The Rescue of Belle and Sundance (12 page)

“I’m okay,” I said. “Just my feet.”

“I guess I’m the wimp today,” he joked. I was grateful for the big mitts Marc had given me that morning.

By 5 p.m., when we finally arrived, pitch dark had descended and an ice-cold wind once more cut across the parking lot. Spencer’s
truck wouldn’t start, and we spent a long time getting it going, even with booster cables.

My big old black and red truck, a 1990 Ford F-350 crew cab that I use to haul my horse trailer, whined and howled and complained but eventually came to life. I called Marc from my cellphone to let him know that we were down from the mountain, but the phone’s battery was almost dead from the cold, and I worried that the cell would quit any moment. Marc had already done the chores—one less worry—and was just waiting for my call before heading to his job in Jasper, one hundred and fifty kilometres to the east. I so looked forward to relaxing and warming up at home.

I did get warm, but there was no relaxing. Once home, I started answering emails. A handful of people in the valley who had heard about the rescue attempt asked me for updates on the digging and how they could help. I reported on the horses’ condition and told my correspondents that ten of us had dug that day. “We need help,” I wrote them. “It’s a huge task.”

Many local people, meanwhile, had alerted the SPCA, which was trying to arrange for a veterinarian from Prince George to assess the two horses the following morning. If the vet decided that
the horses should be euthanized, then this whole operation would shut down. Some of us, me included, still hoped that airlifting the horses out was an option. But the cost (more than $5,000) would be prohibitive, and the SPCA worried about wind chill and the stress on horses whose health was already compromised by exposure and prolonged malnourishment.

While we had been up on the mountain digging a trench and looking after the horses, Alison Schreiber (Dean’s wife) and Sara Olofsson—unbeknownst to each other—had spent the day on the phone with the local helicopter company and posting updates on the sledders’ forum.

Amazing. A few hundred people in the Robson Valley were now following the story of the horses on Mount Renshaw.

At the end of my first day of digging, I had a real sense of what we would-be rescuers faced. The first hurdle was simply getting up the mountain. Each trip required, first, driving one’s car or truck to McBride from the various points in the valley where the rescuers lived, then a twenty-kilometre drive from the village up winding Mountainview Road to the Renshaw parking lot, then a thirty-kilometre trip on a snowmobile along the logging road and
up the mountain in frigid temperatures made worse by wind chill, and then a traverse across the mountain high up in the alpine and a trek down two steep hills before finally reaching the horses.

The second obstacle was the forbidding cold. Sledders couldn’t wear full-face helmets; they would fog up. Instead, they wore motocross helmets (distinguished by their exaggerated chin protectors) with the glass shield removed. The modification that Matt, Stu, Dave and the other drivers came up with was good old duct tape, put over the chin vents to keep out the cold, which seemed especially intense along the river between kilometres five and fifteen. In winter, the river acts as a sink for the cold—in the same way that frost in late fall or fog in summer will settle into low pockets. As Matt had warned on my first day, “The cold along the river will just bite you.”

So there were challenges, forbidding challenges, but at least we had a plan. The team of rescuers would haul up hay every day and blankets for the horses as needed. We would melt snow in pails over campfires to water the horses. And we would do what Canadians do in winter: dig through snow with shovels and toss it high over our heads. The trench as planned would drop at about forty-five degrees and follow a trajectory from the northwest to the southeast, the same compass line that the Robson Valley, the Fraser River, the highway and the railway all followed. We also had
a shovelling strategy: all currently available volunteers would continue digging near the top of the mountain. Eventually, another crew would begin digging by the snowmobile trail. If all went well, the trench diggers would meet somewhere in the middle.

On Friday, December 19, Dave, Matt and Stu accompanied two SPCA constables from Kamloops, along with a veterinarian from Prince George, up to Mount Renshaw to assess the horses.

The involvement of the SPCA did not sit well with Dave Jeck. Frustrated that the digging ground to a halt while the vet and the SPCA constables were transported to the horses and back and also feeling that his horsemanship, his judgment and his knowledge—based on a lifetime around horses—wasn’t being trusted, Dave believed wholeheartedly that the team of community volunteers had everything well in hand and had developed a viable plan to get these horses off the mountain. What the SPCA was doing was meddling, he thought, and a waste of precious time.

Veterinarians use a one-to-nine score to grade a horse’s body condition. A score of nine indicates an extremely fat or obese horse; five is considered ideal; and a horse with a score of one is near death. Dr. Jodyne Green, the vet brought up to examine Belle and
Sundance, gave the older gelding a score of two, and the younger mare a rating of two to three. A tall, athletic young woman, the vet knew at a glance that these horses had a chance. There would be no “pulling the pin on the whole deal,” as Matt had feared might happen.

All the vet’s checks simply corroborated her first impression: the horses were thin but not in danger. We were to stay the course, keep doing what we were doing. Dr. Green advised against airlifting them out—for all the obvious reasons: wind chill, the added stress, the horses’ poor condition.

But I knew we weren’t out of the woods yet. Predators roaming the mountain might get the horses first. Wind or wind-driven snow could fill in the trench, blocking the path out. Avalanche presented another risk, especially if temperatures began to rise. That winter, twenty-six sledders died in British Columbia and Alberta, all of them buried in cascading snow. A lot could still go wrong on Mount Renshaw.

While the vet was examining the horses up on the mountain, I sat at my computer trying to write stories for the
Valley Sentinel
, but I couldn’t focus. I was wrestling with various unhappy scenarios
when Marc called me from work and suggested alerting some of the radio stations in Edmonton and Jasper. “See if they’ll put something on the air asking sledders going to McBride for the weekend to help shovel,” he said.

I called CISN Country in Edmonton, which promised to air my plea, and did. I also tried to reach a radio station in Jasper but only left a message. No one returned my call.

Dave Jeck telephoned me that evening, and he wasn’t pleased. “This whole thing has been blown way out of proportion,” he said. He thought the operation was getting too big, with too many volunteers becoming involved. “The story of the rescue mission is all over the Internet,” he complained. “Toni came across it on
SnowandMud.com
. It would have been better if just the core group of our family and some friends had kept going up there.”

Dave had been giving some thought to adopting the horses himself—should we succeed—but as the attempted rescue of Belle and Sundance moved from a small-scale, family-and-friends operation into something larger, he changed his mind. He worried that adoption would involve the SPCA and a great deal of red tape and public scrutiny, none of which he wanted.

The Robson Valley is, in large part, populated by people who share Dave’s outlook. The area served as a refuge for American draft dodgers and hippies when the Vietnam War raged, and before that,
the Mennonites had come, looking to be left alone to their religion and culture. A great many people lived in the valley because they didn’t like governments and bureaucracies nosing around, and here in this distant outpost, they endured less of it—though maybe not little enough to suit Dave Jeck.

I for one didn’t agree with his view on keeping the rescue operation small. The more people toiling away, the quicker the path would be forged and the horses secured in a new home. “I don’t think we will be able to do it by ourselves,” I countered. “It’s too long a trench in too much snow. And one big storm could fill it all in.” I refrained, however, from telling Dave I’d contacted several radio stations with my plea for more volunteers.

In the end, we met halfway, with Dave conceding that perhaps we did need more bodies digging on the mountain. We ended on a good note, agreeing to meet in the Renshaw parking lot in the morning for another day of digging.

Meanwhile, not everyone in the community was enthusiastic about what we were doing on Mount Renshaw. That evening, I read what one member of the sledders’ forum had written about the lost horses: