The Rescue of Belle and Sundance (13 page)

Barry Walline countered with this:

Sara posted a reply as well, but hers had bite:

When Matt heard about the “lead injection” comment, he had one thought: You wouldn’t suggest that if you had seen the horses’ eyes.

A CHRISTMAS GIFT TO REMEMBER

M
y alarm roused me at dawn on Saturday, December 20. When I flicked on my bedside light, I glimpsed the first hint of just how cold it was outside—a thick coating of frost lined the inside of my bedroom window. At 6 a.m., the outdoor thermometer registered forty degrees below Celsius.

After bundling up, I headed outside to do my morning chores. I have nineteen animals on my farm (not counting the chickens), and all must be fed and watered at dawn and dusk.

Before going to the barn, I plugged in my truck. To do this, I had to unplug the power cord leading to the two heated water
buckets for the horses penned by the barn. Knowing that their water would freeze in this nasty cold, I’d made the decision the night before to keep the buckets plugged in, rather than my truck. My hope was that there would be enough time that morning to warm the truck’s big engine block.

My nine horses were whinnying as I prepared their feed. “You guys have it a lot better than those poor horses on the mountain, and yet you’re still complaining and being impatient!” I scolded them.

When I went to start my truck, nothing happened. Keeping the horses’ water buckets plugged in had been the right decision, but my old truck’s battery had paid the price. I called my neighbour, Dr. Tom Vogel, our local vet, who happened to be heading the same way I was. “Can you give me a lift?” I asked him, and of course he agreed.

When Tom and I got to the Jeck farm shortly after 9 a.m., Dave informed me that he wasn’t going up Mount Renshaw after all. He had an injured mare and wanted to stay home and help Tom tend to her.

“Stu is going, though,” said Dave. “He can take you.”

Dave then showed me the feed schedule the vet had given him the day before and asked me to ensure the horses were fed accordingly. The schedule offered mainly common sense advice—increase feed gradually, space out feedings, administer small and frequent meals if possible—and warnings that days three to seven were the most critical. That is when a starving horse being nursed back to health faces the greatest risk of dying; the right balance has to be struck between offering too little food and too much. Beyond that period, the horses could be fed grain on days eight to ten, and within ten days to two weeks, Belle and Sundance could be put on an all-you-can-eat diet.

I fashioned two cardboard signs that we intended to place next to the groomed snowmobile trail, where the trench would emerge. The signs read:

Soon after, Stu arrived at Dave’s and we took off. Stu had filled the box of his pickup truck with square bales of hay, some of which we would take up the mountain; the rest we’d leave in the parking lot. The attendant selling sled trail passes had agreed to ask sledders to transport hay up to the Renshaw cabin. Once it was there, we could easily get the bales to the horses.

Dave wanted to store as many bales as possible up by the horses in case a storm cut off snowmobile access to Belle and Sundance. Dave figured that no matter the conditions, he would be able to sled to the bottom of the steep hill and then snowshoe up to the horses to feed them. I was surprised at his optimism, though not by his determination. Weather in the mountains is always the unknown, and storm conditions would confound Dave’s plan at a time when the horses would be most desperate for food.

While we were unloading Stu’s snowmobile and securing two bales to it, along came the two B.C. SPCA constables who’d visited the horses the day before. Kent Kokoska, a senior animal protection officer, asked me to put a sign up by the horses asking people not to feed them. I didn’t have any more cardboard, so he handed me his clipboard. I made a temporary sign, which read:

“Thank you so much for what you guys are doing for these horses,” said special provincial constable Jamie Wiltse.

 

The two constables didn’t stay long (they were here on their vacation time) but did say that an SPCA constable from Prince George would be back on Monday with a snowmobile.

Monika then arrived in her truck. She had picked up a few more shovels donated by the local hardware store. Even though she couldn’t get a ride to the horses that day, she was bent on recruitment and planned to talk to sledders in the parking lot about the horse rescue and ask them to help shovel.

Dean Schreiber and his thirteen-year-old son, Sam, had planned to come this day as well, but they hadn’t been able to get their truck started either. Stu and I, it turned out, were the only diggers.

The ride up to the horses was witheringly cold that day, but at least my head stayed fairly warm since Stu had loaned me a helmet. Only my toes complained on this, the harshest day of the digging so far.

December’s average temperature in this part of the valley is minus ten degrees. On December 1, the McKale weather station was reporting a high of plus one, but starting on December 13, just two days before the horses were first spotted, the temperature had turned dangerously cold, as low as minus thirty-six degrees at the weather station and four degrees colder than that at our Falling Star Ranch.

But seen another way, the cold was a blessing. I sometimes ached from the work of shovelling, but Matt, Stu and Dave never did. As shovelling went, Matt observed, this was good shovelling. Owing to the cold, the snow stayed light and powdery; anyone who has ever shovelled wet snow or slush would appreciate the difference.

When we got to the spot where the trench was to meet the groomed snowmobile trail, Stuart and I stopped and put up the two signs, one facing each way. We also left a few shovels there and put flagging tape around some of the trees to make the area more visible.

Just before noon, we stopped at the Renshaw cabin to warm up for a few minutes. I told a group of sledders inside about the horse rescue and asked them to come help shovel.

“You’ll generate heat doing it,” I said, hoping to entice them.

“We’ll go ride first and then we’ll come help for a while,” said one.

I had my doubts. They were already drinking beer.

Once we reached the horses, I put my balaclavas and gloves under the hood of the sled, on top of the still-warm engine so they could dry before I started the day’s shovelling. I had learned my lesson from my first day on the mountain.

As for Belle and Sundance, they already looked quite a bit better than they had two days before. When we got there, they were clearly happy to see us and gave us a soft, low whinny as a greeting. Horses housed in a barn or corral and fed according to a schedule know when breakfast comes even a minute late, and they inform everyone of their displeasure. The whinny from Belle and Sundance that morning was more of the pleading kind: “Feed us. Please, please feed us.”

Jamie Wiltse had given us two more horse blankets, these ones made of thick canvas. I fed the horses and then put an additional blanket on each of them—the mare, to my pleasant surprise, actually stood still this time.

Stu, meanwhile, gathered firewood so we could melt snow to water the horses. And then we set to work on the trench.

With only two of us digging, and my having to trudge back to the campfire several times throughout the day to refill the bucket and tend the fire, we didn’t make much progress. Nevertheless, we had fun. We joked with each other and teased each other, doing our best to lighten the work. “Got to keep laughing to keep from crying” best defined the day. Thursday I had felt down, numbed by the impossibility of our task. Not today. Besides, the sun was shining, the sky was a deep azure, and there was not a cloud in sight on this gorgeous clear day. And I liked Stu. He was not the sort to laugh out loud, but he seemed always to wear a smile on his face. He struck me as a man content with his lot and alive to the glories of nature. Over a Thermos of coffee or while breaking for lunch, we talked about the splendour of the alpine, the horses and their predicament, and what their owner had and had not done. Stuart was an easy man to talk to. And, like Matt, content to let others grab the spotlight.

Stu presented an idea—typical of him, it was offered as a suggestion, not issued as an order—that we quit work at the top end of the trench earlier in the day so we could spend time starting a new trench at the bottom to give people an incentive to dig from that end as well. So we worked away where we were until almost three o’clock and then returned to the horses.

Sundance still wasn’t drinking, and I was a little concerned that he might suffer an impaction colic—blocked intestines from a solid mass of food. A horse needs water when fed hay. But the gelding did seem to eat quite a bit of snow. Not the same as drinking water, but better than nothing, I figured. It’s true what they say: you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. After feeding the horses more hay, watering them and checking their blankets, Stu and I headed out.

I had not minded the ride in as much that day, but I was dreading the cold ride out after working up a sweat shovelling. When we got down to the groomed trail, we found a snowmobile parked to one side. The machine belonged to Jesse and Liz Trask, a young couple from McBride. Having seen our signs, they’d started work on the bottom part of the trench and had already dug from the groomed snowmobile trail to the creek. Jesse was busy flooding the creek bed to make an ice bridge.

I was pleased by the initiative, but hardly surprised. Handy and hard-working, Jesse is a mechanic by trade and a farmer. He and Liz knew exactly what had to be done, and they did it.

Under all the snow, which had acted as an insulating blanket, the water in the creek hadn’t frozen yet, so it would have been impossible to cross the creek with the horses. Only a thin layer of ice lay between the snow cover and the water in the creek, which, beneath
all that snow, was still flowing straight down the mountain—virtually north to south. Jesse’s solution was to shovel a path about three feet wide and four feet long—running east to west. He left about a foot of snow, then made a hole in the ice, just above his path, and scooped out water, which he poured over the snow where the crossing would occur. Mother Nature would do the rest overnight; before morning, the new path would be slippery but rock solid.