The Rescue of Belle and Sundance

by Birgit Stutz

  At the party, we all felt the same. Disconsolate, strangely bereft. Whatever the name for this loss, it had taken place too close to home.

  Chapter 5

  HANDGUN—OR HAY?

  On the following Monday, December 15, Logan Jeck and Leif Gunster set out for Mount Renshaw on their errand of mercy to relieve an exhausted search-and-rescue crew and tow down two sleds stuck in deep snow. That was the day they made their grim discovery: two horses clinging to life in a gully above the treeline.

  And now the ball set in motion by Ray Long, Reg Marek, Monika Brown and Glenn Daykin really started to roll. That evening, Ray called Monika to share the news that the abandoned horses were alive, though barely. Monika then called me.

  I was in the middle of finally writing some Christmas cards. I had been putting off all the usual preparations because I just couldn’t conjure up my Yuletide spirit. I usually have my house decorated the first weekend in December and, shortly after, start baking a variety of Swiss Christmas cookies, from recipes passed down from my grandmother. But I still hadn’t done any baking or decorating. Normally driven and energetic, I was feeling overworked, tired and generally sorry for myself.

  “This is not going to make you feel better, what I am going to tell you,” Monika said. She relayed what she knew: the two starving horses were alive and trapped in six feet of snow on Mount Renshaw, a point some forty-five kilometres from McBride and accessible only by snowmobile. Their plight seemed hopeless. News of the two horses on the mountain had triggered in several individuals an urgently felt impulse to rescue them, but still vague was who would do the rescuing, and how, and who would lead the effort—not to mention who would decide their fate: let the horses live and try to get them out or end their misery. A clock had begun to tick.

  As Monika and I talked, we started to formulate some sort of plan of action. Getting up there was the first step and the major challenge. Neither of us is a sledder.

  I called Logan Jeck on his cellphone to try to get information, any information, on these horses. No answer. I called two friends with snowmobiles and, again, failed to connect. The adrenalin flowing, my frustration growing, I called another friend, who suggested I call Sara Olofsson and her partner, Matt Elliott. Luckily, I immediately got Sara—someone I knew, but not well—and explained the dreadful situation.

  Funny, outrageous and sharp, Sara is a lifelong horsewoman. Her first word, at the age of two, was “horse.” By four, she was on her first horse. By nine, she had saved up $900 to buy her first saddle horse. I knew I could count on her. I told Sara that I was looking for someone to sled up there and see if these horses needed to be put down or if they could be helped.

  Before I could finish my plea, Sara looked at Matt, as she put it, “the way only a woman can,” and he agreed to go up the following day. Matt—a quiet man then thirty-one years old—also had a soft spot for animals, so Sara’s sell was an easy one even though the ride was apparently difficult, especially with a passenger on board.

  Sara promised me that Matt would get me there safely. “Just hang on as tight as you can, and you’ll be fine,” Sara told me.

  Then I thought better of the plan. None of us knew precisely where the horses were or what the terrain was like. I didn’t know Matt nor how good a snowmobiler he was; I knew only that his having a passenger on board would make tricky sledding trickier. As much as I wanted to go, I worried that I would slow Matt down, so I reluctantly declined. I told him what to look for when deciding whether to keep the horses alive or not, and I underlined the risk of colic from overfeeding. “One flake of hay for each horse,” I instructed him. “No more. The horses should be alert, with their heads up. If not . . .”

  Sara and Matt spent the next few hours getting everything organized, and Sara—reinforcing what I had said—carefully instructed Matt on what to look for when making his difficult choice. “Look at the eyes,” Sara told Matt. “You’ll know. If the horses have fight, if they’re standing on their own, if they want to leave when you do—those are all good signs. Pinch the skin: in two or three seconds, it should go flat again. Longer means dehydration. And, finally, check their manure. Diarrhea is not good.”

  Matt seemed fired up by the mission. “I don’t care if no one else is going,” he said. “I’m going.”

  Come what may, something was being done for those horses, and I took a little consolation in that.

  What I hadn’t known when I called Sara that day is that the name Matt Elliott gave the rescue attempt instant legitimacy. Matt is a logger and heavy equipment operator who works both in the Robson Valley and in Alberta. He studied specialty mechanics in college and can operate heavy equipment of all kinds—from complicated machines such as dangle-head processors to skidders, cats and wheel loaders.

  More important, he is—here where the snowmobile is a kingpin in the local economy—a champion sledder. He started sledding when he was fifteen years old. A dirt-bike accident had broken both legs above the ankle and put him in a wheelchair for six months. Matt remembers how frightened he was that he would never escape that chair. “I would have sold my soul to walk,” he says. It drove the teenager crazy that he couldn’t ski that winter, but when a friend took him out on a snowmobile, young Matt was immediately hooked. And then came the competitions.

  “I did okay a few times” is how he puts it. In fact, he has twice, in 2002 and 2003, won the hill-climbing championship at Jackson Hole, Wyoming—the most famous snowmobile competition in the world. These invitation-only contests draw up to three hundred sledders vying for trophies. Winners end up with big-name sponsors and are celebrated on spectacular videos that feature daring climbs, sharp turns and spraying snow from very muscular machines.

  Four-year-old boys on the streets of McBride see Matt as a hero and fashion mogul. They love his Arctic Cat jacket and tricked-out lifted diesel truck. The kids sheepishly say hi to him on the sidewalk. For these children, Matt has star quality.

  A natural competitor, Matt hates losing. And when the naysayers said that getting two horses off Mount Renshaw in mid-winter couldn’t be done, people like Matt saw it as a challenge to be overcome in his own backyard.

  While Matt prepared for the next day, Monika called me to relay what she had learned from Leif—that the horses’ condition was, as he put it, “bad enough to make a person cry. Those two horses looked like really skinny Holstein cows, with their hipbones sticking out and all the ribs showing.”

  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 alpi
ne. 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.

  The first short trench that rescuers dug to get the horses down from the alpine to their sheltered snow pad.

  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.

  Belle (left) and Sundance, as they were found, pictured here with rescuer Spencer Froese.

  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.

  My sleep that night was shallow and restless. I dreamt of the two horses standing in a narrow, deep hole, surrounded by high walls of snow—a prison that resembled a small yet deep swimming pool, made of snow and ice. In my dream, I stood alone atop one of the walls, looking down on the two pathetic-looking creatures and feeling sad, disillusioned and confounded by their predicament. While I was puzzling over how to get them out, I threw hay down to the starving animals. Then in the distance, far away, I heard the drone of snowmobiles. Eventually, in my dream, Matt drove to the lip of the would-be grave. “We’ll get them out of there,” he said confidently. Then I woke up.

  Chapter 6

  THE DIGGING STARTS

  At 10 a.m. on Wednesday, December 17, eight volunteers met in the Renshaw parking lot. They drained the last bit of coffee from their Thermoses before unloading their sleds from their truck beds and heading up the mountain. Temperatures had dipped to minus twenty-four Celsius the night before, and the bright sun, though welcoming, was doing little to warm things up.