The Rescue of Belle and Sundance (20 page)

About four hours into the journey, Stu and Matt rode ahead of us to the parking lot. Stu went to get some hot chocolate for us all, and Matt was going to call Ray Long and give him our estimated time of arrival so Ray could meet us at the parking lot with the stock trailer.

By 8:30 p.m., I was famished. Stu returned with a Thermos of
hot chocolate generously spiked with Amaretto. It was so good, but I was hungry, too, and I fervently wished I had grabbed one more sandwich that morning.

We were still drinking our hot libations and the horses were munching on hay when we glimpsed the lights of a snowmobile from around the corner. It was Matt.

“I am only going to tell you guys this once, so everybody listen up,” he said. His words sounded ominous, but he had certainly grabbed our attention. We moved closer to ensure we heard what he had to say. He told us that while we’d been walking, a power outage had thrown the entire Robson Valley into darkness.

“A truck tore down the power line by the Husky,” Matt explained, referring to a gas station on Highway 16.

I was relieved. No big deal. Power outages are fairly common in the valley, and this one didn’t affect us at all; we stood in the pitch dark anyway. But everybody following the story of the horse rescue would have been disappointed to miss the airing of the Global TV footage of the digging earlier that day. As for us on the mountain, we had our priorities: get the horses safely down, get ourselves into bed and let sweet sleep come.

About half an hour later—Dave and I were leading the horses then—we saw lights coming toward us again. This time they belonged to a pickup truck.

Wes Phillips, who lives near the Blackwater Road, had brought us hot coffee and soup.

“We’re good for now, thanks,” I said. I was very hungry, but I needed solids—not more liquid. “But we’d all love a warm drink once we get to the parking lot!” Wes agreed to meet us there in about an hour or so and started backing his truck down the single-lane logging road. About thirty minutes later, I again saw lights, but their angle didn’t seem right.

Wes had been crossing a water bar when the ice underneath gave way and the truck sank in. Water bars are diagonal channels cut across roads on slopes like this to divert water and prevent erosion. My first reaction was relief that we had decided against trying to pull a horse trailer up the logging road. We would never have made it.

The truck blocked most of the road. Dave and I barely managed to get around it with the two horses. Gord, Stu, Matt and Lester stayed behind and tried to help Wes extricate the truck, unfortunately to no avail. Wes ultimately left it and joined our crew. He decided he would take a shift walking, so he took the mare’s lead rope from me while I rode with Matt. By then I’d realized just how tired, cold and hungry I really was. We were still five kilometres from the parking lot.

The horses were doing fine, or so it seemed. The lights of the
sleds behind were showing the way when I suddenly noticed that Sundance was limping ever so slightly. We stopped the march and had a look. The cut, on one hind leg, was very minor. “A long way from the heart,” as cowboys say. Twice on the logging road he had broken through; he might’ve cut himself on a chunk of ice. Or he may have clipped himself while in the trench. In any case, the cut was of no consequence, and Sundance soldiered on.

Belle, as before, needed a push now and then. I would sometimes have to flick a rope at her hind end to keep her going. She would stall, I would send out the rope, and she would pick up her pace again. I was miffed, but so was she. Did she pin her ears to show how put out she was? Perhaps. It was too dark to tell. More likely, she swished her tail, a lesser show of objection. And so it went, kilometre after kilometre, down, ever down, the dark mountain.

Along the rest of the way, Matt and I talked to pass the time and help us forget about the cold. He told me about a trip he had taken to Europe a few years before and the different places he had visited. I leaned back on the snowmobile and stared up to the clear sky with its innumerable stars, cold distant suns that offered such scant light that I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face.

About an hour later, when we were close to the end of the logging road, I asked Matt to stop, and I got off the snowmobile to
walk the last few metres with Wes, Dave and the horses. I needed to warm up. The others raced ahead on their sleds.

 

At 10 p.m., the tired but happy group of volunteers reached the end of their seven-hour-long journey. Ray, his daughter Janice and her son Alex were waiting for us on Mountainview Road with the stock trailer. The horses loaded without incident, and at last, Belle and Sundance were on their way to a place that would resemble home: a stall in a barn, bedding to lie on, food and water. My
shoulders relaxed, and I breathed a sigh of relief. It was over. There were no tears at that moment, no sense of celebration—only a barely felt happiness that we had rescued the horses without mishap.

The rescue had unfolded in three stages—digging the trench, walking the horses through that trench and walking them down the logging road. We were all happy at the end of each stage, and that happiness would have stretched into joy—had we not felt so exhausted and so wary of what lay around the next corner.

Dozens and dozens of photographs taken during those eight days chronicle the rescue of Belle and Sundance. One image captures the apple cheeks of young Justin Brown as he helped dig what looked like the world’s longest, deepest and thinnest driveway. Another records the moment on December 18 when Belle and Sundance got their winter blankets (as bright and blue as the sky) and then the moment a few days later when the horses got second blankets overtop (these in muted shades of green). One photo shows a bedraggled Belle nuzzling the arm of an amused Lester Blouin. Another documents Sundance and Gord, Belle and me walking down the groomed logging road, the snow at our level looking slate blue in the fading light, the alpine and the mountain behind and above us still sunlit and so, so majestic. What strikes me most is how, as the trench neared completion and the rescue was looking more and more like a success, the weary diggers managed to smile
for the camera. The horses, especially Belle with all her missing fur, look dreadful in some shots, yet it was clear that the two pack horses had literally dodged a bullet.

Rescued horses, like rescued dogs, somehow know that they have been spared a horrible fate. Belle in her way, and Sundance in his, would be grateful for the rest of their lives.

“When you go up in the mountains on pack trips,” Dave had told me as we walked that final leg, “every day, you hope your day goes well and you don’t run into trouble.” He had harboured concerns that if we had dug the trench too deep, and the ground below wasn’t frozen, we would have encountered mud. He had also worried about the creek crossing. But his worries were over: everything had gone beautifully. When Dave saw how well the horses moved through the trench, he knew they could handle the long trek down the logging road. It was the stamina of the human handlers he questioned—yet they, too, had come through. But there was nothing left in our tanks. Nothing.

I didn’t say a lot after we loaded the horses onto Ray’s trailer. “Thanks for picking us up” was all I could muster as I sat slumped in Ray’s truck, the heater blasting.

Sara Olofsson, meanwhile, had donned several sweaters and was sitting on her couch in the cold and the dark. Her children (Logan, ten, and Emily, eight) were bunking with friends that night. Because there was no reliable cellphone service on Mount Renshaw, Sara had no way of getting in touch with Matt. He was always home from digging by 6:30 p.m. It was already 10:30 p.m. and he still wasn’t home, so she knew that either something had gone horribly wrong or everything was going just right.

Matt had actually phoned and texted her four hours earlier: “The horses are being walked out.” When she finally got the message, delayed as cellphone service in the mountains often was, Sara started to cry.
They’re out!
she thought.
They did it!
And Sara had what she conceded was a selfish thought: Matt wouldn’t have to dig tomorrow. For her, this was a wonderful Christmas gift—the knowledge that the horses would soon be warm, snoozing in a stall or dining on hay. They could have been dead and frozen, their bodies stiff, for lack of someone doing the right thing. But they weren’t, thought Sara, because a great many people did do the right thing.

Exhausted, I had thought I would be heading straight to my bed once home. But I was too wired to sleep. Several media outlets had called and left messages. There were also emails from the Canadian Press wire service, the
Edmonton Journal
and others, all wanting updates on the horses. CBC Newsworld, out of Toronto, wanted to do a five-minute, live television interview the following morning. From all across Canada, from Tulsa, Oklahoma, to Orlando, Florida, from Austria to Australia, reporters would all ask the same questions: How did you manage that feat? How are Belle and Sundance doing? Why did you take on this superhuman effort? How does it feel to have succeeded?