The Rescue of Belle and Sundance (2 page)

Logan Jeck and Leif Gunster were born and bred in these mountains and have been friends all their lives. They cherish snowmobiling and the outdoor life, and with work so scarce, they joke darkly about having more time than money. But for all the changes inflicted on the valley, one constant is the instinct to assist those in distress. Up here, “Help thy neighbour” is a commandment bred in the bone. We wouldn’t survive otherwise. Leif calls it “the McBride mentality.” He has worked in northern Alberta in the fast-cash, oil-fuelled economy, but while the money is good, the life is not. He couldn’t wait to get back home to the Robson Valley, where people actually look out for one another.

Leif knows, and loves, the territory. A skilled sledder, he drives an Arctic Cat 800, a powerful snow machine that generates 150 horsepower and hits a top speed of 140 kilometres an hour. When it’s available, Leif finds work as a logger in the McBride area and, in the fall, as a hunting guide on horseback in the Yukon. A compactly
built and strong young man with light brown hair, blue eyes and chiselled features, Leif is like so many around here: comfortable with horsepower in all its forms.

As for Logan, the name Jeck is a recognizable one in the community. Logan’s great-grandfather came to the area in 1924 from New Sarepta in central Alberta, a fact remembered in Jeck Road, which runs off the highway outside McBride. In December 2008, Logan was, by all accounts, a well-mannered, soft-spoken young man. Blond and tall with an athletic build, he worked in the forest as a faller and had done some heli-logging, but like Leif, he went to where the work was. Although Logan had grown up in a family of horse people, he had never really taken to horses. He preferred his horsepower in a machine.

But Logan knew, and Leif knew, that a mountain can be a treacherous place any time of the year, doubly so in winter. Blizzards strike without warning and the terrain is dangerously steep in places. There is a knack to driving a snow machine in the mountains, and even seasoned snowmobilers get into trouble on the Renshaw, as some locals call it. The uninitiated might think that a machine built to run over snow couldn’t possibly get stuck in the stuff, but many sledders have discovered the hard way that in several feet of fresh powder, sleds may float, or sink, according to the skill, luck and circumstances of the driver.

Mount Renshaw boasts the largest maintained sledding area in North America. In early December of 2008, the mountain was doing its usual job of accommodating thousands of snowmobilers without anyone feeling crowded or pinched. The views, as always, were spellbinding and even the risks of the mountain, it seemed, possessed a certain allure. The local search and rescue team had spent three successive nights rescuing sledders in the backcountry; when snowstorms lashed the mountain yet again, the men were too spent to go out. They called on Logan and Leif, then twenty and twenty-one respectively, who generously agreed to relieve them. Visitors from Alberta had gotten their snowmobiles mired in deep snow and had walked to a warming cabin nearby. The search and rescue crew had gotten the sledders out, but the tasks of locating and towing their machines off the mountain still remained.

In a typical winter on Mount Renshaw, ten metres of snow will fall, and the base will settle in at more than three metres deep. That December 15, with the temperature hovering around minus thirty degrees Celsius, a light flurry had added to the lovely pile. Logan and Leif were searching below Mount Renshaw, two kilometres from the warming cabin. They had pushed past a high ridge called “the saddle,” which overlooks a massively wide expanse called “the bowl,” much favoured by sledders. Just before noon on that bitterly cold morning, Logan and Leif were down in the bowl scouting for
the lost snow machines. Noticing what they took to be moose in a gully near the warming cabin just above the treeline, they stopped. There was something odd about the sighting. The moose, if moose they were, stood frightfully still and their heads hung low. Curious, Leif and Logan advanced.

When the two men grew close, they realized they had come upon two grossly emaciated horses. Logan knows his way around a horse and had worked for outfitters; his father, uncle and sister are all horse people. His gut response to the stricken animals was revulsion. In a starving horse, the bones are so prominent that the skeleton appears to be that of a larger horse. The tail is quiet, the head is low, the ears still, the eyes dull. These two horses had ceased to interact with their environment; gone were hope and expectation. Breathing was a chore. Their sad and low-hanging heads spoke of their despair.

The two horses had packed down the snow and made a claustrophobic enclosure, maybe twelve feet square, with six-foot-high snow walls all around. They were trapped near the summit of a 2,400-metre-high mountain in the dead of winter. The horses were alive, though barely. Logan took a cheese stick from his pocket and gave it to the mare, who accepted it feebly.

By Leif’s estimation, the horses hadn’t eaten in a month. Ribs and hipbones prominent, backbones in sharp relief, they looked more
like skinny cows than horses. Leif took no notice of their height or colour or markings, only their sad, drawn faces that seemed to beg for mercy. The two men felt helpless and angry. Leif wished he’d been carrying a pistol or a rifle. He would have shot the horses then and there to end their suffering.

The men well knew how easy it is to lose a horse in the bush (a lightning flash or the scent of a cougar can cause a horse to panic and flee, and some horses take off out of mischief), but still, the sight of two horses so high up the mountain confounded them. Logan and Leif had also heard about heartless outfitters who simply released unwanted mounts into the wilderness and forgot about them. The question of how these two horses had become stranded on a mountaintop in winter would remain unanswered for the moment.

The larger question, the one that demanded an immediate answer, was this: What were they going to do about these starving horses?

LOST HORSES

B
elle and Sundance were pack horses, and to begin to understand how they came to be marooned in winter near the top of a snowbound mountain, it’s important to know something about horses in general and pack horses in particular.

Every horse herd is also a hierarchy, and whether there are two or twenty horses in that herd, each knows precisely where he or she fits. By tests of courage or small signs (a pinning of ears, a kick—or the threat of one), dominance is determined, and the bold and the timid and those in between neatly arrange themselves. If, in a paddock, horse number two, say, were to drink or dine before horse
number one had done so, the latter might have something to say about that. If horse number twenty pulled rank in that fashion, there would be hell to pay.

One of the many things I love about horse society is that horses know their place, and once that place is established, they tend toward peaceful coexistence and even mutual aid. Two horse chums in a field will align themselves head to tail on a hot summer day so they can swat flies on each other’s face with their tails or gently groom each other along the flanks with their teeth. Horses buddy up and form allegiances, and sometimes these connections are intense. Typically, high-ranking horses pair up with each other, and low-ranking horses do the same. Belle and Sundance were both dominant horses. In a cruel twist, the tight bond between them would contribute to the grim circumstance in which they found themselves on Mount Renshaw.

Another kind of hierarchy exists among horses, according to task—though this ranking is by human, not equine, design. At the top of the heap are the sport horses, the ones that may command millions of dollars when they are bought and sold: sleek thoroughbreds of the racetrack, powerful warm-blooded show jumpers, graceful dressage horses, cutting and reining horses that rule western horse shows. On this scale, school horses—the ones used to help teach novices how to ride—are well down the line.

But at the very bottom of that ranking are pack horses. They need not possess speed or agility or understand any of the subtle forms of communication that pass between rider and horse. A pack horse needs just a few credentials: a strong back, a willingness to follow the one ahead, a calm and gentle disposition and, finally, a sure-footedness in rugged and steep terrain.

The pack horse line is ancient. Humans began to ride horses at least six thousand years ago, but evidence suggests horses were penned or tethered as early as thirty thousand years ago. It’s a good bet that the first horses encountered by humans were hunted for meat and that long before that first human got on the back of that first horse, horses and mules, donkeys and ponies were carrying loads. Where roads were poor or non-existent, the pack horse conveyed goods to market. In the Old West, pack horse trains were sometimes a hundred horses long. Even today, forest and park rangers, surveyors, miners, ranchers and outfitters all over North America use them. And pack horses continue to work throughout the developing world. In the Rockies, they power hunting expeditions, camping trips and geological forays. The pack horse, in short, has never fallen out of favour.

The pack horse’s treatment depends largely on circumstance and the conscience and means of its owner. Pity the horse whose owners are poor—poor in sympathy for horses, poor in their ability
to fathom the ways of horses, poor in the ordinary sense of that word. If a family routinely goes hungry, their horse likely suffers the same fate. Even a horse of high breeding can come to know neglect, but pack horses such as Belle and Sundance—widely viewed as the cheapest and most expendable of their kind—are the most vulnerable.

Taking pack horses into the Rocky Mountains of northeastern British Columbia—especially the rugged western slope where I live—is not for the faint of heart. Without years of experience, anyone planning such an expedition would do well to either hire a good guide, travel with someone experienced or, at the very least, read up on the subject.

Most outfitters in the Robson Valley have read what they call “the packer’s bible.”
Horses, Hitches and Rocky Trails
, written by Joe Back in 1959, is a remarkable little 117-page book—remarkable not least for its detailed and often wry illustrations, its homespun wisdom and for the fact that its advice is still followed almost to the letter by outfitters more than fifty years later. If horses are sometimes dangerous, mountains are more so, and the combination of the two can be deadly. “The lack of two or three cave men tools
and a few simple precautions,” wrote Back, “can sometimes bring modern men to disaster and even death.”

Leading pack horses in the mountains requires experience and a complicated set of skills. A simple omission, like forgetting to bring an axe to make a fire if need be, may prove fatal. You have to know your knots—the diamond hitch (single and double), the basket hitch, the half-hitched diamond. You have to know about saddles—the Decker, the sawbuck, the Spanish. You have to know about panniers (baskets slung on either side of the pack horse), slings and much else.

And even if you were to pack a horse perfectly, with a keen eye for balance and weight, the job doesn’t end there. The breast collar has to be just so, so the load won’t shift backward when the horse goes uphill. As the horse loses weight from all this labour, the cinch loosens. Working also makes him thirsty, and when he fills up on water at every creek he passes (sometimes just so he can take a break), his belly expands, tightening the cinch again. Supreme vigilance and careful horsemanship are a must. “A horse gets to eat in his spare time, if any,” observed Back, “and if you push him beyond reason you walk home, and that poor devil ends up in a coyote or a can.”