The Rescue of Belle and Sundance (3 page)

Belle and Sundance’s journey up Mount Renshaw began on September 12, 2008. Frank Mackay, a lawyer in Edmonton, some four hundred kilometres to the east as the crow flies, was bringing supplies to a friend who was hiking the Great Divide, which aligns pretty well with the B.C.–Alberta border. It seemed like a simple enough task for a man who had owned horses for a decade and who likely saw himself as a horseman. But things went wrong, very wrong, on that trip.

 

The sixty-three-year-old was riding his saddle horse, and leading Belle and Sundance, who dutifully carried their loads. Sundance was a fourteen-year-old gelding, a sorrel (a horse with a reddish brown coat and a mane and tail the same colour or flaxen); Belle was a three-year-old mare, a bay (dark brown in colour with black points—mane, tail, lower legs). This was Mackay’s first solo mountain expedition, and he quickly discovered the many challenges: on the way to Beaver Dam Pass, he got lost, veering east when he should have gone west. The weather, as it often does in the Canadian Rockies, turned foul and cold. And a brewing mutiny by his two pack horses finally erupted.

What befell the group high in the alpine that day was not weather but unruly and rough terrain. Bog, to be precise. In previous years, crews had cut trees to widen a snowmobile trail, and all the deadfall lying in low and wet areas pinched and grabbed at the horses’ legs. The horses were soon exhausted, then stuck, and the man leading them struggled to extricate them. “It was like pickup sticks in there, with muskeg in between,” Mackay would later report. “This stuff was just muck.”

Mackay had failed to heed one of Joe Back’s rules:

Eventually, Mackay and his horses made it past the Renshaw warming cabin, where again the two pack horses got mired in bog.

Belle and Sundance had had enough. Even after they were relieved of their loads and untethered, they refused to follow their master’s lead. The pack horses had lost faith. The mare was spent by her travails, and the stronger gelding, though able to, would not leave her side. The bond between the two was too strong.

Frank Mackay spent the night of September 12 on Mount Renshaw with all three horses, and the following morning he abandoned his camping equipment on the mountainside and rode out on his saddle horse, telling himself that the two pack horses would soon enough find their way to a logging road and from there to the main valley, where someone would see them and report them. He also informed the Royal Canadian Mounted Police detachment in McBride, which serves as the local police, in case the loose horses were spotted coming down the mountain.

The man had fully expected the pack horses to head for the valley within a few days. This was a reasonable expectation in ordinary circumstances, local outfitters would later confirm. But the expected didn’t occur, probably because the horses would have associated descending the mountain with revisiting that miserable bog.

The gelding and the mare were left alone on the mountain, but they were also free. Mount Renshaw, for the time being, proved a blissful place for Belle and Sundance to be.

HORSE HEAVEN, HORSE HELL

F
or weeks that fall, Belle and Sundance would have revelled in their newfound freedom. The horses could graze to their hearts’ content in those yawning alpine meadows; they could nap in the sun in the afternoon and play when play was called for. At night, they would have slept, although one of them would have remained alert, testing the winds for any sign of wolf, cougar or bear.

Dark-chocolate brown in colour, Belle bore a star on her forehead, almost a stripe, and had small eyes that suggested she might be scheming. The young mare was the saucier and more sure-footed
of the two horses and would surely have pushed the envelope with her heavier, more senior companion. Teased him, nipped him, tested his patience.

Sundance, a chestnut with three white stockings, sported a wide blaze on his head and large, pretty eyes. Although calm and laid-back, the gelding was clearly the boss of the pair. At 16.2 hands, he also had size in his favour. (A hand, in reference to horses, refers to height. Our forebears used the adult hand, four inches across, to measure the height of a horse. So a 16.2-hand horse stands sixty-six inches from the ground to the withers, the highest part of the back. Belle, at 15.2, was sixty-two inches from ground to withers.) Lanky and somewhat stiff, Sundance would get pushy with both horses and humans and gravitated to the leadership of any herd he joined.

On the mountain, Belle and Sundance were camped in majestic territory. Geographical place names here sound almost boastful: White Falls, Falls of the Pool, Emperor Falls, Rainbow Falls, Tumbling Glacier, the Valley of a Thousand Falls and the Emperor Face of Mount Robson. Mount Robson itself is the stunning high point of the Canadian Rockies, and climbers attempting to reach its almost four-thousand-metre summit are rebuffed by weather ninety per cent of the time. Those who make it, though, glory in views that extend one hundred kilometres in every direction. I have never been up there, but hikers rave about the mountain’s vast
meadows and many lakes, as well as the glaciers—the longest one, twelve hundred metres in length—that spill into the aquamarine waters of Berg Lake.

 

In mid-September, not long after their owner had left them, one such hiker spotted the two horses. Glen Stanley will modestly say he has done a bit of hiking: he has twice climbed Mount Robson and has hiked to Berg Lake a staggering seventy-six times. But despite all that experience over his seventy years, what Glen saw on that early fall day jarred him. He was hiking with his dog Badge when
he chanced upon two horses gambolling high in the alpine about two kilometres north of the Renshaw cabin. “There’s a ridge running south and east from the peak of Mount Renshaw separating two meadows,” said Glen. “This is up high, where the last grass is. The place is a small pocket of short grass, with water. I’m not a horse person, but I would think it would be an ideal place for them.”

The horses shook their heads at the hiker and his dog. First the horses came to them, then they scattered, then they returned. Using a telephoto lens, Glen took pictures of them. The horses in the photos look fat and sassy and happy and, with their glistening coats, in perfect health. They wore bells at their necks, as is common for horses taken into the mountains—to give fair warning to bears and to help a rider retrieve them should they spook and flee. But there was no owner to be seen. The whole thing puzzled Glen. What were two horses doing way up there alone?

Not long after, as he sat in the meadow eating his lunch, Glen saw a helicopter fly overhead. He assumed it was part of a search team looking for two lost horses. But when he later called Yellowhead Helicopters, which has a base in the nearby village of Valemount, he was told that what he had observed was a routine flight to check out a stand of timber. So Glen called the RCMP, who gave him the answer he was looking for. A man on his way to Grande Cache, Alberta, had had two of his horses bog down on Mount Renshaw.
Having learned that the animals’ presence on the mountain was known, Glen assumed the owner would return for them very soon. Horses are valuable animals; no one would just leave them there, especially with winter coming.

Aside from Glen, few in the Robson Valley knew there were horses running free in the alpine that fall. One exception was Wes Phillips. Wes started working as a guide in the mountains at the age of seventeen, almost thirty years before, and to him, the lost horses presented an opportunity. He had just come back from a trip to the Yukon when “the old moccasin telegraph,” as he calls word of mouth in the mountains, told him that two horses were loose on the north fork of the Blackwater River below Mount Renshaw. “There’s an unwritten law in the mountains,” he says. “Someone callous enough to leave any unbranded horses over four up in the mountains . . . it’s finders keepers.” Four is deemed to be the age a wild horse would leave its dam.

Twice, once at Thanksgiving in mid-October and again a week later, Wes drove up the logging road—formally called McKale Forest Service Road but locally also known as Blackwater River Road. He parked at kilometre twenty-six and then searched for the
horses on foot. The weather grew nasty as he went that first time, with cold rain turning to snow, resulting in a four-inch dump. The second time, a foot of snow covered the ground, putting an end to Wes’s search.

Wes had reason to believe that even high atop a mountain in winter’s grip, horses can find ways to survive. “Horses can surprise you with their fortitude,” he says. “One time I had a horse hit by a train. Half his face was torn off. I thought, Better put him down. But in six months it had healed over. Another time, a horse of mine was attacked by wolves. He was just a little horse, but he got away. He couldn’t walk for four or five months, but he made it.”

Wes felt certain that the two horses were alive and somewhere on the mountain, but where was anybody’s guess.