by Birgit Stutz
Belle and Sundance’s journey up Mount Renshaw began on September 12, 2008. Frank Mackay, a lawyer in Edmonton, some four hundred kilometres to the east as the crow flies, was bringing supplies to a friend who was hiking the Great Divide, which aligns pretty well with the B.C.–Alberta border. It seemed like a simple enough task for a man who had owned horses for a decade and who likely saw himself as a horseman. But things went wrong, very wrong, on that trip.
The vast alpine area of Mount Renshaw.
The sixty-three-year-old was riding his saddle horse, and leading Belle and Sundance, who dutifully carried their loads. Sundance was a fourteen-year-old gelding, a sorrel (a horse with a reddish brown coat and a mane and tail the same colour or flaxen); Belle was a three-year-old mare, a bay (dark brown in colour with black points—mane, tail, lower legs). This was Mackay’s first solo mountain expedition, and he quickly discovered the many challenges: on the way to Beaver Dam Pass, he got lost, veering east when he should have gone west. The weather, as it often does in the Canadian Rockies, turned foul and cold. And a brewing mutiny by his two pack horses finally erupted.
What befell the group high in the alpine that day was not weather but unruly and rough terrain. Bog, to be precise. In previous years, crews had cut trees to widen a snowmobile trail, and all the deadfall lying in low and wet areas pinched and grabbed at the horses’ legs. The horses were soon exhausted, then stuck, and the man leading them struggled to extricate them. “It was like pickup sticks in there, with muskeg in between,” Mackay would later report. “This stuff was just muck.”
Mackay had failed to heed one of Joe Back’s rules:On bad trails, across deep streams, bog holes, slide rock, and along canyon trails, it’s safer to drive the pack horses loose, and let them pick their own way around bad and chancy sections. A lot of the time the pack animal shows far better judgement than the packer . . . two-legged fools rush in where four-legged angels fear to tread.
Eventually, Mackay and his horses made it past the Renshaw warming cabin, where again the two pack horses got mired in bog.
Belle and Sundance had had enough. Even after they were relieved of their loads and untethered, they refused to follow their master’s lead. The pack horses had lost faith. The mare was spent by her travails, and the stronger gelding, though able to, would not leave her side. The bond between the two was too strong.
Frank Mackay spent the night of September 12 on Mount Renshaw with all three horses, and the following morning he abandoned his camping equipment on the mountainside and rode out on his saddle horse, telling himself that the two pack horses would soon enough find their way to a logging road and from there to the main valley, where someone would see them and report them. He also informed the Royal Canadian Mounted Police detachment in McBride, which serves as the local police, in case the loose horses were spotted coming down the mountain.
The man had fully expected the pack horses to head for the valley within a few days. This was a reasonable expectation in ordinary circumstances, local outfitters would later confirm. But the expected didn’t occur, probably because the horses would have associated descending the mountain with revisiting that miserable bog.
The gelding and the mare were left alone on the mountain, but they were also free. Mount Renshaw, for the time being, proved a blissful place for Belle and Sundance to be.
Chapter 3
HORSE HEAVEN, HORSE HELL
For weeks that fall, Belle and Sundance would have revelled in their newfound freedom. The horses could graze to their hearts’ content in those yawning alpine meadows; they could nap in the sun in the afternoon and play when play was called for. At night, they would have slept, although one of them would have remained alert, testing the winds for any sign of wolf, cougar or bear.
Dark-chocolate brown in colour, Belle bore a star on her forehead, almost a stripe, and had small eyes that suggested she might be scheming. The young mare was the saucier and more sure-footed of the two horses and would surely have pushed the envelope with her heavier, more senior companion. Teased him, nipped him, tested his patience.
Sundance, a chestnut with three white stockings, sported a wide blaze on his head and large, pretty eyes. Although calm and laid-back, the gelding was clearly the boss of the pair. At 16.2 hands, he also had size in his favour. (A hand, in reference to horses, refers to height. Our forebears used the adult hand, four inches across, to measure the height of a horse. So a 16.2-hand horse stands sixty-six inches from the ground to the withers, the highest part of the back. Belle, at 15.2, was sixty-two inches from ground to withers.) Lanky and somewhat stiff, Sundance would get pushy with both horses and humans and gravitated to the leadership of any herd he joined.
On the mountain, Belle and Sundance were camped in majestic territory. Geographical place names here sound almost boastful: White Falls, Falls of the Pool, Emperor Falls, Rainbow Falls, Tumbling Glacier, the Valley of a Thousand Falls and the Emperor Face of Mount Robson. Mount Robson itself is the stunning high point of the Canadian Rockies, and climbers attempting to reach its almost four-thousand-metre summit are rebuffed by weather ninety per cent of the time. Those who make it, though, glory in views that extend one hundred kilometres in every direction. I have never been up there, but hikers rave about the mountain’s vast meadows and many lakes, as well as the glaciers—the longest one, twelve hundred metres in length—that spill into the aquamarine waters of Berg Lake.
Sundance (left) and Belle enjoying their freedom in the Renshaw area, mid-September 2008.
In mid-September, not long after their owner had left them, one such hiker spotted the two horses. Glen Stanley will modestly say he has done a bit of hiking: he has twice climbed Mount Robson and has hiked to Berg Lake a staggering seventy-six times. But despite all that experience over his seventy years, what Glen saw on that early fall day jarred him. He was hiking with his dog Badge when he chanced upon two horses gambolling high in the alpine about two kilometres north of the Renshaw cabin. “There’s a ridge running south and east from the peak of Mount Renshaw separating two meadows,” said Glen. “This is up high, where the last grass is. The place is a small pocket of short grass, with water. I’m not a horse person, but I would think it would be an ideal place for them.”
The horses shook their heads at the hiker and his dog. First the horses came to them, then they scattered, then they returned. Using a telephoto lens, Glen took pictures of them. The horses in the photos look fat and sassy and happy and, with their glistening coats, in perfect health. They wore bells at their necks, as is common for horses taken into the mountains—to give fair warning to bears and to help a rider retrieve them should they spook and flee. But there was no owner to be seen. The whole thing puzzled Glen. What were two horses doing way up there alone?
Not long after, as he sat in the meadow eating his lunch, Glen saw a helicopter fly overhead. He assumed it was part of a search team looking for two lost horses. But when he later called Yellowhead Helicopters, which has a base in the nearby village of Valemount, he was told that what he had observed was a routine flight to check out a stand of timber. So Glen called the RCMP, who gave him the answer he was looking for. A man on his way to Grande Cache, Alberta, had had two of his horses bog down on Mount Renshaw. Having learned that the animals’ presence on the mountain was known, Glen assumed the owner would return for them very soon. Horses are valuable animals; no one would just leave them there, especially with winter coming.
Aside from Glen, few in the Robson Valley knew there were horses running free in the alpine that fall. One exception was Wes Phillips. Wes started working as a guide in the mountains at the age of seventeen, almost thirty years before, and to him, the lost horses presented an opportunity. He had just come back from a trip to the Yukon when “the old moccasin telegraph,” as he calls word of mouth in the mountains, told him that two horses were loose on the north fork of the Blackwater River below Mount Renshaw. “There’s an unwritten law in the mountains,” he says. “Someone callous eno
ugh to leave any unbranded horses over four up in the mountains . . . it’s finders keepers.” Four is deemed to be the age a wild horse would leave its dam.
Twice, once at Thanksgiving in mid-October and again a week later, Wes drove up the logging road—formally called McKale Forest Service Road but locally also known as Blackwater River Road. He parked at kilometre twenty-six and then searched for the horses on foot. The weather grew nasty as he went that first time, with cold rain turning to snow, resulting in a four-inch dump. The second time, a foot of snow covered the ground, putting an end to Wes’s search.
Wes had reason to believe that even high atop a mountain in winter’s grip, horses can find ways to survive. “Horses can surprise you with their fortitude,” he says. “One time I had a horse hit by a train. Half his face was torn off. I thought, Better put him down. But in six months it had healed over. Another time, a horse of mine was attacked by wolves. He was just a little horse, but he got away. He couldn’t walk for four or five months, but he made it.”
Wes felt certain that the two horses were alive and somewhere on the mountain, but where was anybody’s guess.
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.
Chapter 4
SENDING OUT AN SOS
McBride 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 ste
am 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.