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that anyone else I knew would be there. Monika asked me to bring some warm gear for her—she didn’t own the heavy-duty winter clothing required for a mountaintop—so I packed another pair of Sorel boots, Marc’s thick, long army coat (which he swears you could sleep in comfortably during forty-below weather), his lined winter overalls and an extra pair of goggles.
    From McBride, it’s almost twenty kilometres to the parking lot. Just before the bridge over the Fraser River, I turned off the highway and followed Mountainview Road, which runs parallel to the river before heading northwest alongside the Rocky Mountains for a good long stretch. As I turned into the lot, a few sledders were busy unloading their machines. When I asked if they were here for the horse rescue, they looked amused and shook their heads no.

    The cold had bite, and the wind blowing snow across the wide-open field from the east made that bite even fiercer. I walked back to my truck and sat inside. It was too frigid to stand around in that nasty wind.
    Finally, someone who was actually part of the horse rescue showed up. Spencer Froese and Joey Rich were the first ones, and I was happy to see their familiar faces. Spencer’s mother, Irene, and his sister Robertta had taken riding lessons from me in the past. They lived just southeast of town on a grain farm and also raised buffalo. Then Lester Blouin arrived, with a borrowed snowmobile and his skimmer—an eight-by-three-foot heavy plastic sled that farmers use to pull newborn calves from the field to shelter. The crew planned to load the skimmer with all the gear needed to get the rescue operation rolling.
    Matt, whom I had never met in person, arrived next. He and I had been talking for several days on the phone, and it was nice, finally, to put a face to the voice. Dave Jeck followed with his daughter Toni, who nodded in my direction.
    Toni was born into a horse family and has worked in northern British Columbia as a wrangler; she and I have a love of horses in common, but neither of us has warmed to the other. People who are passionate about horses do not always see eye to eye. I once read a vet’s theory on why the horse world is marked by so much
jealousy and antagonism: he observed that riding a horse is about a human controlling an animal who may weigh six or seven times what the human does, so a room full of horse people is sometimes a room full of controllers. However, I thought to myself, this was a time for Toni and me to put our differences aside.
    Leif showed up shortly afterward. I met Leif eight years ago when Marc and I first moved to the valley and bought hay from his parents, whose farm is halfway between Dunster and McBride. I hadn’t seen him since he was a young teenager; he was now a grown man. I would never have recognized him.
    I felt encouraged by this assemblage of people. Lester wasn’t in the best of health, but he had come. And so had all these others. I was impatient to start, and feeling good about our prospects.
    We loaded Lester’s skimmer with the following: two winter horse blankets (they were lined and buckled at the belly so they’d fit snugly over a horse’s torso), two square bales of hay, several shovels and a roll of road carpet. Someone had suggested we try to walk the horses out on it. Until ruled out, all options remained on the table. More hay and shovels were loaded onto the sleds and tied down with bungee cords. Leif, Spencer and Joey took off on their sleds first, with Matt and me not far behind them.
    I had never been on a snowmobile before. I had driven lots of four-wheelers but usually just for short trips to feed horses or check
fences. I wasn’t the type of person who used such machines for pleasure. To me, they existed for a practical reason—to make my job easier. So being a passenger on a snowmobile took some getting used to. I slid on the cold and slippery plastic seat and found it difficult to hang on at the beginning. It ultimately