by Birgit Stutz
Matt, whom I had never met in person, arrived next. He and I had been talking for several days on the phone, and it was nice, finally, to put a face to the voice. Dave Jeck followed with his daughter Toni, who nodded in my direction.
Toni was born into a horse family and has worked in northern British Columbia as a wrangler; she and I have a love of horses in common, but neither of us has warmed to the other. People who are passionate about horses do not always see eye to eye. I once read a vet’s theory on why the horse world is marked by so much jealousy and antagonism: he observed that riding a horse is about a human controlling an animal who may weigh six or seven times what the human does, so a room full of horse people is sometimes a room full of controllers. However, I thought to myself, this was a time for Toni and me to put our differences aside.
Leif showed up shortly afterward. I met Leif eight years ago when Marc and I first moved to the valley and bought hay from his parents, whose farm is halfway between Dunster and McBride. I hadn’t seen him since he was a young teenager; he was now a grown man. I would never have recognized him.
I felt encouraged by this assemblage of people. Lester wasn’t in the best of health, but he had come. And so had all these others. I was impatient to start, and feeling good about our prospects.
We loaded Lester’s skimmer with the following: two winter horse blankets (they were lined and buckled at the belly so they’d fit snugly over a horse’s torso), two square bales of hay, several shovels and a roll of road carpet. Someone had suggested we try to walk the horses out on it. Until ruled out, all options remained on the table. More hay and shovels were loaded onto the sleds and tied down with bungee cords. Leif, Spencer and Joey took off on their sleds first, with Matt and me not far behind them.
I had never been on a snowmobile before. I had driven lots of four-wheelers but usually just for short trips to feed horses or check fences. I wasn’t the type of person who used such machines for pleasure. To me, they existed for a practical reason—to make my job easier. So being a passenger on a snowmobile took some getting used to. I slid on the cold and slippery plastic seat and found it difficult to hang on at the beginning. It ultimately occurred to me that the seat wasn’t meant to hold two people. Matt was such an expert driver, though, that I was never worried or frightened. Instead, I enjoyed the scenery. The ride through the narrow valley, along the frozen Blackwater River, was absolutely breathtaking. The deep blue of the mountain sky, the pristine white of the snow and the gleaming silver of the ice on the branches and treetops are some of the brightest and purest colours in creation.
“Have you never been up here before?” Matt asked. He seemed shocked when I said no.
Matt sits a snowmobile the way I sit a horse. We each look comfortable and completely at home on our respective mounts. For Matt, a sled offers adrenalin-fuelled thrills, the chance to cover ground that would take weeks by foot or horseback, and views of peaks and valleys that photographs and video can never really capture. Seeing them with my own eyes, I understood for the first time why sledders came up here in such numbers.
Half an hour into the ride, the valley widened and we drove through several cut blocks—large areas that have been clear-cut by logging companies. The Rocky Mountains lay before us in all their majesty. At one point, Matt stopped and pointed toward one of the mountains. “That’s where the horses are,” he said.
“Way up there?” I asked. He nodded. It still seemed so far away.
About ten minutes further along, Matt guided his snowmobile off the logging road and started veering uphill. Here the horse trail led off to the left. The trail we took, to the right—the same one the horses’ owner had mistakenly taken—was known by locals to be impassable in summer due to thick downfall and bog. The ascent was quite steep at times, and I had to hang on tightly to Matt to avoid sliding off the back of the snowmobile.
When we reached the Mount Renshaw warming hut, we briefly stopped and went inside. Leif sat alone in the cabin, munching on a sandwich. Matt steered me to the back window and pointed. “That’s where we’re headed.”
We didn’t rest there long. I really wanted to see the horses. Beyond the cabin, the trail was no longer groomed and the terrain was wide open. The scene struck me as unforgettably beautiful, but wild and rugged, even menacing, and the depth of snow defied belief. The average winter snowfall on the Renshaw is ten feet. To traverse the mountain with a passenger and avoid getting stuck in that depth of powdery snow, a snowmobiler has to be very skilled. And Matt is that. He instructed me to slide to the front of the snowmobile while he stood behind me, steering his sled carefully. The ride was very bumpy, and more than once my chin glanced off the handlebar. But I didn’t care. I was just so exhilarated to finally be up here.
At the top of a steep hill, just below Mount Renshaw, Matt stopped again and aimed a gloved finger down toward the treeline at the bottom of the bowl. “That’s where they are,” he said.
I didn’t know a snowmobile could go down such a precipitous slope as the one we now descended, with Matt once more at the front and me behind. I wasn’t frightened, thanks to Matt, but the steep drop offered a wild adrenalin rush.
Spencer and Joey were already waiting at the spot where the horses had been found three days earlier. Matt showed me the trench that he and the other volunteers had dug so they could walk the horses down into the shelter of the trees. I could see bits and pieces of hay, remnants of the first meal the two horses had eaten in a long, long time.
I stumbled down the narrow trench surrounded by high walls of snow. How on earth, I wondered, did they get those horses to walk through this steep passageway? My mind raced. I was impatient to see the horses but, on the other hand, worried that I would be really upset by the sight that awaited me. The track was slippery, and I practically ran downhill, almost falling on top of the horses, who looked at me curiously. Both whinnied, that high-pitched hello that horses use with both humans and each other.
“Hi guys,” I said to them. One by one, I stroked the horses’ shoulders, ran my hands down their backs, and offered what comfort I could by touch.
They looked horrendous, with their hips and tailbones protruding, with fur and tails missing. The gelding’s tail was almost completely chewed off; only the dock (the bony part of the tail from which the long hair grows) retained a little hair. The mare’s tail had somewhat more hair, but she was missing huge patches on her sides and haunches, shoulders and forelegs. It looked as though someone had haphazardly and erratically clipped her, leaving her that much more vulnerable to the cold. At first, some of us blamed lice or rain scald, but we later concluded that she had suffered frostbite from reclining in the snow.
Both horses were emaciated, their backs were covered in snow and ice, and the mare was shivering. They looked pathetic, but I was pleasantly surprised—even taken aback—by how alert they were. Their eyes were clear, their ears were up, and they were curious about me. All signs pointed to the same conclusion: they wanted to live. I now understood why the group had decided not to shoot them but, instead, to give them a fighting chance.
Following Dave Jeck’s instructions, I fed each horse a flake of hay; they ate it eagerly. Before going up on the mountain, I had heard about a plan to feed alfalfa cubes to the horses. Monika had told me this, but she had had many conversations about the stranded pair and couldn’t recall who had told her.
When Belle (left) and Sundance were discovered, Belle was missing huge patches of hair, and the horses had gnawed each other’s tails in an attempt to avoid starvation.
“What?” I’d said. “They’re going to kill them!”
I had no experience with rescuing starving horses, but I knew this much: alfalfa is far too rich a food for weak horses. The day before, I had contacted Rick Maitlin, part of the Rescue 100 Foundation based in Alberta, a group that had rescued a hundred starving Arabian horses in the spring of 2008. I had particular questions about salt and electrolytes.
“I agree with you,” Rick
had written in an email. “No cubes! Grass hay is by far the best, but if not available something with limited alfalfa. A salt/mineral block is okay providing they have water to drink. Electrolytes are a good idea as well, but again they should have water for this. Their electrolyte level is probably way off. NO OATS!”
I had worried a little that a tense standoff might have developed on the mountain if anyone had notions of feeding the horses alfalfa cubes, but it turned out no such plans existed; we all agreed on how to feed the horses. The alfalfa cubes rumour had been just that—a rumour. One of many.
It was important that the horses continue receiving the same amount of food they’d been fed thus far. Dave suggested this routine: I feed the horses the instant I got there each morning and just before I left each afternoon so we could spread out the horses’ two feedings as much as possible. This made perfect sense, and it’s what I do with my own horses. Feeding the horses, watering them, ensuring they were fed according to a strict protocol—this became my job, one I felt very comfortable doing.
Birgit Stutz (left), sitting on Stuart MacMaster’s snowmobile, and Leif Gunster bring hay bales to the horses.
Spencer joined me in the snow pen and began working on the mare’s urine-encrusted tail, or at least its remnant. Frozen urine clung to her tail hair in chunks of pale yellow ice. With the little saw on his Swiss Army knife, Spencer began cutting while I held the tail away from the mare’s body and tried to separate the hair to be cut from that to be saved.
“Is my cheek red?” Spencer asked me at one point, holding his cheek with one hand.
His cheek was beet red and obviously causing him pain. We later learned that he had suffered severe frostbite. He wasn’t the only one. Dean Schreiber—a neighbour of Dave Jeck who would spend four days shovelling on the mountain—would also suffer frostbite on his face and hands, and Leif would get touched by it, too. They were “lit up,” as we say—touched by frost.
With only two avalanche shovels, Spencer and I then started digging the trench, as well as we could, a few feet below the horses’ little snow fort. The going was painfully slow, but at least the activity kept us warm.
Soon after, we heard snowmobiles in the distance, and in due time the rest of that day’s digging crew—Dave Jeck, Toni Jeck, Monika and Tim Brown, Leif Gunster and Lester Blouin—came barrelling down the hill between the trees and right up to the horses. The horses didn’t spook or even stir and barely looked up from their hay. Belle and Sundance, it seemed, had already started to connect the sound and sight of snowmobiles with meal time. The two horses were friendlier now than they’d been on that first day when Matt and the others had approached them, more pushy and feeling like themselves, butting the rescuers with their heads.
Sundance’s mane was covered in icicles, earning him the nickname “Reggae.”
At this point, we didn’t know the horses’ names. Monika started calling the gelding Hippie because the ice in his mane made her think of beads. Tim then came up with Reggae, which Monika liked better. The Browns called the mare—what else—Renshaw. So Reggae and Renshaw they became.
We unloaded the sleds and formed small teams to try to put the blankets on the horses. Though the mare continued to shiver, she nevertheless kept moving away from us—probably because she had never had a blanket on before. Sundance quietly munched his hay while we worked around him, suggesting one of three explanations: he knew about blankets, didn’t know about blankets but was too weak to object or was old enough to know better than to object in any case.
I asked Monika to wrap her arms around Belle’s neck so I could lay the winter blanket on the mare, who finally co-operated. The blanket was a bit too big for her, so Lester pulled some baler twine from his pocket and tied it around the front closure to make the blanket fit more snugly. Belle stopped shivering pretty quickly; the hay had begun generating some heat, and the blanket was keeping it in.
By then it was just past noon, so I quickly ate my sandwich and cookies, then grabbed my snow shovel and went back to digging. Meanwhile, some of the crew gathered dry branches and started a fire. Dave had brought a metal bucket, and the men packed it with snow and hung it on a big branch over the fire so we could water the horses. The slow, tedious process reminded me just how much snow must melt to produce one litre of water. Ten to twelve inches of snow in a pail, once melted, might net one inch of water.
Sundance and Belle are warm and cozy with their fresh hay and winter blankets.
We continued to use the “stairway” system that Dave and the others had developed. This method worked really well, for it meant that shorter people, such as Monika and me, didn’t have to throw snow over our heads and off to the side.
While we dug, Dave strapped on his snowshoes and walked a line to signal the path for the long trench—from the horses’ pen to the groomed snowmobile trail below. At first, he figured the distance we had to shovel was about one and a half kilometres, then he recalculated and judged that one kilometre was more like it. Dave was looking for a route alongside the hill, not a direct line but one with a gentler slope. He also planned it so we’d have only one creek to cross, in a small gully just before the trench met the snowmobile trail.
It felt a lot warmer up on the mountain than it had down at the parking lot, and we were thankfully spared any wind. The sun shone with no cloud in sight, and the spellbinding view of the snow-covered mountains in the distance took me out of the serious business at hand and into a little reverie; I was taken back to my childhood skiing vacations in Switzerland. I even doffed my coat. At the end of the day, though, the back of my fleece vest was coated in ice and snow from brushing against the sides of the narrow tunnel as I shovelled, and when the sun started to dip below the Cariboo Mountains across the valley, the cold quickly regained its sharp edge.
Apart from short breaks to catch our breath and straighten our backs, drink water and grab a few bites to eat, we had shovelled for three hours.
Dave had suggested moving the horses down into the newly dug part of the trench every day and creating a new pen each time. Had a storm moved in or the wind picked up, our hard-won trench would have been buried. However, by making new pens every day, the horses would be that much closer to the snowmobile trail and our digging efforts wouldn’t be wasted—no matter what the weather brought. We had all agreed on this plan, but by the end of the day, after giving the matter more thought, we all decided against it. The whole area was heavily treed and steep, meaning that getting to the horses on snowmobiles and bringing in hay would have become even more difficult.
If Belle and Sundance were to get off the mountain then, two things had to occur: the horses would have to stay put in that first pen, and the mountain weather would have to co-operate. The first was easily done; the second would require an enormous helping of good luck.
Before heading back down the mountain, I fed each horse another flake of hay and checked their blankets. The mare had drunk some water, but not the gelding, who seemed to prefer snow. At some point, one horse had kicked over the bucket with the remaining water. Because they hadn’t ingested enough water, I decided against giving them electrolytes. The primary role of electrolytes is to maintain water and ionic balance in the body. But I could only safely administer electrolyte supplements—which contain minerals such as sodium, chloride and potassium—if the horses were drinking at least some water. Feeding electrolytes to a severely dehydrated horse risks transferring precious water from the circulation to the gastrointestinal tract, compounding the dehydration.
Surveying our progress, Dave said that if worse came to worst and we couldn’t get the horses out, he and other sledders—Matt, Leif, Logan and Stu—would just keep coming up here regularly with hay, even if that meant doing so until spring, when we could walk them out. Although a possibility, I was not keen on that idea. Sledders might not be able to reach the horses at all if the weather turned—precisely when Belle and Sundance would need food the most to stay warm. In winter, the mountain night
s are long and cold. This is why I feed my horses an extra meal at 11 p.m.—so they’ll have food for heat when the temperatures are at their most bitter. With Belle and Sundance, we had to limit their intake of hay or risk colic. There was no getting around it: once the food we gave them at 4 p.m. was gone, the gelding and the mare would have to wait until 11 a.m. the next day to get more of that life-sustaining hay. I found it very difficult to leave the horses. I just wanted them off the mountain so they could be looked after properly.
And now it was time to embark on the dreaded long trip back down. The balaclavas I’d worn on the ride in were now frozen and stiff from the moisture in my breath turning to ice, and the gloves I’d worn while shovelling had likewise stiffened. I had at least managed to keep my other pair of gloves and a pair of mitts dry by stuffing them into my backpack. Even my goggles were frozen.
Monika Brown (left) and Birgit Stutz are excited to be doing their part to rescue Belle and Sundance.
Dave asked Monika, Tim and me if we wanted to snowshoe out to the snowmobile trail. “It’s easier than doubling everybody back up to the cabin,” he suggested. We agreed, albeit reluctantly. Like most everyone else, I hadn’t brought my snowshoes up the mountain, so we borrowed some from Dave and Spencer.
The three of us then followed Dave’s snowshoe tracks from the horses toward the snowmobile trail, with Tim in front, Monika (who had never snowshoed before) in the middle, and me following. We all wiped out several times in the deep snow. The trail angled down, and every so often we would slide off Dave’s tracks and catch a snowshoe before taking a tumble. The adrenalin of the day provided my fuel as I snowshoed, so I felt no fatigue. The digging had taxed one set of muscles, the snowshoeing another. Still, it was hard going.
