The Rescue of Belle and Sundance (18 page)

I had some orange flagging tape left, so I put up a ribbon between two trees, across the point where the upper and lower ends of the trench would meet.

“The race is on!” I challenged the bottom crew. They had far more diggers, so they had an unfair advantage. I didn’t care. The end was in sight.

“Come help us dig,” I urged Justin. A feeling of euphoria suffused the volunteers, with everyone laughing and joking. We all found new reserves of energy and dug faster. Snow was flying up, then down, up, then down, on both sides of the trench—as if so many unseen creatures were frantically digging tunnels. The job of finishing the trench had consumed seven days, with half the work done in the first five and the other half done in just two.

At about one-thirty in the afternoon, “the tunnel to freedom”—as some in the press had come to call it—was finally completed. Cheers went up everywhere; people took off their mitts, high-fived each other and clapped. Shouts of “We got it done!” could be heard from the whole crew. I looked at Stu, and he had “Yahoo!” written all over his face.

 

What I felt most powerfully was relief. The shovelling, at least, was over. But my elation was checked a little by the knowledge that we had finished only phase one of the rescue. There remained two more big hurdles: getting the horses into and through that one-kilometre-long trench, and then walking the almost thirty kilometres along the logging road. So the champagne wouldn’t be uncorked just yet.

Marc likened it to a hockey game. “We had come back and tied up the score, which was great. But there was still overtime.”

Dave and Stu stoked the campfire, and we all took a short break. It was two in the afternoon. We still had plenty of time to lead the horses out.

Soon after our shared celebration and subsequent rest, the majority of the volunteers walked single-file down the finished trench to the snowmobile trail while a few of us—Dave, Stu, Gord, Matt, Leif, Lester, Marc, Monika, Tim, Justin, Carla, Carolina and I—headed back up the trench to Belle and Sundance.

Seeing the horses for the first time, Marc thought they looked forlorn and skinny, their blankets just hanging on them. The first image that came to mind was footage from the Second World War. He remembered a camera panning across a gathering of humans and their animals, and how each bore the gaunt look of creatures who had known what it is to starve.

 

“You should have seen the horses a week ago,” I told Marc. The blankets still looked far too big for them, but by the tiniest of increments and with each passing day, the horses were beginning to flesh out. For Belle and Sundance, deprived so long of sustenance, it was all about the food. These men and their machines had for many days now been bringing them grub, and the horses knew, just knew, they were safe. Not yet off the mountain, not yet out of the cold, but—for the moment, anyway—safe.

Dave instructed everyone left save Lester and me, who would lead the horses out, to walk ahead down the trench to the logging road. Dave was worried that if the horses encountered some mishap in the trench, those behind them would be stuck.

Belle and Sundance had their heads up and their ears pricked forward. They were two horses ready to roll. We put halters on them and removed their blankets for the trip down the narrow trench (lest the blankets get hung up on a protruding root or branch), we loaded gear onto snowmobiles, pulled strings off the
remaining hay bales to be left in the high country (the polymer might have ensnared wild animals), and soon after, the two horses began their trip down the narrow passageway.

I felt the same elation as others, but mine was tempered. I still had concerns about this next critical leg of the journey. Would the horses, generally claustrophobic creatures, follow us down a slippery, one-kilometre-long trench barely wider than their bodies and surrounded by a six-foot wall of snow—especially when turning around was not an option? I worried that some spots in the trench were too narrow and that the horses might get stuck or refuse to advance. There was one section, in particular—the section where I’d had a difficult time digging because of roots buried under the snow—where we’d had to try to find the best way around a great many trees. I had hoped to widen the trench the following day, but the walls and bottom had turned to ice. I would have needed a pick.

Lester led the way down the trench, with the older gelding in tow. Dave followed with a shovel in case one of the horses got stuck in deep snow or entangled in exposed root. I followed with the young mare. Behind Belle was Gord, who picked up shovels that had been tucked into the trench walls. Marc and Monika snowshoed beside the trench, high above us. Marc was taking pictures, but pretty soon he could no longer keep up with the horses. They were just motoring down the trench. I had to walk really fast, sometimes almost run, to stay ahead of Belle. Sundance seemed a little stiff, likely from not having had any exercise in such a long time, and moved more slowly. That he was ahead of us worked to our advantage, for he slowed the mare’s pace.

 

 

Some members of the sledders’ forum had expressed fears that the handlers could be run over if the horses panicked in the trench. I suppose that could have happened, but Lester and I were confident, experienced handlers. With horses, calm often begets calm, and Belle and Sundance never panicked. They seemed to know we were helping them, and they’d clearly had their fill of the mountaintop.

Luckily, too, we didn’t have to deal with many obstacles on our journey down the trench. Everything went smoothly, save for one time when the gelding’s right hind foot slipped in the snow and under a root. Sundance practically sat down on his hind end. At this spot, the trench was not dug all the way to the ground. The snowy path was still quite soft—and probably only about three feet deep. Amid all the excitement and the great rush of volunteers, the quality of digging had suffered somewhat: getting it done mattered more than getting right to the bottom every step of the way. Because Lester reacted calmly and quickly to Sundance’s plight, the gelding didn’t panic. With Dave’s help, Lester managed to back the gelding up and free his hind foot. The sure-footed mare had no such trouble. The horses slid a bit going down some of the
steeper sections of the trench, but both remained sensible about it all. Even the creek crossing was uneventful.

At 2:45 p.m., the horses and a handful of volunteers emerged from the claustrophobic trench onto the wide, groomed snowmobile trail. Cheers and applause from all the other volunteers, who anxiously awaited our arrival—likely two dozen all told—greeted us. I remember seeing a sea of smiling faces and all these backpacks and snowmobiles and shovels on the side of the logging road. Belle and Sundance pricked their ears in response to the shouting.

But the exhilaration was short-lived. Horses and rescuers had the same question: now what? This wasn’t over yet, not by a long shot. Would the two emaciated horses have the strength to walk the next and final leg—almost thirty kilometres of groomed trail—in one go? Would we be forced to stop at some point and create another temporary pen for the horses where they’d spend one more night?

We allowed the horses time to rest and again blanketed the mare, who had begun shivering. The gelding seemed fine, but we put his winter blanket on one of the sleds; it would be available when needed. Dave also tied a bale of hay onto a sled for the trip down the groomed snowmobile trail. All the remaining gear—shovels, signs, the volunteers’ personal items—was packed up and loaded onto the many sleds.