The Rescue of Belle and Sundance (15 page)

Eight of us dug that day. Dave, Monika, Leif and I laboured at the top, and Dean, Barry, Steve Iben (another resident of McBride) and Stu, at the bottom. Mother Nature bestowed on us another stunning day up in the mountains. It was a lot warmer than the day before and, again, completely clear and still.

This day, though, was the toughest day for me so far. I started out already very tired, so every shovelful seemed like a huge effort. I kept hitting snags. At one spot, where the trench turned a narrow corner to avoid trees, I encountered roots and had to dig around and underneath them to reach the ground. Because we had milder temperatures, the snow was also starting to compact, which made for harder digging and lifting.

As well, we didn’t dig according to the system we had used on
Thursday (with three or four volunteers spreading out as a team and digging only a few feet down before moving on) because circumstance cut into our numbers. At the bottom, Steve had to leave early and Stu came late. At the top, Leif, who had been using a chainsaw to trim branches that stood in the way of the trench, left when his back got sore. Monika and I, both only about five-foot-four, had a hard time throwing the snow beyond the six- to seven-foot-high walls of the trench. The snow kept falling back in, which was very frustrating. I can’t say why we decided to forgo the stairway system that had been serving us so well. Maybe we succumbed to psychology. Having three diggers spread out made it seem as though we were making more progress. So Monika, Dave and I were the only ones left at the top by the early afternoon.

“Let’s dig until about 2.30 p.m., then head to the other end of the trench and help the guys down below,” Dave suggested.

“Sounds like a plan,” I said.

We were just about to finish at the top end for the day when five sledders came walking down the trench, shovels in hand. They were the guys from the parking lot this morning.

“I guess your persistence impressed them,” Monika said to me in a low voice while trying to suppress a laugh.

The sledders, young men from Alberta, shovelled for a while but within half an hour started to peter out, one after the other. One,
lying on his back in the snow smoking a cigarette beside his sled, eyed the sky. “Why are you doing all this?” he asked.

 

“The owner of the two horses thought it wasn’t possible to get the horses out, but we aren’t going to let them die of starvation,” I explained.

“So you have to prove that it can be done,” he said, sneeringly. We just smiled. This fellow clearly neither understood nor cared.

But we felt good about how much we’d accomplished. Monika
and I decided to snowshoe down so we could see how much digging was left to do. Dave loaned Monika his snowshoes, and I strapped on mine. We arranged to meet Dave at the other end of the trench, down by the groomed snowmobile trail.

Even though we’d made good progress over the past couple of days, the walk on snowshoes still seemed long. Several times we thought the creek was just around the corner, only to be disappointed. On the other hand, the going was easier than before: the trail had been walked on a few times, so it was hardening up, and we weren’t sinking in as much or taking as many tumbles. When we got close to the flooded creek bed near the groomed snowmobile trail, we met Dave, who was already digging alongside Stu. The four volunteers at the bottom had probably shovelled close to a hundred metres that day as well. Dave estimated that we had about half a kilometre of digging left.

The ride out was uneventful and not as cold as the night before’s. On our way home, Monika and I stopped at the Husky gas station in McBride. Feeling drained, I was longing for a Coke and a chocolate bar to boost my blood sugar level. As I stepped out of my truck, another pickup pulled up alongside us—Tim and Justin had just returned from a trip to Prince George.

Monika and I told them about our day’s work.

“You are never going to get this done. There’s no way,” Tim said.

 

Monika, also exhausted, lit into him. “This is just what we want to hear after spending the whole day up there digging,” she retorted angrily. I sympathized with her. We’d suffered enough naysayers without our families and friends chiming in.

Once at home, I fed my hungry critters and ate a couple of Joette’s leftover sandwiches, which tasted incredibly good—for a change, I was actually hungry. Then I set out to return phone calls (about a dozen of them) and answer emails (about two dozen). A
producer at CTV had left a message; he ended up talking to Lisa Levasseur and to Donna-Rae Coatta, the media liaison for the Rescue 100 Horses Foundation. The piece aired that night. Seeing my pictures of the horses on television brought tears to my eyes. The horses didn’t deserve this. I wanted them out of their icy prison. That’s all I could think about and all that kept me going.

Earlier in the day, Frank Mackay had called Reg Marek to find out how things were going with the digging. He said he had two more days of work to do on his horse trailer, then he would be out here to pick up his horses. Reg said nothing. As far as he was concerned, the correct response to such gall was no response at all. I was as appalled as Reg at the owner’s audacity. Did he really think he could just waltz in and pick up the same horses he had abandoned?

While many of us involved in the rescue of Belle and Sundance had had no clue in the early days who their owner was, and then later knew just his first name, Reg, as the local brand inspector, had known his name almost from the beginning. Frank Mackay called Reg five times all told, and the former left an indelible impression on the latter.

“Absolutely arrogant to the extreme” was how Reg described him.

“Some people who go up in the mountains have no clue,” Reg later told me. “I give him lotsa marks for getting as far as he did—he did have some experience; he just didn’t know when to quit. In Alberta, on the eastern slopes, you can get away with things. Here he was out of his league. He had no clue where a horse could go and not go. He thought the horses would come down, and that was a reasonable expectation. Often, you can’t keep horses up there. It’s why we sometimes hobble horses on pack trips. But in this case, there was bog. And they would not go through that misery again.”

Reg had called Frank Mackay on the second day of digging to verify that the horses on the mountain were his. “He was pretty rude,” said Reg. “He was prepared to leave them there to die. ‘It’s none of your business,’ he told me, and when I challenged him, he said he couldn’t shoot a cat, never mind a horse—though later he said he was a hunter.”

The last thing any of us wanted to do was release those horses to Frank Mackay. Fortunately, the SPCA constable was supposed to meet us at the parking lot next day. I planned to have a chat with him about this new development. The constable never showed, but neither did the owner, so my initial feeling of panic subsided. When I mentioned to Dave that morning that the owner intended to claim the horses, he calmly advised, “Let’s just deal with it as it comes.”

For now, we would focus on the hard task at hand.

THE TUNNEL TO FREEDOM

O
n Monday, December 22, I rose to another cold-snap dawn. The outside thermometer read minus thirty-one, and the radio announcer predicted a daytime high of minus fifteen.

From our living room’s huge sealed window (with a major crack in one corner from the cold of a previous winter), I looked out on my universe. Panning from left to right, I could see my stallion Fire’s paddock (to prevent war with the geldings or breeding with the mares, I kept studs apart from the other horses), then the chicken coop and garden shed, the little red barn, the tack shed
beside it, the fifty-foot round pen for untrained horses and green riders, the vegetable garden, the guest cabin still in the works and the wide path that led down to a creek then up to the pastures and to the big outdoor riding ring—its entryway crowned by elk antlers. The soil in our pastures is clay, so it holds the moisture well, producing rich grass when the weather is kind.

Inside, as outside, horses rule at Falling Star Ranch. The soap dish, the soap dispenser and the towels in the bathroom all bear horse motifs, and horseshoes—along with hundreds of other items—adorn the shelves and walls. Monika insists I am a pack rat, and I have to admit she’s right. But I am a
Swiss
pack rat, which means the hundreds of items—bottles; tobacco tins; portraits; photos, sculptures and drawings of horses, cats and dogs; the antlers on the mantel—are all arrayed just so.

Ours is a rectangular-shaped property, with the Rocky Mountains across the valley in the northeast and the Cariboos in the southwest, behind the ranch. The eyes of visitors to the property are forever drawn to the mountains. Vast wine-coloured strips run through the forests on those mountains, and to visitors they look pretty—until it’s pointed out that this colour marks conifers devastated by mountain pine beetles. But even this flaw does little to taint the glory of those peaks.

Sometimes I wish we had more land, more money, a newer and better house, but other times, walking out to the horses at dawn or dusk, I pinch myself. I stare up at the sun rising over the Rockies or dipping below the Cariboos and think myself the luckiest person on the planet. There is nowhere else I would want to live than here. Some need to live near water—rivers, lakes, oceans. I need mountains.

Dozens of young horse lovers from Europe, Australia and Canada have spent whole summers at Falling Star. In exchange for work—feeding the horses, cleaning the tack, cleaning the corrals, weeding the garden, exercising the horses—the volunteer gets free board, riding lessons and all the expertise I can pass on to them, plus a chance to experience life on a Canadian horse farm. The farm exchange workers would probably agree that I possess an iron hand in a velvet glove.