The Rescue of Belle and Sundance (7 page)

Leif said the mare and gelding appeared very weak and that had he carried a gun with him, he wouldn’t have hesitated to end their misery. But by the time he got down to the valley, it was getting dark and temperatures were dropping again, so it would have been too dangerous to go back up. Leif told Monika that after a great many phone calls it had been decided that he and several others—Logan, his older sister, Toni and Matt—would return to the mountaintop the following day to assess the situation further. Monika advised him to be careful about feeding the horses hay without giving them water, as they might colic.

On the morning of Tuesday, December 16, a single party of three men and one woman on three snowmobiles—Logan with Toni doubled up on one sled and Matt and Leif each driving their own machines—went up Mount Renshaw to the horses. The day was cold and overcast, and the mountain looked to be nearly devoid of sledders.

The four had brought a handgun and a bale of hay, attached by bungee cords to one of the sleds. By mid-morning, they reached the horses. Matt, seeing them for the first time, was struck by the close confines of their enclosure—about the dimensions of a dining room table, he thought to himself. The two sorry horses just stared blankly at the group. The would-be rescuers found themselves returning the horses’ dull stares. Only Matt had no experience of horses; the other three were horse people, and they simply assumed that a hunter or outfitter had lost the horses, maybe after they were spooked by the scent of bear or cougar. When that happened, it often took days to find a frightened horse in the dense forest or vast alpine. Some horses were never found.

After examining the horses more closely, the party of four agreed that despite the sad state of the creatures, there was a glimmer in their eyes. But this was ultimately Toni’s call; she had the most
experience. Having worked for outfitters, Toni had seen horses starve and die on the trail before. She recognized the look of imminent death. When nothing you could do was going to help them, the light in a horse’s eyes would dim, and you would have to put him down. The young woman didn’t hesitate; she cut the twine with her jackknife and broke open the bale of hay. Belle and Sundance weren’t ready to give up. As soon as she’d gotten off the sled, Toni had seen that they still had life in their eyes. Hers was an easy decision—and a relief. She fed each horse a flake of hay (each bale “flakes” differently; a flake may be two to six inches wide and weigh three to five pounds). Toni then used a hoof pick to remove the snow and ice that had balled up under their shoes.

But the foursome still had to find a way to get the animals off the mountain. While Toni stayed with the horses, the three men, using the small collapsible avalanche shovels that sledders carry in their backpacks, started digging a deep, narrow trench—maybe a hundred feet long—from the horses’ snowy prison down a steep hill and into the trees. The incredibly deep snow and the tiny shovels prolonged the job and offered the rescuers their first hint that the task at hand might prove, at worst, impossible, and, at best, a monumental challenge. Eventually, the shovellers got to the desired spot, and there the three men created a new pad for the horses, sheltered from the wind by conifers. Before heading back
down to the valley, Toni fed each horse another flake of hay, a meal to sustain them as night fell.

Belle and Sundance had grown thick fur in the fall as a defence against the cold, but it takes more than fur to keep a horse warm. Horses can stand temperatures of even minus forty degrees Celsius, but to do so, they must have food. It’s their fuel, their lifeline in bitter cold. Horses digest hay or grass by a fermentation process that releases heat. But these two horses had had no food and therefore had produced no heat. And the more Belle and Sundance had felt hunger, the more they’d felt the cold. They’d had no water either, and while eating snow would have provided fluid, it also would have lowered their core temperatures.

The deep snow had acted both as an ally for the two horses and as a foe. It had helped keep predators away, but as exhaustion set in and standing taxed their strength, the horses were forced to lie in the snow. Belle, in particular, had begun to lose huge sections of the fur on her sides and haunches, fur that had offered her at least some protection from the cold.

A thin, wet horse is a cold horse; worse, these horses were unable to move to generate heat. But even a thin, cold, immobilized horse can survive in winter if there’s hay. If Belle and Sundance were to survive a bit longer, if this rescue had any chance, they would need hay. Lots and lots of hay.

 

While all this was happening up on the mountain, I was at home pacing. Armed with bits of information acquired from Monika—that the owner of the two horses was a lawyer from Edmonton named Frank and that he had had a motor vehicle accident somewhere near Mount Robson on his way home in December—I called the RCMP in Valemount, where the mishap would have taken place. But the officer on duty was close-mouthed.

“Can you look into it and, if you find out the person’s name, call the SPCA in Prince George and let them know?” I pleaded with him. “This person abandoned two horses in the Renshaw area last fall, and the horses were found in that area yesterday. We are trying to locate the owner so he can help us get them out.”

The officer eventually agreed, and I gave him the number of Debbie Goodine, an animal protection officer with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Prince George—a two-hour drive but the closest location to McBride.

I then called the RCMP in McBride and talked to the clerk, Lorrie Lewis, who was appalled to learn that the horses were still up on the mountain. She told me that back in September, their owner had informed her that he had left his two pack horses up by the Renshaw cabin because they were too tired to walk all the
way out of the backcountry after he’d extricated them from the bog. The man had said he’d return for them on his next days off, and Lorrie, in turn, had given him the names of local outfitters who could help him. Having heard nothing more from the horses’ owner, Lorrie had assumed that he’d successfully retrieved the animals. The RCMP clerk now promised to search the files for his name and, if successful, contact the SPCA in Prince George.

 

All day, my thoughts drifted. Were the horses still alive? Or had Matt put them down by now? I was almost hoping he had so they
wouldn’t have to suffer one more minute. Besides, at this point, I couldn’t even imagine how we would possibly manage to get those two horses down the mountain.

By mid-afternoon, I still hadn’t heard from the sledders. What was taking them so long? Had something gone wrong? Finally, I received an email from Joette Starchuck, another horse lover and McBride resident: Bob Elliott, Matt’s dad, had just told her that Matt had found the horses. “He left a bale of hay, water and molasses. Apparently going back tomorrow . . .”

I felt a bit better at hearing this news, but I wanted specifics. I needed to talk to Matt. When I finally reached him, he told me that the horses were very skinny, that one had lost hair on both sides, but that they seemed alert and had wanted to follow the sledders out when they’d left in the late afternoon. That was, for me and for many who were told of it, a wrenching detail but yet more proof that the horses’ spirits were not yet broken by cold and hunger. They wanted off the mountain, and they knew that these humans and their machines offered a possible way out.

Matt and the others planned to return the following day to feed the horses once more, to start digging a trail and, they hoped, to get the horses to the logging road below. Matt, for one, felt very upbeat about it all and didn’t think it would take that long to get the horses to safety. Maybe a few days. At first, I felt elated by this
news. Then the doubts came. What about all that snow? Were the horses that close to the logging road?

I really wanted to go up there and help and, of course, to see the horses for myself rather than rely on second-hand information. Work got in the way. This was Tuesday; the earliest I could go was Thursday, and Matt couldn’t guarantee me a spot on his sled. It would depend on how many others were making the trip.

But if I couldn’t go, I could at least marshal others. I called Lisa Levasseur. She once worked for a big Arabian horse farm in California called Baywood Park, where she rose through the ranks, from groom to trainer to manager of shows and sales. Various injuries—car accidents and “horse wrecks,” as riders call calamitous falls—precluded her from riding anymore, but love for horses still burned inside her. I knew that she owned eighteen horses, all retired from active duty, and that she had taken in starving horses in the past.

More important, Lisa’s father’s Terracana Ranch Resort was frequented by sledders. I was looking for manpower, sledders and diggers, and I was hoping that Lisa could muster some.

We discussed various options for liberating the horses. We talked about airlifting them out to the cabin close by, and from there getting them into a horse trailer pulled behind the groomer on the snowmobile trail. Lisa then called Sara and Matt to discuss the idea
further, and Sara called the groomer to run the idea past him. I also talked to Monika and Reg extensively that evening while looking at maps on Google Earth, trying to figure out exactly where on that impossibly huge mountain those horses stood. Surely half the phone lines in the Robson Valley were hosting conversations about those horses that night.

Pure instinct had kicked in. We didn’t stop to think about how this rescue attempt might unfold or how much time it would require or what the odds were of succeeding. Many people in the valley own animals and feel compassion for them. Since so many of us also live perilously close to the highway or rail line, finding an animal in need is a common occurrence in this part of the world. It may be that the pioneer spirit still prevails in this remote valley. Or that in a small town, a common cause is more keenly felt. On big city freeways, commuters pass stranded drivers all the time, knowing that formal help (a police car, a tow truck) will soon arrive. But on a country road, the dispatching of formal help takes longer, so we stop for stricken travellers. Odds are that in the broken-down car sits someone you know, a neighbour or friend or someone who knows a neighbour or friend. In the Robson Valley, it isn’t six degrees of separation. One or two is more like it.