructed me to slide to the front of the snowmobile while
he stood behind me, steering his sled carefully. The ride was very bumpy, and more than once my chin glanced off the handlebar. But I didn’t care. I was just so exhilarated to finally be up here.

At the top of a steep hill, just below Mount Renshaw, Matt stopped again and aimed a gloved finger down toward the treeline at the bottom of the bowl. “That’s where they are,” he said.

I didn’t know a snowmobile could go down such a precipitous slope as the one we now descended, with Matt once more at the front and me behind. I wasn’t frightened, thanks to Matt, but the steep drop offered a wild adrenalin rush.

Spencer and Joey were already waiting at the spot where the horses had been found three days earlier. Matt showed me the trench that he and the other volunteers had dug so they could walk the horses down into the shelter of the trees. I could see bits and pieces of hay, remnants of the first meal the two horses had eaten in a long, long time.

I stumbled down the narrow trench surrounded by high walls of snow. How on earth, I wondered, did they get those horses to walk through this steep passageway? My mind raced. I was impatient to see the horses but, on the other hand, worried that I would be really upset by the sight that awaited me. The track was slippery, and I practically ran downhill, almost falling on top of the horses, who looked at me curiously. Both whinnied, that high-pitched
hello that horses use with both humans and each other.

“Hi guys,” I said to them. One by one, I stroked the horses’ shoulders, ran my hands down their backs, and offered what comfort I could by touch.

They looked horrendous, with their hips and tailbones protruding, with fur and tails missing. The gelding’s tail was almost completely chewed off; only the dock (the bony part of the tail from which the long hair grows) retained a little hair. The mare’s tail had somewhat more hair, but she was missing huge patches on her sides and haunches, shoulders and forelegs. It looked as though someone had haphazardly and erratically clipped her, leaving her that much more vulnerable to the cold. At first, some of us blamed lice or rain scald, but we later concluded that she had suffered frostbite from reclining in the snow.

Both horses were emaciated, their backs were covered in snow and ice, and the mare was shivering. They looked pathetic, but I was pleasantly surprised—even taken aback—by how alert they were. Their eyes were clear, their ears were up, and they were curious about me. All signs pointed to the same conclusion: they wanted to live. I now understood why the group had decided not to shoot them but, instead, to give them a fighting chance.

Following Dave Jeck’s instructions, I fed each horse a flake of hay; they ate it eagerly. Before going up on the mountain, I had
heard about a plan to feed alfalfa cubes to the horses. Monika had told me this, but she had had many conversations about the stranded pair and couldn’t recall who had told her.

 

“What?” I’d said. “They’re going to kill them!”

I had no experience with rescuing starving horses, but I knew this much: alfalfa is far too rich a food for weak horses. The day before, I had contacted Rick Maitlin, part of the Rescue 100 Foundation based in Alberta, a group that had rescued a hundred starving Arabian horses in the spring of 2008. I had particular questions about salt and electrolytes.

“I agree with you,” Rick had written in an email. “No cubes! Grass hay is by far the best, but if not available something with limited alfalfa. A salt/mineral block is okay providing they have water to drink. Electrolytes are a good idea as well, but again they should have water for this. Their electrolyte level is probably way off. NO OATS!”

I had worried a little that a tense standoff might have developed on the mountain if anyone had notions of feeding the horses alfalfa cubes, but it turned out no such plans existed; we all agreed on how to feed the horses. The alfalfa cubes rumour had been just that—a rumour. One of many.

It was important that the horses continue receiving the same amount of food they’d been fed thus far. Dave suggested this
routine: I feed the horses the instant I got there each morning and just before I left each afternoon so we could spread out the horses’ two feedings as much as possible. This made perfect sense, and it’s what I do with my own horses. Feeding the horses, watering them, ensuring they were fed according to a strict protocol—this became my job, one I felt very comfortable doing.

 

Spencer joined me in the snow pen and began working on the
mare’s urine-encrusted tail, or at least its remnant. Frozen urine clung to her tail hair in chunks of pale yellow ice. With the little saw on his Swiss Army knife, Spencer began cutting while I held the tail away from the mare’s body and tried to separate the hair to be cut from that to be saved.

“Is my cheek red?” Spencer asked me at one point, holding his cheek with one hand.

His cheek was beet red and obviously causing him pain. We later learned that he had suffered severe frostbite. He wasn’t the only one. Dean Schreiber—a neighbour of Dave Jeck who would spend four days shovelling on the mountain—would also suffer frostbite on his face and hands, and Leif would get touched by it, too. They were “lit up,” as we say—touched by frost.