The Rescue of Belle and Sundance Read Free Page A

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

    F or 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