The Rescue of Belle and Sundance (9 page)

“My brother Gord and I started going up in the hills after high school,” he told me. “For twenty-five years, we ran Jeck Brothers Outfitters in the McBride area. We once spent a hundred and twenty days in the Yukon, way back in the mountains, working for an outfitter there.” The brothers sold their business in 2004, but Dave still has eight horses at home.

Dave took a matter-of-fact approach to the idea of getting horses off a mountaintop. He would not classify himself as a horse lover. A pragmatist, more like it. “I had to shoot a crippled horse once,” he told me. “I’ve had horses get old and then they get a stroke and you have to shoot them. I don’t cry over them. I’m more realistic. I like horses and I look after them, but I’m not an extremist. I won’t cry if one dies. People can get radical when it comes to horses.”

Lana, Dave’s wife, is fond of telling people that once Dave sets his mind on something, “he’s like a dog with a bone.” After seeing the horses up on Mount Renshaw, he simply said to himself, “I’m getting those horses out of there. They need help.” Dave Jeck felt certain that he and a few good men could dig those horses out.

As for the cold, he’s almost cavalier. “I log in the winter. You can’t stand around,” he jokes. “You’ll freeze.”

The first thing Dave had done after Logan had told him about the two horses stuck on the mountain was call his brother-in-law, Stu MacMaster. “Of course I’ll come,” Stu had said. Dave later
called Lester Blouin, who had worked for ten years as a hunting guide for Jeck Brothers. Lester had been out of town, but when he got back, he said pretty much the same thing. “Count me in.”

 

A powerfully built man with a weathered face and blue eyes, Lester was born a hundred and fifty years too late. He uses Percherons (he has ten) to seed his one hundred and thirty-five acres in the spring, to cut his hay through summer and fall and to log in the winter. He admits that machines are quicker, but he
enjoys walking behind his towering black horses as they work, and he likes being able to grow hay as fuel.

Lester loves horses, but that alone didn’t explain why he signed on in a heartbeat to the Belle and Sundance assignment. In our spectacularly beautiful but isolated community (Vancouver is a nine-hour drive to the southwest, Edmonton is six hours to the east), helping one another is instinctive and natural. “If we see smoke,” Lester once told a visitor from away, “we call and we go there. In the city, it might take them a while to come together. Here you don’t think about it. You just go.”

Stuart MacMaster, like Dave, is accustomed to working in minus-thirty-degree cold. A logger all his life, Stu stays lean and fit, not by visiting the gym or jogging but by labouring over big timber with chainsaws and axes.

So as the crew turned to digging, Stuart relaxed. Although the shovelling was hard work, he was used to that. The hardest part for Stu had been the ride up the mountain and the ride down. An avid sledder, Stuart often drove his red and black Arctic Cat up and down that mountain, and he had all the gear—including black snowmobile pants, a kind of high-bib coverall meant to keep a person warm on a mountain—but that day’s cold was so harsh, the coverall wasn’t doing the job. However, once he got moving
and kept moving, kept digging, he was fine.
Head down, ass up and shovel snow
, Stuart thought as he dug.

 

Motivation never posed an issue for Stu. When Dave Jeck described the situation to him, Stuart just signed on. It wasn’t necessarily about horses. It was about helping, about doing what was required because the alternative was intolerable. “It’s no big deal,” he said. “It’s what we do here. Someone had to do something.”

Stu had worked with horses a bit, though he wouldn’t dare call himself a horseman. He has a dog, a heeler-shepherd, and a sensitivity for animals. And besides, he wasn’t working at the time. Case closed.

While the diggers dug, Belle and Sundance ate their hay. At the end of that first day of digging, Stu thought he could see a change in the horses. They looked a tad brighter, a little more interested in things.

Riding down that night, the team endured an hour of blistering cold and cutting wind. But for Stuart MacMaster, it was one more trip through God’s country. As they sped down the mountain, he felt what he often felt up here—a powerful blend of gratitude and awe. Stuart was thinking three things:

“HI GUYS”

O
n Thursday, December 18, it was my turn, finally, to go up the mountain. I didn’t sleep much the previous night. Nervous and excited, I couldn’t wait to see the horses for myself. By morning, Matt had said the evening before, he would know who was going up the mountain and whether he could take me. He’d told me that if he was forced to choose between me and a big, strong man, he would take the man, who most likely would make the better shoveller.

“No offence,” he’d said.

“I can shovel,” I’d countered. “I shovel every day at home, horse
manure and snow.” I was determined to prove myself, given the opportunity.

I phoned Matt at 8.30 a.m. sharp, as he had instructed me. First the line was busy, then there was no answer. I feared he had left without me.

The idea of the horses being up there, stranded in the snow and the cold, was weighing more heavily on me than I had at first thought.

“Don’t get consumed by all this,” my husband, Marc, kept telling me, even though he feels the same compassion for animals that I do. A tall, slim, olive-skinned man, he feels most at home in cowboy boots and a Stetson, with a guitar on his lap and a cowboy song on his lips.

Marc himself was angry about the horses having been abandoned in the mountains. “The owner just walked away. I wouldn’t have done it, and I’m a poor man,” he said later.

I met Marc through a co-worker in Hinton, Alberta, where I wrote for a newspaper. Marc was working in nearby Jasper for Parks Canada’s highways department. We married in 2002 under the birch tree I pass every day en route to our horse pasture. I was born a Capricorn, and people born under that sign are notoriously
stubborn and persistent, head-through-the-wall persistent. Marc is a Gemini, a lone wolf with two personalities. The one is very quiet, the other quite social. He and I had just clicked.

Marc had grown up in Parry Sound, in central Ontario, where he experienced an attraction to animals as strong as my own. He would clean box stalls just so he could ride a horse. Marc had come west as a young man and found work tar-roofing in Edmonton and later with the Canadian National Railway. Once he had seen Banff, he was hooked on living in the mountains. Marc is a self-taught rider, but he is also fearless, and most horses under him take comfort in that.

Like many in the Robson Valley, Marc has to go elsewhere for work, commuting back home on weekends and days off. In winter, he drives a snowplow in Jasper National Park. In summer, he drives a truck hauling gravel, fixes roads and signs and, during forest fires, transports chainsaws, hoses and fuel to fire bases. Marc is gone from the ranch four to five days every week, longer if there are fires. He sleeps in a tin-can camper during his workweek, then comes home to unending rounds of farm chores.

I was grateful that he was there on that stressful Thursday morning as I fretted over whether Matt had or had not left for Mount Renshaw without me. Marc suggested I call Tony Parisi, an outfitter and snowmobile guide who lives in Valemount. I reached Tony
right away and, after explaining the circumstances, asked him if he could take me up the mountain.

But Tony had blown his sled’s engine, and his truck had broken down, too. “I’m sorry, Birgit,” he said. “But if Matt said he was going to take you, he will.” (Just a note on my name: my Canadian friends pronounce it Ber-geet, while in Europe the stress is on the first syllable, as in Beer-git.)

Tony knows Matt very well, so his words offered me some assurance. Still, I could not make sense of Matt’s line being busy one minute and going unanswered the next. I ended my call with Tony by asking him to spread the word that we needed sledders to help us shovel.

Finally, just before 9 a.m., the phone rang. It was Matt.

“So, do you still want to go?”

“You bet,” I said.

“We’re meeting at the Renshaw parking lot at ten.”

I had had no breakfast yet, but I couldn’t eat anyway. My stomach was in knots.

I raced to get ready. Getting dressed for the mountain is no simple matter. The rule is to dress in layers, starting with several pairs of socks, long underwear, then fleece pants, a turtleneck and two fleece sweaters, a neck warmer, a fleece vest, jogging pants and insulated bib coveralls. Then I gathered up my toque, two balaclavas,
several pairs of gloves and mitts, Sorel winter boots, ski goggles and my thick oilskin coat. I also got my snowshoes ready, just in case.