The Rescue of Belle and Sundance (6 page)

BOOK: The Rescue of Belle and Sundance
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Glenn Daykin is thirty-four years old, a lean man with a shaven head and tattoos on his arms. The part owner of Spin Drift Power Sports, he has been fixing machines since he was fourteen years old and has lived most of his life in small-town British Columbia. His shop on 2nd Avenue, fronted by turquoise steel siding, is chock full of snowmobiles, four-wheelers, helmets and all the other accoutrements you would expect in a place that rents and repairs machines that scoot over land or snow. The air in the shop is redolent of hard plastic and motor oil, and the gleaming snow machines look much bigger and more powerful up close.
Glenn had been in the shop one day in late November when several sledders came in with some odd news.
“You’re not going to believe what we saw up on Mount Renshaw,” one told him. And, at first, Glenn didn’t believe them. His initial reaction was stupefaction. Glenn grew up on a farm, and while machines are his bread and butter, he knows horses, too. When he asked around, he was told that a local outfitter had the situation well in hand. But when sledders kept returning to his shop with news of more sightings and when the weather turned increasingly foul, he knew he had to act. In the appeal he would broadcast on the sledders’ forum, Glenn reported what he had been hearing from sledders. Some dates and details were wrong: Glenn
was under the impression that the man who had left the horses behind was a hunter who had gone up there in October. But some parts of Glenn’s plea were spot on: he said that with the heavy snow on the mountains, the horses would be in desperate shape, that horses didn’t deserve this treatment and that many people in the valley had expressed concern about them. He appealed for more information “on this sad situation.”
Glenn Daykin had sent out an SOS. But with Christmas less than two weeks away, with the valley economy so distressed, with everyone so busy with shopping and all the other obligations of the holiday season, would anyone respond? Would the plight of two pack horses register on the Robson Valley radar?
On Saturday, December 13, I attended another Christmas party—this one at Monika and Tim’s house. Overnight, the temperature had plummeted. It was thirty degrees below zero at my place when I walked up to the highway that evening to wait for my ride. The boards on the porch groaned and cracked, the snow crunched loudly underfoot, and my nostrils pinched in the cold. At these temperatures, exposed skin is vulnerable to frostbite in as little as fifteen minutes. The trick is to dress in layers and pay
special attention to protecting the extremities—head, hands and feet—where the heat loss is most acute.
I knew before I left the house, before walking outside, that it was exceptionally frosty. Sound seems to travel better in such wicked cold. The sound of the tires on the highway—cold hard rubber meeting cold hard pavement—is a noise like nothing else. And there is something about such arctic temperatures that casts a stillness over everything. As I stood by the roadway, I admired the beautiful, clear night and the star-dappled sky. A bitter wind blew, and snow drifted across the top part of the road. Glad that I had decided to wear my warm winter boots, I wrapped my scarf tighter around my neck and pulled it up over my ears. Luckily, I didn’t have to wait long for my ride.
The talk of the evening was those horses up the Renshaw. Ray and Lu were there, and Ray, especially, felt terrible that the horses had been abandoned on the mountain. He wished he could have helped save them. We were torn between faint hope that the horses might endure even this cold—but then what?—and a wish that death had come to end their suffering. Neither thought offered comfort.
At the party, we all felt the same. Disconsolate, strangely bereft. Whatever the name for this loss, it had taken place too close to home.
Chapter 5
HANDGUN—OR HAY?
O
n the following Monday, December 15, Logan Jeck and Leif Gunster set out for Mount Renshaw on their errand of mercy to relieve an exhausted search-and-rescue crew and tow down two sleds stuck in deep snow. That was the day they made their grim discovery: two horses clinging to life in a gully above the treeline.
And now the ball set in motion by Ray Long, Reg Marek, Monika Brown and Glenn Daykin really started to roll. That evening, Ray
called Monika to share the news that the abandoned horses were alive, though barely. Monika then called me.
I was in the middle of finally writing some Christmas cards. I had been putting off all the usual preparations because I just couldn’t conjure up my Yuletide spirit. I usually have my house decorated the first weekend in December and, shortly after, start baking a variety of Swiss Christmas cookies, from recipes passed down from my grandmother. But I still hadn’t done any baking or decorating. Normally driven and energetic, I was feeling overworked, tired and generally sorry for myself.
“This is not going to make you feel better, what I am going to tell you,” Monika said. She relayed what she knew: the two starving horses were alive and trapped in six feet of snow on Mount Renshaw, a point some forty-five kilometres from McBride and accessible only by snowmobile. Their plight seemed hopeless. News of the two horses on the mountain had triggered in several individuals an urgently felt impulse to rescue them, but still vague was who would do the rescuing, and how, and who would lead the effort—not to mention who would decide their fate: let the horses live and try to get them out or end their misery. A clock had begun to tick.
As Monika and I talked, we started to formulate some sort of plan of action. Getting up there was the first step and the major challenge. Neither of us is a sledder.
I called Logan Jeck on his cellphone to try to get information, any information, on these horses. No answer. I called two friends with snowmobiles and, again, failed to connect. The adrenalin flowing, my frustration growing, I called another friend, who suggested I call Sara Olofsson and her partner, Matt Elliott. Luckily, I immediately got Sara—someone I knew, but not well—and explained the dreadful situation.
Funny, outrageous and sharp, Sara is a lifelong horsewoman. Her first word, at the age of two, was “horse.” By four, she was on her first horse. By nine, she had saved up $900 to buy her first saddle horse. I knew I could count on her. I told Sara that I was looking for someone to sled up there and see if these horses needed to be put down or if they could be helped.
Before I could finish my plea, Sara looked at Matt, as she put it, “the way only a woman can,” and he agreed to go up the following day. Matt—a quiet man then thirty-one years old—also had a soft spot for animals, so Sara’s sell was an easy one even though the ride was apparently difficult, especially with a passenger on board.
Sara promised me that Matt would get me there safely. “Just hang on as tight as you can, and you’ll be fine,” Sara told me.
Then I thought better of the plan. None of us knew precisely where the horses were or what the terrain was like. I didn’t know
Matt nor how good a snowmobiler he was; I knew only that his having a passenger on board would make tricky sledding trickier. As much as I wanted to go, I worried that I would slow Matt down, so I reluctantly declined. I told him what to look for when deciding whether to keep the horses alive or not, and I underlined the risk of colic from overfeeding. “One flake of hay for each horse,” I instructed him. “No more. The horses should be alert, with their heads up. If not . . .”
Sara and Matt spent the next few hours getting everything organized, and Sara—reinforcing what I had said—carefully instructed Matt on what to look for when making his difficult choice. “Look at the eyes,” Sara told Matt. “You’ll know. If the horses have fight, if they’re standing on their own, if they want to leave when you do—those are all good signs. Pinch the skin: in two or three seconds, it should go flat again. Longer means dehydration. And, finally, check their manure. Diarrhea is not good.”
Matt seemed fired up by the mission. “I don’t care if no one else is going,” he said. “I’m going.”
Come what may, something was being done for those horses, and I took a little consolation in that.
What I hadn’t known when I called Sara that day is that the name Matt Elliott gave the rescue attempt instant legitimacy. Matt is a logger and heavy equipment operator who works both in the Robson Valley and in Alberta. He studied specialty mechanics in college and can operate heavy equipment of all kinds—from complicated machines such as dangle-head processors to skidders, cats and wheel loaders.
More important, he is—here where the snowmobile is a kingpin in the local economy—a champion sledder. He started sledding when he was fifteen years old. A dirt-bike accident had broken both legs above the ankle and put him in a wheelchair for six months. Matt remembers how frightened he was that he would never escape that chair. “I would have sold my soul to walk,” he says. It drove the teenager crazy that he couldn’t ski that winter, but when a friend took him out on a snowmobile, young Matt was immediately hooked. And then came the competitions.
“I did okay a few times” is how he puts it. In fact, he has twice, in 2002 and 2003, won the hill-climbing championship at Jackson Hole, Wyoming—the most famous snowmobile competition in the world. These invitation-only contests draw up to three hundred sledders vying for trophies. Winners end up with big-name sponsors and are celebrated on spectacular videos that feature daring climbs, sharp turns and spraying snow from very muscular machines.
Four-year-old boys on the streets of McBride see Matt as a hero and fashion mogul. They love his Arctic Cat jacket and tricked-out lifted diesel truck. The kids sheepishly say hi to him on the sidewalk. For these children, Matt has star quality.
A natural competitor, Matt hates losing. And when the naysayers said that getting two horses off Mount Renshaw in mid-winter couldn’t be done, people like Matt saw it as a challenge to be overcome in his own backyard.
While Matt prepared for the next day, Monika called me to relay what she had learned from Leif—that the horses’ condition was, as he put it, “bad enough to make a person cry. Those two horses looked like really skinny Holstein cows, with their hipbones sticking out and all the ribs showing.”
BOOK: The Rescue of Belle and Sundance
8.14Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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