The Rescue of Belle and Sundance (19 page)

Then the majority of volunteers started the long, cold snowmobile ride down the mountain to the parking lot, ahead of the two horses and their handlers. It was shortly after 3 p.m. when Gord, leading Sundance, I, leading Belle, and Marc all started the trek down the logging road. Marc soon opted to catch a ride with Tim and Justin; he could hardly walk in his “big monkey suit” (as he calls his thick winter coveralls). Poor Justin was squeezed in between Tim and Marc on Tim’s rented snow machine.

Monika had thought she might be part of the group leading the horses down the logging road, but the cold had begun to bite, along with the fatigue, and her warm house beckoned.

“But promise you’ll call me when you get home,” she said before leaving. “I don’t care what time it is.” I promised I would.

Dave, meanwhile, worked on logistics. He instructed Marc to call Ray when he got down to the valley to let him know that we were on our way down with the horses. Ray would need to hook up his livestock trailer and ready the stalls in his barn in case we managed to walk all the way out.

Shovelling in the sun all day had caused Marc to sweat up on the mountain, which, because of temperature inversions, could sometimes be warmer than the valley. Now, with dusk approaching, he was dropping down into the cold valley, with the speed of the sled adding yet more bite to the wind chill. Tim was driving the sled,
which had handlebars for the passenger—in this case, Marc. “This is great,” Marc told Tim as they sped down the mountain. “These handlebars are heated.”

“Uh, I don’t think so,” Tim replied.

Marc thought of that short story by Jack London, “To Build a Fire,” in which a man—foolishly hiking across the tundra during his first winter in the far north—fights a losing battle with minus-seventy-five-degree cold. Those who have read that story, set in the early 1900s, often remember two salient details—the man’s folly in building his fire too close to a snow-laden spruce, and the great warmth that is said to come over humans just before they freeze to death:

Marc remembers playing hockey on outdoor rinks near his family’s home in Parry Sound, Ontario. The pain and tingling were only felt when you came inside and the warm air hit the frozen skin.

When he got to the parking lot, Marc, instead of calling Ray, drove straight to Ray’s farm. Lu came to the door. Marc told her the horses were on their way.

“Great!” she answered.

When Marc explained how chilled he was, Lu, a soft-spoken, kind and generous farm wife, directed him to the basement, where a big oil furnace sits next to a wood stove. After a few minutes, she went down to check on him. Her perennial smile got a little wider when she saw Marc with his hands out and pressed close to the oil furnace.

“That’s the one that’s hot,” she said warmly, pointing at the wood stove.

As she drove home in the dark, Monika found herself going over what the rescue had meant to her. She remembered the frantic moments in the early days, searching on the Internet for expertise on the feeding of starving horses, and how impossible the task of digging had seemed at first. Monika relived her three days of shovelling, recalling the frustration of her first day and the fun of the second, how she and her fellow diggers had come to laugh at how hard the work was and tossed snow at each other.

 

After that day, her attitude had changed completely. The impossible looked possible after all. Digging with strangers, friends, acquaintances, she felt that they all shared a common purpose.

For many in the Robson Valley, getting those horses off the mountain would be the best Christmas present ever.

HOLD YOUR HORSES

T
he horses were out of the woods, but not yet off the mountain. The thirty-kilometre logging road still lay ahead.

Matt, Dave, Lester and Stu—all on snowmobiles—followed Gord, me, Belle and Sundance. The four sledders stayed well behind us so they could warn snowmobilers approaching from behind them of the horses ahead. Luckily, only a few remained on the mountain, and none came by after dark.

We talked about creating a makeshift pen somewhere along the logging road and leaving the horses overnight, then coming back the next day to finish the journey. However, we worried that
predators would make an easy meal of them. Wolves, cougars and coyotes avoid the alpine, preferring the lower ranges—a fact that had so far protected Belle and Sundance. This far down the mountain—and on a groomed trail at that—the threat of carnivores became much more real.

On the other hand, the horses faced a marathon walk. They had lost a lot of muscle mass during their ordeal on the mountain, both from standing still all that time and from the wasting. So much muscle had been metabolized to keep them alive. Did they possess the strength and energy required to walk the trail’s full length in one go? The lost muscle left them vulnerable to bone fractures—a catastrophic thought. When we started our trek down the mountain, I tried not to think about the long march ahead of us. I just took one step, then another, and another.

The gelding was a trooper. Early on the march, he began to shiver, so we put a blanket on him. After that, he walked steadily forward. He and I were both beat, both on autopilot.

The young mare, on the other hand, was a cocky little thing. Despite her ordeal, she still had sass and attitude. Instead of walking beside me as the gelding was doing with his handler, she would drift behind me, pin her ears back in annoyance and butt my backpack with her head. Frustrated and just as annoyed as she was, I wondered what she hoped to accomplish. Maybe she was trying to
get at something in my backpack. I took it off and put it on one of the sleds. Her behaviour improved somewhat.

 

At first walking quite fast, sometimes even ahead of the gelding, Belle soon slowed down and, after a while, wanted to quit altogether. She had used up precious energy fooling around and being bold, as young horses tend to do. Several times along the way, the person leading the gelding had to get behind the mare and urge her on. Trying to pull a reluctant horse is foolish and pointless. As
skinny as she was, Belle still amounted to seven hundred pounds of stubbornness. It was far easier to use the gelding’s energy to press her from behind, like a tailgating motorist on the freeway urging on the slowpoke ahead. I wondered, too, if the gelding recognized the logging road—he would have come this way in the fall—and knew he was headed down the mountain.

About an hour after we started our journey, darkness began to descend. The sky was clear and full of stars, with no moon visible. Only four days to new moon. By five o’clock it was pitch dark and the temperature had dropped considerably. Only the headlamps of the snowmobiles illuminated the road. Dave suggested driving one of the sleds closely behind the horses at all times so the horse handlers had some light. At first, the horses fretted, but they soon got used to the noise, lights and proximity of the machines.

We took turns leading the horses and riding the four snowmobiles. I much preferred walking, the warmer choice. As well, I had never driven a snowmobile before, so I was reluctant. Matt, however, was encouraging.

“It’s easy,” he said. “I’ll show you.”

After some brief instruction, he left me alone with his machine while he took the mare from me. Once I got going, I was fine, but I never lost my apprehension. I worried that I’d get the sled stuck in the snow at the side of the logging road. But the cold was what
bothered me most. I had loaned my big mitts to Matt while I was leading the mare—for that, my hands were kept warm enough by the two pairs of gloves I wore. When I’d handed Matt the mare’s lead rope, I’d forgotten to ask him for my mitts back. Within minutes of driving the snowmobile, my hands turned ice cold. I could hardly steer and had to stop and try to warm them up by slapping them against my sides to get the blood flowing. Matt returned my mitts, but even with them, my hands weren’t warming up much.

“Here, try one of these,” said Stu, handing me one of those little hot packs that heat up when shaken. The heat felt wonderful, but it still took a long time for my hands to feel warm.

We stopped several times along the way to rest the horses and feed them hay. They also ate some snow. However, we had brought little food for ourselves. In my backpack, I had a half-frozen sandwich, which I ate, and a bag of chocolate-covered goodies, which I shared with the guys. The water I’d packed, though, was frozen solid.