The Rescue of Belle and Sundance (11 page)

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.

 

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.

 

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 nights 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.

 

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.

Adding to our difficulties were the tree wells. The spreading limbs of coniferous trees prevent falling snow from reaching the base of the tree, creating deep and dangerous depressions called tree wells. Many skiers and snowboarders have died falling into them. The tree wells, of course, were lower than the tracks we followed, and it was easy to slide down into them. Parts of the “trail” coursed downhill, so we ended up sliding on our bottoms more than walking. Reaching the groomed snowmobile trail seemed to take forever but in actuality was more like twenty-five minutes.

“The snowshoeing was so exhausting,” Monika said when we finally reached the snowmobile trail. “The idea of shovelling that distance seems impossible.” And we would have to shovel that distance to a depth of six feet and a width of three. Like Monika, I too felt frustrated and disillusioned, and harboured grave doubts that we would ever get this job done.

 

None of the other volunteers had arrived at the trail by the time we had. They were all in the cabin warming up while we waited for them in the cold. Since Monika and I hadn’t wanted to wear our heavy coats on the hike out, we’d left them with the sledders, but now it was getting darker and colder by the minute. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity but was probably only a few minutes, we heard the drone of multiple engines and saw headlights coming around the bend and down the steep hill.

Monika, Tim and I bundled up and loaded our backpacks onto the sleds. Once we were all set, the convoy of seven snowmobiles headed down the mountain. I couldn’t see a thing, and not just because it was getting dark. With my goggles frozen, I had to put full trust in Matt.

The temperature had dropped considerably since we’d left the horses. “Aren’t you cold?” Matt asked me, warming his bare hands and gloves over the heat of the engine.