The Rescue of Belle and Sundance Read Free Page B

seventy years, what Glen saw on that early fall day jarred him. He was hiking with his dog Badge when
he chanced upon two horses gambolling high in the alpine about two kilometres north of the Renshaw cabin. “There’s a ridge running south and east from the peak of Mount Renshaw separating two meadows,” said Glen. “This is up high, where the last grass is. The place is a small pocket of short grass, with water. I’m not a horse person, but I would think it would be an ideal place for them.”
    The horses shook their heads at the hiker and his dog. First the horses came to them, then they scattered, then they returned. Using a telephoto lens, Glen took pictures of them. The horses in the photos look fat and sassy and happy and, with their glistening coats, in perfect health. They wore bells at their necks, as is common for horses taken into the mountains—to give fair warning to bears and to help a rider retrieve them should they spook and flee. But there was no owner to be seen. The whole thing puzzled Glen. What were two horses doing way up there alone?
    Not long after, as he sat in the meadow eating his lunch, Glen saw a helicopter fly overhead. He assumed it was part of a search team looking for two lost horses. But when he later called Yellowhead Helicopters, which has a base in the nearby village of Valemount, he was told that what he had observed was a routine flight to check out a stand of timber. So Glen called the RCMP, who gave him the answer he was looking for. A man on his way to Grande Cache, Alberta, had had two of his horses bog down on Mount Renshaw.
Having learned that the animals’ presence on the mountain was known, Glen assumed the owner would return for them very soon. Horses are valuable animals; no one would just leave them there, especially with winter coming.

    Aside from Glen, few in the Robson Valley knew there were horses running free in the alpine that fall. One exception was Wes Phillips. Wes started working as a guide in the mountains at the age of seventeen, almost thirty years before, and to him, the lost horses presented an opportunity. He had just come back from a trip to the Yukon when “the old moccasin telegraph,” as he calls word of mouth in the mountains, told him that two horses were loose on the north fork of the Blackwater River below Mount Renshaw. “There’s an unwritten law in the mountains,” he says. “Someone callous enough to leave any unbranded horses over four up in the mountains . . . it’s finders keepers.” Four is deemed to be the age a wild horse would leave its dam.
    Twice, once at Thanksgiving in mid-October and again a week later, Wes drove up the logging road—formally called McKale Forest Service Road but locally also known as Blackwater River Road. He parked at kilometre twenty-six and then searched for the
horses on foot. The weather grew nasty as he went that first time, with cold rain turning to snow, resulting in a four-inch dump. The second time, a foot of snow covered the ground, putting an end to Wes’s search.
    Wes had reason to believe that even high atop a mountain in winter’s grip, horses can find ways to survive. “Horses can surprise you with their fortitude,” he says. “One time I had a horse hit by a train. Half his face was torn off. I thought, Better put him down. But in six months it had healed over. Another time, a horse of mine was attacked by wolves. He was just a little horse, but he got away. He couldn’t walk for four or five months, but he made it.”
    Wes felt certain that the two horses were alive and somewhere on the mountain, but where was anybody’s guess.

    When October turned to November up on Mount Renshaw, everything changed for Belle and Sundance. The snow began to fall with greater regularity, and the nights got colder. The banquets of rich alpine grass the two horses had enjoyed in the fall became just memories. The verdant mountain meadows, which had offered the horses a freedom the likes of which