The Rescue of Belle and Sundance (16 page)

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.”

 

“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.

 

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.

 

“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:

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 Marc 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.