The Rescue of Belle and Sundance

by Birgit Stutz

  “Let’s dig until about 2.30 p.m., then head to the other end of the trench and help the guys down below,” Dave suggested.

  “Sounds like a plan,” I said.

  We were just about to finish at the top end for the day when five sledders came walking down the trench, shovels in hand. They were the guys from the parking lot this morning.

  “I guess your persistence impressed them,” Monika said to me in a low voice while trying to suppress a laugh.

  The sledders, young men from Alberta, shovelled for a while but within half an hour started to peter out, one after the other. One, lying on his back in the snow smoking a cigarette beside his sled, eyed the sky. “Why are you doing all this?” he asked.

  Birgit (left) and Monika have a rest by the campfire.

  “The owner of the two horses thought it wasn’t possible to get the horses out, but we aren’t going to let them die of starvation,” I explained.

  “So you have to prove that it can be done,” he said, sneeringly. We just smiled. This fellow clearly neither understood nor cared.

  But we felt good about how much we’d accomplished. Monika and I decided to snowshoe down so we could see how much digging was left to do. Dave loaned Monika his snowshoes, and I strapped on mine. We arranged to meet Dave at the other end of the trench, down by the groomed snowmobile trail.

  Even though we’d made good progress over the past couple of days, the walk on snowshoes still seemed long. Several times we thought the creek was just around the corner, only to be disappointed. On the other hand, the going was easier than before: the trail had been walked on a few times, so it was hardening up, and we weren’t sinking in as much or taking as many tumbles. When we got close to the flooded creek bed near the groomed snowmobile trail, we met Dave, who was already digging alongside Stu. The four volunteers at the bottom had probably shovelled close to a hundred metres that day as well. Dave estimated that we had about half a kilometre of digging left.

  The ride out was uneventful and not as cold as the night before’s. On our way home, Monika and I stopped at the Husky gas station in McBride. Feeling drained, I was longing for a Coke and a chocolate bar to boost my blood sugar level. As I stepped out of my truck, another pickup pulled up alongside us—Tim and Justin had just returned from a trip to Prince George.

  Monika and I told them about our day’s work.

  “You are never going to get this done. There’s no way,” Tim said.

  Stuart, Birgit and Dave stop to warm up.

  Monika, also exhausted, lit into him. “This is just what we want to hear after spending the whole day up there digging,” she retorted angrily. I sympathized with her. We’d suffered enough naysayers without our families and friends chiming in.

  Once at home, I fed my hungry critters and ate a couple of Joette’s leftover sandwiches, which tasted incredibly good—for a change, I was actually hungry. Then I set out to return phone calls (about a dozen of them) and answer emails (about two dozen). A producer at CTV had left a message; he ended up talking to Lisa Levasseur and to Donna-Rae Coatta, the media liaison for the Rescue 100 Horses Foundation. The piece aired that night. Seeing my pictures of the horses on television brought tears to my eyes. The horses didn’t deserve this. I wanted them out of their icy prison. That’s all I could think about and all that kept me going.

  Earlier in the day, Frank Mackay had called Reg Marek to find out how things were going with the digging. He said he had two more days of work to do on his horse trailer, then he would be out here to pick up his horses. Reg said nothing. As far as he was concerned, the correct response to such gall was no response at all. I was as appalled as Reg at the owner’s audacity. Did he really think he could just waltz in and pick up the same horses he had abandoned?

  While many of us involved in the rescue of Belle and Sundance had had no clue in the early days who their owner was, and then later knew just his first name, Reg, as the local brand inspector, had known his name almost from the beginning. Frank Mackay called Reg five times all told, and the former left an indelible impression on the latter.

  “Absolutely arrogant to the extreme” was how Reg described him.

  “Some people who go up in the mountains have no clue,” Reg later told me. “I give him lotsa marks for getting as far as he did—he did have some experience; he just didn’t know when to quit. In Alberta, on the eastern slopes, you can get away with things. Here he was out of his league. He had no clue where a horse could go and not go. He thought the horses would come down, and that was a reasonable expectation. Often, you can’t keep horses up there. It’s why we sometimes hobble horses on pack trips. But in this case, there was bog. And they would not go through that misery again.”

  Reg had called Frank Mackay on the second day of digging to verify that the horses on the mountain were his. “He was pretty rude,” said Reg. “He was prepared to leave them there to die. ‘It’s none of your business,’ he told me, and when I challenged him, he said he couldn’t shoot a cat, never mind a horse—though later he said he was a hunter.”

  The last thing any of us wanted to do was release those horses to Frank Mackay. Fortunately, the SPCA constable was supposed to meet us at the parking lot next day. I planned to have a chat with him about this new development. The constable never showed, but neither did the owner, so my initial feeling of panic subsided. When I mentioned to Dave that morning that the owner intended to claim the horses, he calmly advised, “Let’s just deal with it as it comes.”

  For now, we would focus on the hard task at hand.

  Chapter 9

  THE TUNNEL TO FREEDOM

  On Monday, December 22, I rose to another cold-snap dawn. The outside thermometer read minus thirty-one, and the radio announcer predicted a daytime high of minus fifteen.

  From our living room’s huge sealed window (with a major crack in one corner from the cold of a previous winter), I looked out on my universe. Panning from left to right, I could see my stallion Fire’s paddock (to prevent war with the geldings or breeding with the mares, I kept studs apart from the other horses), then the chicken coop and garden shed, the little red barn, the tack shed beside it, the fifty-foot round pen for untrained horses and green riders, the vegetable garden, the guest cabin still in the works and the wide path that led down to a creek then up to the pastures and to the big outdoor riding ring—its entryway crowned by elk antlers. The soil in our pastures is clay, so it holds the moisture well, producing rich grass when the weather is kind.

  Inside, as outside, horses rule at Falling Star Ranch. The soap dish, the soap dispenser and the towels in the bathroom all bear horse motifs, and horseshoes—along with hundreds of other items—adorn the shelves and walls. Monika insists I am a pack rat, and I have to admit she’s right. But I am a Swiss pack rat, which means the hundreds of items—bottles; tobacco tins; portraits; photos, sculptures and drawings of horses, cats and dogs; the antlers on the mantel—are all arrayed just so.

  Ours is a rectangular-shaped property, with the Rocky Mountains across the valley in the northeast and the Cariboos in the southwest, behind the ranch. The eyes of visitors to the property are forever drawn to the mountains. Vast wine-coloured strips run through the forests on those mountains, and to visitors they look pretty—until it’s pointed out that this colour marks conifers devastated by mountain pine beetles. But even this flaw does little to taint the glory of those peaks.

  Sometimes I wish we had more land, more money, a newer and better house, but other times, walking out to the horses at dawn or dusk, I pinch myself. I stare up at the sun rising over the Rockies or dipping below the Cariboos and think myself the luckiest person on the planet. There is nowhere else I would want to live than here. Some need to live near water—rivers, lakes, oceans. I need mountains.

  Dozens of young horse lovers from Europe, Australia and Canada have spent whole summers at Falling Star. In exchange for work—feeding the horses, cleaning the tack, cleaning the corrals, weeding the garden, exercising the
horses—the volunteer gets free board, riding lessons and all the expertise I can pass on to them, plus a chance to experience life on a Canadian horse farm. The farm exchange workers would probably agree that I possess an iron hand in a velvet glove.

  My horse know-how comes from working as a guide at a dude ranch and as an assistant trainer at a warm-blood training facility. Having studied extensively under Chris Irwin, one of Canada’s most celebrated horse trainers and clinicians and author of two books (Horses Don’t Lie and Dancing with Your Dark Horse), I am a gold-certified trainer in groundwork and silver-certified in riding. I’m currently working on my Chris Irwin gold certification in riding as well as my Equine Canada Level 1 Western and English teaching certificates. Chris subscribes to the theory of training the trainer to think like a horse and to speak the horse’s language, which is, first and foremost, body language.

  That day, December 22, I rode up to Mount Renshaw with Dave. As usual, I looked forward to seeing the horses, but the excitement of the first day was gone. I didn’t like the ride in on the snowmobile and felt anxious to get to the horses, feed them and start digging. I just wanted to get the job done.

  As always, the horses greeted us with a whinny. Clearly getting pickier with their feed, they had some hay left over from the previous night’s meal. With every passing day and every feeding, the gelding and mare grew more lively, more themselves. Ever so slowly and ever so slightly, they were gaining weight and shedding worry. After giving the horses their morning ration of hay, we launched into the digging routine. Matt, along with others, had grown increasingly frustrated with all the promised assistance that wasn’t materializing.

  “All this hype but no help,” he complained.

  One day—the day the vet arrived to examine the horses—Matt had walked into the Renshaw warming cabin and heard some Alberta sledders talking about “some people who were trying to rescue two horses up here.”

  Tom Parviainen and Dave Jeck take a break from their digging.

  “Yeah,” he’d told them, “I’m part of that bunch.”

  Without Matt asking, the sledders offered assurances that they would lend a hand the next day, but Matt put no stock in their promises, and, sure enough, he never saw the sledders again.

  “All this yak in town, all this media coverage. But why isn’t it translating into diggers?” Matt asked. Fatigue and frustration had begun to wear on him, too.

  But on that Monday, with Christmas three days away, all that yak yielded results. The number of volunteers mushroomed—fifteen in total. Digging at the top were Dave, Stu, Matt, Tom Parviainen (a friend of Sara’s who’d learned about the rescue through Facebook) and me.

  Digging down at the bottom were Linden and Logan Salayka Ladouceur (two teenage brothers), Brian McKirdy and his son Ross, Ross’s friend Reiner Thoni, Barry Walline, Dean and Sam Schreiber, and Tim and Justin Brown. Just twelve, Justin was the youngest member of the shovelling brigade. Dean’s son Sam was only a year older.

  The work seemed easier with this many people, as if we drew energy from each other, and the mood on the mountain was ecstatic. A sense of camaraderie touched every volunteer, and jokes and teasing ruled the day. Everyone was feeling good, generating lots of chatter—about the weather, about work, about the horses. The day had the feel of a joyous work bee.

  Justin Brown, the youngest member of the shovelling brigade, digs in to help free the horses.

  Four sledders from Alberta happened upon the bottom crew and dug with them for a long time. In the snow they wrote the name of their town—Bonnyville.

  Later in the afternoon, Dave used his GPS (global positioning system) to measure the distance we had shovelled that day. He figured we had dug another two hundred and fifty metres, meaning that just two hundred and fifty remained. The volunteers cheered at that news.

  “If this many people show up again tomorrow, we should get it done in a day or two,” Dave predicted.

  Toward the end of the day, Matt, Tom and I stopped our work in the trench and began creating a new pad for the horses—simply a widening of the trench, about a third of the way to the logging road. We were thinking of moving the horses there and giving them a break before heading all the way out of the trench the next day or the one after. And we would have moved them to the new pad had it started snowing hard or blowing, but the weather remained fair, so Dave suggested we didn’t need to move them after all.

  After feeding the horses their supper, offering them water and checking their blankets—my end-of-the-day routine—I felt a huge sense of satisfaction. We had accomplished a lot that day. For the first time, getting the horses off the mountain looked manageable. I walked the short trench from the horses up to the alpine and waited for Dave and his snowmobile. The ride out took my breath away. Dave stopped his machine at one point so we could admire the setting sun, which had cast the rock and snow of the mountaintops in a striking shade of pink. I now understood why so many people own and ride sleds. The views in this high country are ones to give you pause and make you feel glad to be alive.

  A lineup of snowmobiles near the bottom of the trench was a welcoming sight after a hard day of shovelling.

  “I hope to come back here in the summer on horseback,” I told Dave. “I want to explore some of these areas.”

  When we got to the bottom end of the trench, a wonderful sight greeted us: a long lineup of sleds alongside the groomed snowmobile trail and many volunteers shovelling, shoulder to shoulder.

  Once home, I met with another pleasant surprise. Marc was back from Jasper, had done the chores and was just in the process of making supper—my first real meal in days, shrimp and rice, one of my favourite dishes. All of a sudden, I felt ravenous.

  At 10:20 p.m., I sent out another update with pictures and a note that read in part:Hi all. Had a great day today. Only have 250 metres to go! The horses are doing better every day. Thanks to all who were up on the mountain today. . . .

  P.S. We have received a lot of coverage.

  What I didn’t know, and only discovered much later, was that Dave chatted with Belle and Sundance’s owner that same evening. Dave had tracked down Frank Mackay’s name and telephone number and called him. He wanted to hear Mackay’s side of the story, to get the measure of him.

  Dave felt some sympathy for the man, who had been demonized by the media and the public. He wondered if he was just a guy who got into trouble with his horses. The two men spoke for about half an hour, calmly and rationally. Dave was neither aggressive nor accusatory while Mackay simply told his story—how he thought he could handle taking horses to the Great Divide and never imagined how it would all turn out.

  Dave believed that the owner had made valid attempts to get the horses down off the mountain, and though maybe he hadn’t done all that Dave himself might have, no intentional wrong had been committed. If Mackay had left his horses tied to the warming cabin and they’d starved, that, thought Dave, would have constituted a true crime. But after speaking with him, Dave decided the case wasn’t black and white.

  Dave knew, and Frank Mackay knew, that all over Canada horses were abandoned and starved all the time. That night, Dave Jeck, the man leading the painstaking rescue of Belle and Sundance, thought: Why is their owner the one up on the cross?

  After I got off the phone for the final time that night, I headed from my office to the kitchen for a restorative glass of milk, which I hoped would help wind my engines down. I passed, on my right, a cork bulletin board—home to important phone numbers, photos of horses, dogs and cats, a to-do list and much else. Halfway down the board, below eye level, is a handwritten line from The Little Prince (or Le Petit Prince, in its original French) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in 1943.

  “You become responsible, forever,” the line reads, “for what you have tamed.”

  In the little novel, a boy is engaged in conversation with a fox, and the fox is explaining to the boy the meaning of tame and all the joys—and responsibilities—inherent in the word. Both M
arc and I believe passionately that Saint-Exupéry uttered a profound truth when he wrote that there is a contract between humans and the animals entrusted to us. This is a sacred bond, and we break it at our peril.

  Marc had been really keen on going up the mountain and helping dig, so I was glad that he would finally get the chance to do so on Tuesday, December 23, just two days before Christmas. He had been a huge moral support for me. From the moment I had heard about those horses on the mountain, I had gone into overdrive. Too exhausted to make meals or even eat, I lost weight. Helping the horses was both physically and mentally draining—the hardest thing I have ever done in my life—and I felt so fortunate to have a partner who valued the effort every bit as much as I did.

  Many of the rescuers paid a price for their participation: sore backs, frostbite, lost wages, mental anguish. On or off the mountain, volunteers felt the same—the horses never left our thoughts. The digging was actually a relief because the labour offered an antidote to all that worry. Of course, no one suffered more or longer than Belle and Sundance, and what they had endured put everything else into perspective.

  Marc saw himself as part of “a fresh second wave” of diggers. He’d taken no time off work to help, for he had been convinced that snow and wind would play havoc with the rescue attempt—which he thought would unfold over several weeks at least. The notion that the digging might soon be over seemed miraculous to him. “I was convinced I’d be shovelling over the Christmas holidays,” he told me as we drove to the parking lot. “This is good.”