The Rescue of Belle and Sundance (17 page)

Marc had been really keen on going up the mountain and helping dig, so I was glad that he would finally get the chance to do so on Tuesday, December 23, just two days before Christmas. He had been a huge moral support for me. From the moment I had heard about those horses on the mountain, I had gone into overdrive. Too exhausted to make meals or even eat, I lost weight. Helping the horses was both physically and mentally draining—the hardest thing I have ever done in my life—and I felt so fortunate to have a partner who valued the effort every bit as much as I did.

Many of the rescuers paid a price for their participation: sore backs, frostbite, lost wages, mental anguish. On or off the mountain, volunteers felt the same—the horses never left our thoughts. The digging was actually a relief because the labour offered an antidote to all that worry. Of course, no one suffered more or longer than Belle and Sundance, and what they had endured put everything else into perspective.

Marc saw himself as part of “a fresh second wave” of diggers. He’d taken no time off work to help, for he had been convinced that snow and wind would play havoc with the rescue attempt—which he thought would unfold over several weeks at least. The notion that the digging might soon be over seemed miraculous to him. “I was convinced I’d be shovelling over the Christmas holidays,” he told me as we drove to the parking lot. “This is good.”

When Marc and I arrived at the Renshaw parking lot, we found Monika there with boxes full of sandwiches and trail mix, all donated by the McBride Trading Co. Moving about quickly in that minus-thirty cold, we handed out the goodies to volunteers and stuffed as much food as possible into our backpacks and coat pockets, certain we’d need those rations later.

Many locals had returned home from jobs in Alberta or up north. Former residents were likewise coming back to celebrate Christmas with family and friends. That meant we had a lot of bodies, and I was thrilled to see them. Twenty-four volunteers made the long snowmobile ride to the bottom of the trench that day to help dig from the groomed snowmobile trail up toward the horses.

It was the worst ride in yet for me. The helmet Stu had loaned me—the same one I’d used twice before—kept sliding up on my head, so most of the time I couldn’t see the trail ahead. The cause, most likely, was the bumpy ride: the trail hadn’t been groomed for several days, so the whole way up the mountain, I had to hold on to Stu more than usual—especially since there were no hay bales behind me this time to wedge me in. Tired from all the shovelling and hanging on, I turned and twisted my arms, trying to use different muscle groups to grip. No use. I couldn’t wait for the ride to be over.

Marc’s ride in with Lester Blouin was just as miserable. Putting
his hands forward to hang on to Lester exposed his wrists to the cold wind, but if he didn’t hang on, he risked falling off the sled. His solution was to let his arms dangle at his sides and always to watch ahead for dips and rises. “It was like riding a horse,” he told me later when he could laugh about it. “I was posting and trotting—on a snowmobile.”

Stu and I stopped briefly where the trench emerged onto the groomed snowmobile trail, but nobody else had arrived yet. We then continued up to the horses’ pen. After we fed Belle and Sundance, a group of us started digging from the top down.

Digging from the bottom were Monika, Tim and Justin; Marc; Dave and his brother Gord; Lester; Wes Phillips; Dean, Sam and Alison Schreiber; Joey Rich and his dad, Joe; Carla Trask; Carolina and Jason Beniuk; Byron Murin; Jeff Zyda; and Matt Villmure. The last five mentioned live in Alberta, but all have a connection to McBride. Two groups of Alberta sledders also stopped to help with the digging effort. With this many people, the stair method worked to perfection.

Later on, Rod Whelpton—he owns Adrenaline Tours, a company that rents out snowmobiles and offers snowmobile tours—and Barry came walking down the trench from the direction of the horses’ pen. Rod and Barry had agreed to bring a two-man TV crew up the mountain, but a few kilometres after they had left the
parking lot, the engine on Barry’s sled blew. When another sledder happened along and was told the circumstances, he agreed to join Rod in ferrying the TV crew members to the bottom of the trench, from where Matt Elliott took them the rest of the way. Barry, meanwhile, started walking back toward the parking lot by himself. He’d walked about four kilometres when another local sledder on his way up the mountain chanced by. He readily offered Barry a ride back to the parking lot. Two good Samaritans in a row.

 

At the parking lot, Barry unloaded one of the spare machines they had brought along for just such an emergency and rode back up the mountain. Told of Barry’s trek, the Global TV crew seemed astonished. Perhaps they had never walked four kilometres in their lives.

Meanwhile, the reporter and cameraman, one of them mumbling something about the mountain air being thin, seemed anxious to leave. Maybe they feared we would try to shame them into helping.

“How do you dig with that?” Dean Schreiber had joked, pointing at the reporter’s microphone, and everybody had laughed.

One volunteer worried aloud about all the media attention. What if something happened to the horses while they were being led out? How would that make us look?

“How can we look bad?” answered Marc. “We’d only look bad if we’d quit on them. You don’t look bad for trying.”

I agreed with Marc’s sentiment, though I did still worry that the horses might balk at entering the trench. They had readily walked down a short steep trench to their new pad a week beforehand, but this new trench was far longer, with no end in sight.

Belle and Sundance had worked a little magic, even on people with no interest in horses—such as Barry. The avid snowmobiler and
volunteer with the local search and rescue unit dug on the mountain for two days, though he later conceded with irreverent humour, “I’m not a horse person. Horses hate me. The tamest one will try to bite me. I could not believe we were doing this nonsense. I was very negative about all this in the beginning. I thought the digging was stupid, but one look at the horses . . .”

Matt had said the same thing. To see Belle and Sundance in the flesh was to sign on to the rescue team.

All over the Robson Valley, horse-mad wives were putting pressure on husbands to help. The men were often reluctant at first, then keen. Sara had convinced Matt to help by giving him what she called “the look.” She said Matt wouldn’t know one end of a horse from the other—though I think she put it less delicately than that. Judy Fraser had deployed a different tactic on her partner, Barry Walline. She used pure, simple logic: if the horses were suffering, he had to help. As Barry put it, “We were goaded into it.”

Barry calls himself “a wuss,” even though he’ll go out in the small hours in a blizzard in minus-thirty temperatures—but only because he has to, he insists. As a recreational snowmobiler, he ducks cold weather. But when a sledder is reported missing, Barry will—along with his rescue unit cohorts—go to the highest point of the mountain and look or smell for a warming fire or try to
catch the flash of a camera. He will yell to be heard or listen for yelling. Invariably, the lost are found.

On the morning of December 23, Matt hiked from the shovelled end of the bottom trench up to the shovelled end of the top one to gauge how much digging was left to do. Climbing a rugged mountain in heavy boots and sledder suit was tiring enough, but all those days of digging had taken a toll on him. Once he reached us, he let himself fall back into the snow. It was the kind of freefall that kids do just before making a snow angel.

“I am not going to do that again,” he said, supremely exhausted, his eyes closed. He meant the walk up the hill.

“How far is it still?” I asked.

“It seems quite a way,” he answered, “but then again, I was walking uphill.”

We had started digging around 11 a.m., and shortly after noon I could hear voices. One of them was Justin’s.

“Hey Birgit, we’re here,” he shouted.

“You’d better have a shovel and not just be walking up here to see how far we still have to go!” I yelled.

“We’re shovelling,” he yelled back.

 

Yeah, right, I thought to myself, but then I saw snow flying.

“Is that where the trench is?” I called again.

“Yes, we’re right here,” Justin replied.

Then I could see Marc’s red coveralls, and behind him Wes and Lester. A human digging chain was working its way toward us. Monika and Tim were part of that crew digging from the bottom, shoulder to shoulder with strangers—people she had never met, people who had never seen the horses.
What a great bunch
, she later
told me she thought as she dug. Now and again, there comes a feeling of connectedness—to one’s community, to some worthy cause. You feel as though you are a vital cog in a great turning wheel. This, thought Monika, is one such moment.