The Rescue of Belle and Sundance (4 page)

When October turned to November up on Mount Renshaw, everything changed for Belle and Sundance. The snow began to fall with greater regularity, and the nights got colder. The banquets of rich alpine grass the two horses had enjoyed in the fall became just memories. The verdant mountain meadows, which had offered the horses a freedom the likes of which they had never experienced, gradually transformed into something else: a cold, white prison.

In mid-November, snowmobilers took photos of the horses running in the powder and posted them on
SnowandMud.com
, a popular Internet forum for sledders in the valley and indeed all over the continent. Sadly, the fact that horses ran loose on the mountain without food or shelter failed to register; most likely, the posters and viewers of the photos assumed that the owner or the authorities had the situation well in hand.

And so more time passed. As the snow got deeper, the horses—now weak from hunger—ultimately realized the futility of moving at all.

Frank Mackay made two attempts to retrieve his horses. Some six weeks after leaving them, during the last week in October, he rode up Mount Renshaw on a saddle horse borrowed from a local outfitter named Stan Walchuk. But heavy snowfall on the mountain confounded his search effort.

Some six weeks after that, on December 5, Mackay returned. This time he knew the whereabouts of Belle and Sundance thanks to some young snowmobilers—relatives of one of his clients—who had happened upon the horses two days before. Once he got the call, “I packed my gear and loaded up and headed out there,”
Mackay later told me in a telephone interview I did for a local newspaper, the
Valley Sentinel
, in nearby Valemount.

Belle and Sundance’s owner was on a snowmobile, not a horse this time, and he was hauling hay, oats and alfalfa pellets to feed his two pack horses. Having sought help, he was accompanied by a sledder who knew the terrain of Mount Renshaw. But once again, a dump of snow stymied any rescue, and the two men lost their way for a time. “We couldn’t even see the bottom of the mountain,” Mackay told me. “We didn’t know which way was out.”

On their way up the mountain’s bumpy trail, the hay fell off the sled. The loss of the hay was perhaps telling of the men’s unpreparedness or the rugged landscape, or both. In any case, although Mackay eventually found Belle and Sundance, the horses got no hay.

“They were pretty pathetic looking,” Mackay told me. “They were skin and bone.” A far cry from the plump and playful creatures Glen Stanley had stumbled upon almost three months earlier.

A starving horse will start to draw on stores of fat and carbohydrates to produce energy for metabolism—blood flow, brain function, the normal workings of the body. That process in a healthy horse begins with nutrients derived from food, but when food is no longer available, the body looks for other sources of protein—muscle mass, vital organs. A horse can lose thirty per cent of its body
weight and rebound, a testament to the equine will to survive. We know from the testimony of humans that hunger pangs are very real and that the process of starvation also involves headaches and dizziness—not to mention mental anguish. I imagine that it’s much the same for horses. These two pack horses were domesticated animals, used to having their needs met for them. This is the nature of the contract between humans and horses. “I’ll work for you,” the horse as much has said. “I’ll carry you into war, I’ll race for you, I’ll leap those fences, I’ll help round up those cattle, I’ll transport you and your goods. But I’m counting on you to keep me fed and watered and sheltered from the storm.”

Mackay tried to give the emaciated horses the food he had brought—thirty pounds of oats and alfalfa pellets and eight litres of Gatorade. He had thought to use the power drink to restore the horses’ electrolyte levels because by then hunger and thirst would have been playing havoc with their blood chemistry. So he poured Gatorade onto the oats and tried to force the rest down the horses’ throats through a funnel attached to a hose.

“They were vomiting it up because they couldn’t hold it,” Mackay said later, adding that some of the food came out through their nostrils. “I was trying to give them some strength,” he said. “I fed them as best I could.”

No doubt he did. Apparently, however, he was unaware that
horses are not physically capable of vomiting. Belle and Sundance were simply balking at being fed in this way. A more knowledgeable horseman never would have attempted such an unconventional feeding method. “Tubing,” as it’s called, is sometimes used to administer mineral oil to a horse with a gastrointestinal problem, but the process requires experience and a deft hand. Given the poor state of the horses, the sugar in the Gatorade could have provoked spasmodic or cramp colic or colic itself—a painful twist or blockage in the bowels and the leading cause of premature death in horses.

In their owner’s estimation, the horses were too weak to walk out, and the deep snow wouldn’t have allowed them passage anyway. Mackay left them the rest of the oats and alfalfa, a kind of last supper. He then took off the bells they were wearing and tearfully bade his horses farewell. The horses were being left for dead. Mackay had brought no gun to dispatch them, and, as he subsequently put it in an interview with me, “That’s all I could do. I made every effort I thought I could . . . physically or humanly, and after that you have to make a tough decision. I didn’t have a gun, and I wasn’t going to slit their throats. Even if I had a gun, I don’t think I could have shot them. Everybody thinks euthanasia would have been the best thing. I had nothing to kill them with. I didn’t go up there to kill them. I let nature take its course.”

Mackay perhaps assumed the two pack horses to be far closer to death than they were. If so, he vastly underestimated the resilience of his horses and their will to live.

When later questioned about his ultimate decision to abandon the animals, Mackay appeared to blame the horses themselves for their misfortune. “Horses are like teenagers,” he said. “If they can get into trouble, they will get into trouble.”

Dumbfounded, I inquired, “Why didn’t you ask for help?”

“I doubt people would have helped a stranger,” he replied.

Driving home to Edmonton that day after his failed rescue attempt, Mackay was involved in an accident near Mount Robson and rolled his truck and trailer. As he later told reporters, he had sustained a concussion and a deep gash to the top of his head, along with other injuries that left him unable to work.

Horses have no word for abandonment, but surely Belle and Sundance felt it. The long nights, especially, must have been excruciating as the temperatures progressively dipped on that mountain and the cold settled into their bones.

SENDING OUT AN SOS

M
cBride is a typical small town in Western Canada, with wide streets and faux facades, with angled parking and no building higher than two storeys. Encased in boulders, the welcome sign at the village entrance on Main Street features a black steam locomotive: the heritage railway station in town has been preserved and highlighted as a focal point—it matters that the train still stops here. The town’s fire hydrants are all gaily painted—some powder blue with Aboriginal art, some with happy Dalmatians, some with blue-eyed railwaymen. Smile, the art proclaims. Pause and smile.

There’s a quirkiness to the Robson Valley that I love. In a field not far from the Dunster General Store, someone has parked a TV set on the hood of a rusting car—a homemade sculpture as welcoming as a wink. One long driveway near the hamlet features a car bench-seat strapped to a cedar-rail fence, and this strange pairing, too, makes me smile. On the outside wall of our tack shed, we’ve stuck a black rotary phone—another found object given licence to amuse.

In the villages of the valley, there is no cinema: if you want to watch a movie, you rent a DVD and watch it at home or you catch movie night at the high school, McBride Secondary. Bingo takes place at the Legion Hall, the New Year’s dance at the Elks Hall. The annual fishing derby is a big deal, as are curling, hockey and figure skating, the Valemountain Days celebration in Valemount in May, the Pioneer Days celebration in McBride in June, the Robson Valley Fall Fair in McBride in September and the Valemount Winter Festival.

The mighty Fraser River, the rail line and the Robson Valley all follow the same trajectory—from the northwest to the southeast. Eons ago, the river would have overflowed its banks and cast up rich alluvial soil on the valley floor. Now just about every foot of available land on the Robson Valley floor is cultivated. The town of McBride sits on the river’s south bank, set back a respectful distance from the river and the raging torrents unleashed each spring when snow on the mountains melts.

The Robson Valley may look paradisical, but of course it’s not. Because of high unemployment, the men and women who live here are forever heading elsewhere—to the oil fields of Alberta or the Middle East or points in-between—for work. Not all marriages survive such separations and stresses, and divorce and spousal abuse are issues here, as they are everywhere. And as I write these words, a rogue bear has for weeks been slaughtering cattle in the valley, including those in the fields right next to my own.

Still, when the setting sun casts a pink glow on the snow-covered mountain passes in early summer, when a healthy foal arrives one day at a friend’s ranch and the next day at mine, when the cottonwoods are flashing new leaves and spring rain leaves the air smelling sweet, when our hummingbird feeders need air traffic controllers and the mountain creeks are rushing headlong to the Fraser, on such days I really do believe that I live in paradise.

“Let the mountains move you,” it says below Valemount’s welcome sign built of massive fir logs, and we are moved.

Somewhere up on those mountains roamed two horses. Glen Stanley knew about their presence there, as did Wes Phillips and the snowmobilers who had posted the horses’ photos on the sledding website.