The Rescue of Belle and Sundance

by Birgit Stutz

  Marc remembers playing hockey on outdoor rinks near his family’s home in Parry Sound, Ontario. The pain and tingling were only felt when you came inside and the warm air hit the frozen skin.

  When he got to the parking lot, Marc, instead of calling Ray, drove straight to Ray’s farm. Lu came to the door. Marc told her the horses were on their way.

  “Great!” she answered.

  When Marc explained how chilled he was, Lu, a soft-spoken, kind and generous farm wife, directed him to the basement, where a big oil furnace sits next to a wood stove. After a few minutes, she went down to check on him. Her perennial smile got a little wider when she saw Marc with his hands out and pressed close to the oil furnace.

  “That’s the one that’s hot,” she said warmly, pointing at the wood stove.

  As she drove home in the dark, Monika found herself going over what the rescue had meant to her. She remembered the frantic moments in the early days, searching on the Internet for expertise on the feeding of starving horses, and how impossible the task of digging had seemed at first. Monika relived her three days of shovelling, recalling the frustration of her first day and the fun of the second, how she and her fellow diggers had come to laugh at how hard the work was and tossed snow at each other.

  Dave and Birgit (with Belle) are all smiles after the successful journey down the trench.

  After that day, her attitude had changed completely. The impossible looked possible after all. Digging with strangers, friends, acquaintances, she felt that they all shared a common purpose.

  For many in the Robson Valley, getting those horses off the mountain would be the best Christmas present ever.

  Chapter 10

  HOLD YOUR HORSES

  The horses were out of the woods, but not yet off the mountain. The thirty-kilometre logging road still lay ahead.

  Matt, Dave, Lester and Stu—all on snowmobiles—followed Gord, me, Belle and Sundance. The four sledders stayed well behind us so they could warn snowmobilers approaching from behind them of the horses ahead. Luckily, only a few remained on the mountain, and none came by after dark.

  We talked about creating a makeshift pen somewhere along the logging road and leaving the horses overnight, then coming back the next day to finish the journey. However, we worried that predators would make an easy meal of them. Wolves, cougars and coyotes avoid the alpine, preferring the lower ranges—a fact that had so far protected Belle and Sundance. This far down the mountain—and on a groomed trail at that—the threat of carnivores became much more real.

  On the other hand, the horses faced a marathon walk. They had lost a lot of muscle mass during their ordeal on the mountain, both from standing still all that time and from the wasting. So much muscle had been metabolized to keep them alive. Did they possess the strength and energy required to walk the trail’s full length in one go? The lost muscle left them vulnerable to bone fractures—a catastrophic thought. When we started our trek down the mountain, I tried not to think about the long march ahead of us. I just took one step, then another, and another.

  The gelding was a trooper. Early on the march, he began to shiver, so we put a blanket on him. After that, he walked steadily forward. He and I were both beat, both on autopilot.

  The young mare, on the other hand, was a cocky little thing. Despite her ordeal, she still had sass and attitude. Instead of walking beside me as the gelding was doing with his handler, she would drift behind me, pin her ears back in annoyance and butt my backpack with her head. Frustrated and just as annoyed as she was, I wondered what she hoped to accomplish. Maybe she was trying to get at something in my backpack. I took it off and put it on one of the sleds. Her behaviour improved somewhat.

  The beginning of their journey down the logging road, with Birgit leading Belle and Gordon leading Sundance.

  At first walking quite fast, sometimes even ahead of the gelding, Belle soon slowed down and, after a while, wanted to quit altogether. She had used up precious energy fooling around and being bold, as young horses tend to do. Several times along the way, the person leading the gelding had to get behind the mare and urge her on. Trying to pull a reluctant horse is foolish and pointless. As skinny as she was, Belle still amounted to seven hundred pounds of stubbornness. It was far easier to use the gelding’s energy to press her from behind, like a tailgating motorist on the freeway urging on the slowpoke ahead. I wondered, too, if the gelding recognized the logging road—he would have come this way in the fall—and knew he was headed down the mountain.

  About an hour after we started our journey, darkness began to descend. The sky was clear and full of stars, with no moon visible. Only four days to new moon. By five o’clock it was pitch dark and the temperature had dropped considerably. Only the headlamps of the snowmobiles illuminated the road. Dave suggested driving one of the sleds closely behind the horses at all times so the horse handlers had some light. At first, the horses fretted, but they soon got used to the noise, lights and proximity of the machines.

  We took turns leading the horses and riding the four snowmobiles. I much preferred walking, the warmer choice. As well, I had never driven a snowmobile before, so I was reluctant. Matt, however, was encouraging.

  “It’s easy,” he said. “I’ll show you.”

  After some brief instruction, he left me alone with his machine while he took the mare from me. Once I got going, I was fine, but I never lost my apprehension. I worried that I’d get the sled stuck in the snow at the side of the logging road. But the cold was what bothered me most. I had loaned my big mitts to Matt while I was leading the mare—for that, my hands were kept warm enough by the two pairs of gloves I wore. When I’d handed Matt the mare’s lead rope, I’d forgotten to ask him for my mitts back. Within minutes of driving the snowmobile, my hands turned ice cold. I could hardly steer and had to stop and try to warm them up by slapping them against my sides to get the blood flowing. Matt returned my mitts, but even with them, my hands weren’t warming up much.

  “Here, try one of these,” said Stu, handing me one of those little hot packs that heat up when shaken. The heat felt wonderful, but it still took a long time for my hands to feel warm.

  We stopped several times along the way to rest the horses and feed them hay. They also ate some snow. However, we had brought little food for ourselves. In my backpack, I had a half-frozen sandwich, which I ate, and a bag of chocolate-covered goodies, which I shared with the guys. The water I’d packed, though, was frozen solid.

  About four hours into the journey, Stu and Matt rode ahead of us to the parking lot. Stu went to get some hot chocolate for us all, and Matt was going to call Ray Long and give him our estimated time of arrival so Ray could meet us at the parking lot with the stock trailer.

  By 8:30 p.m., I was famished. Stu returned with a Thermos of hot chocolate generously spiked with Amaretto. It was so good, but I was hungry, too, and I fervently wished I had grabbed one more sandwich that morning.

  We were still drinking our hot libations and the horses were munching on hay when we glimpsed the lights of a snowmobile from around the corner. It was Matt.

  “I am only going to tell you guys this once, so everybody listen up,” he said. His words sounded ominous, but he had certainly grabbed our attention. We moved closer to ensure we heard what he had to say. He told us that while we’d been walking, a power outage had thrown the entire Robson Valley into darkness.

  “A truck tore down the power line by the Husky,” Matt explained, referring to a gas station on Highway 16.

  I was relieved. No big deal. Power outages are fairly common in the valley, and this one didn’t affect us at all; we stood in the pitch dark anyway. But everybody following the story of the horse rescue would have been disappointed to miss the airing of the Global TV footage of the digging earlier that day. As for us on the mountain, we had our priorities: get the horses safely down, get ourselves into bed and let sweet sleep come.

  About half an hour later—Dave and I were leading the horses then—w
e saw lights coming toward us again. This time they belonged to a pickup truck.

  Wes Phillips, who lives near the Blackwater Road, had brought us hot coffee and soup.

  “We’re good for now, thanks,” I said. I was very hungry, but I needed solids—not more liquid. “But we’d all love a warm drink once we get to the parking lot!” Wes agreed to meet us there in about an hour or so and started backing his truck down the single-lane logging road. About thirty minutes later, I again saw lights, but their angle didn’t seem right.

  Wes had been crossing a water bar when the ice underneath gave way and the truck sank in. Water bars are diagonal channels cut across roads on slopes like this to divert water and prevent erosion. My first reaction was relief that we had decided against trying to pull a horse trailer up the logging road. We would never have made it.

  The truck blocked most of the road. Dave and I barely managed to get around it with the two horses. Gord, Stu, Matt and Lester stayed behind and tried to help Wes extricate the truck, unfortunately to no avail. Wes ultimately left it and joined our crew. He decided he would take a shift walking, so he took the mare’s lead rope from me while I rode with Matt. By then I’d realized just how tired, cold and hungry I really was. We were still five kilometres from the parking lot.

  The horses were doing fine, or so it seemed. The lights of the sleds behind were showing the way when I suddenly noticed that Sundance was limping ever so slightly. We stopped the march and had a look. The cut, on one hind leg, was very minor. “A long way from the heart,” as cowboys say. Twice on the logging road he had broken through; he might’ve cut himself on a chunk of ice. Or he may have clipped himself while in the trench. In any case, the cut was of no consequence, and Sundance soldiered on.

  Belle, as before, needed a push now and then. I would sometimes have to flick a rope at her hind end to keep her going. She would stall, I would send out the rope, and she would pick up her pace again. I was miffed, but so was she. Did she pin her ears to show how put out she was? Perhaps. It was too dark to tell. More likely, she swished her tail, a lesser show of objection. And so it went, kilometre after kilometre, down, ever down, the dark mountain.

  Along the rest of the way, Matt and I talked to pass the time and help us forget about the cold. He told me about a trip he had taken to Europe a few years before and the different places he had visited. I leaned back on the snowmobile and stared up to the clear sky with its innumerable stars, cold distant suns that offered such scant light that I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face.

  About an hour later, when we were close to the end of the logging road, I asked Matt to stop, and I got off the snowmobile to walk the last few metres with Wes, Dave and the horses. I needed to warm up. The others raced ahead on their sleds.

  Lester visits with Belle.

  At 10 p.m., the tired but happy group of volunteers reached the end of their seven-hour-long journey. Ray, his daughter Janice and her son Alex were waiting for us on Mountainview Road with the stock trailer. The horses loaded without incident, and at last, Belle and Sundance were on their way to a place that would resemble home: a stall in a barn, bedding to lie on, food and water. My shoulders relaxed, and I breathed a sigh of relief. It was over. There were no tears at that moment, no sense of celebration—only a barely felt happiness that we had rescued the horses without mishap.

  The rescue had unfolded in three stages—digging the trench, walking the horses through that trench and walking them down the logging road. We were all happy at the end of each stage, and that happiness would have stretched into joy—had we not felt so exhausted and so wary of what lay around the next corner.

  Dozens and dozens of photographs taken during those eight days chronicle the rescue of Belle and Sundance. One image captures the apple cheeks of young Justin Brown as he helped dig what looked like the world’s longest, deepest and thinnest driveway. Another records the moment on December 18 when Belle and Sundance got their winter blankets (as bright and blue as the sky) and then the moment a few days later when the horses got second blankets overtop (these in muted shades of green). One photo shows a bedraggled Belle nuzzling the arm of an amused Lester Blouin. Another documents Sundance and Gord, Belle and me walking down the groomed logging road, the snow at our level looking slate blue in the fading light, the alpine and the mountain behind and above us still sunlit and so, so majestic. What strikes me most is how, as the trench neared completion and the rescue was looking more and more like a success, the weary diggers managed to smile for the camera. The horses, especially Belle with all her missing fur, look dreadful in some shots, yet it was clear that the two pack horses had literally dodged a bullet.

  Rescued horses, like rescued dogs, somehow know that they have been spared a horrible fate. Belle in her way, and Sundance in his, would be grateful for the rest of their lives.

  “When you go up in the mountains on pack trips,” Dave had told me as we walked that final leg, “every day, you hope your day goes well and you don’t run into trouble.” He had harboured concerns that if we had dug the trench too deep, and the ground below wasn’t frozen, we would have encountered mud. He had also worried about the creek crossing. But his worries were over: everything had gone beautifully. When Dave saw how well the horses moved through the trench, he knew they could handle the long trek down the logging road. It was the stamina of the human handlers he questioned—yet they, too, had come through. But there was nothing left in our tanks. Nothing.

  I didn’t say a lot after we loaded the horses onto Ray’s trailer. “Thanks for picking us up” was all I could muster as I sat slumped in Ray’s truck, the heater blasting.

  Sara Olofsson, meanwhile, had donned several sweaters and was sitting on her couch in the cold and the dark. Her children (Logan, ten, and Emily, eight) were bunking with friends that night. Because there was no reliable cellphone service on Mount Renshaw, Sara had no way of getting in touch with Matt. He was always home from digging by 6:30 p.m. It was already 10:30 p.m. and he still wasn’t home, so she knew that either something had gone horribly wrong or everything was going just right.

  Matt had actually phoned and texted her four hours earlier: “The horses are being walked out.” When she finally got the message, delayed as cellphone service in the mountains often was, Sara started to cry. They’re out! she thought. They did it! And Sara had what she conceded was a selfish thought: Matt wouldn’t have to dig tomorrow. For her, this was a wonderful Christmas gift—the knowledge that the horses would soon be warm, snoozing in a stall or dining on hay. They could have been dead and frozen, their bodies stiff, for lack of someone doing the right thing. But they weren’t, thought Sara, because a great many people did do the right thing.

  Exhausted, I had thought I would be heading straight to my bed once home. But I was too wired to sleep. Several media outlets had called and left messages. There were also emails from the Canadian Press wire service, the Edmonton Journal and others, all wanting updates on the horses. CBC Newsworld, out of Toronto, wanted to do a five-minute, live television interview the following morning. From all across Canada, from Tulsa, Oklahoma, to Orlando, Florida, from Austria to Australia, reporters would all ask the same questions: How did you manage that feat? How are Belle and Sundance doing? Why did you take on this superhuman effort? How does it feel to have succeeded?

  Once the media had gotten wind of the dramatic events on Mount Renshaw, I became a point person for the story. At Christmas, the world wanted an uplifting story, and it seemed that the “heroic” rescue of Belle and Sundance—right in our own backyard—was the one that people were warming to in December of 2008.

  I never expected this attention, and I found it overwhelming. When we handed Belle and Sundance over to Ray Long, I thought my job was done. I was looking forward to a day off, going into town and finally doing some Christmas shopping with Marc. Instead, I spent the day on the phone, finally stopping at 4 p.m.

  Chapter 11

  SOFT LANDINGS FOR BELLE AND SUNDANCEr />
  While the rescuers marked their Christmas, Belle and Sundance recuperated in the barn at Ray and Lu’s farm on Jeck Road. Throughout the digging process, Ray had provided bales of hay to the rescuers (without charging a penny), so the two horses had grown well used to the fare.

  “They’re skin and bone,” Ray told Marc when he swung by for a visit just a few days into their stay. Marc had promised himself that every time he passed Ray’s place he’d stop in and say hello to the horses. Ray took Marc into the barn, and the men leaned in and eyed the two horses in the large stall they shared.

  “They’re tight,” Ray said. “If you take one away, they both complain.”

  Marc thought the horses looked content. He rubbed Sundance’s head, then went on his way. A few days later, Monika also went to visit them and reported watching Sundance playfully bite Belle. It lifted her heart just to see them.

  Having grown fond of Belle and Sundance, we volunteers hoped and expected that the two horses would remain together and that new owners in the valley would take them in. If the rescue itself was a gift, that outcome would have been the bright bow on the wrapping. But according to the SPCA, there’d been only a few local inquiries about adopting the rescued horses. Meanwhile, Frank Mackay was making it known in the press and by calls to Reg, the brand inspector, that he wanted his horses back.

  The SPCA, it seemed, wanted the situation resolved quickly, for just one day into the horses’ stay, the SPCA declared that Belle and Sundance would be transferred to a foster home in Prince George.

  But five days later, Toni Jeck and a friend—both hired by the SPCA to transport the horses—arrived at Ray’s farm and, with a vet’s blessing, loaded Belle and Sundance. Though temperatures had risen slightly, Ray was not pleased. What was the rush, he wanted to know. Sure, the two horses wore blankets, but they were still weak from their ordeal and now would face almost three hours in that cold trailer. Ray insisted that Toni tie a tarp over the trailer’s open places to reduce wind chill and stop any snow from swirling in.