A WHILE AGO I wrote about Belle and Sundance… and I swear, I’ve been searching my backlogs for an hour now and I cannot find that post!  Arrgh.  (Update:  I have since found my original story – click here!)

Anyway, as I remember the story, it went something like this:

Hikers were up in the high country in Canada and they spotted two horses who were stranded, surrounded by snow, with no food.  They were so hungry, they had eaten the tails off of each other.

The hikers returned back to town and organized a rescue party – except the weather was so bad, it took a while to get back to the horses.

By the time the rescue party was able to depart to find the  horses, they brought  food and a gun.  The food was for the horses and so was the gun… they didn’t know what condition the horses would be in when they finally reached the pair.

Luckily, the horses were still standing.

My memory is a little fuzzy here, but I think someone figured out who the owner was and contacted him.  And, I think he said he was a hunter and winter came in too quickly and he couldn’t get his horses out – so he just left them.

And no, he didn’t want to pay to have them rescued.

Then there was a bit of a skirmish about who owned them or if they were abandoned.

Anyway, all of that took a while…

And, I think… the decision was made to feed them so they would have some strength while the rest of the town banded together to figure out how to gain ownership of the horses and then to – dig.

And that’s what  they did.

They dug.  And dug and dug and dug… shoulder width was just about all they could manage.  Digging in the snowdrifts just wide enough to allow a leader to pass followed by skinny horses.

I cannot remember how long it took to dig the path, but you can imagine the effort that was put into the enormous task of bringing these horses down from the high country by footpath.

Remarkable.

Stunning, really.

And they did it.

The horses were barely strong enough to make the trip, but their will brought them through.

I remember cheering and crying as I watched this unfold via the internet.

Amazing and Powerful.

I actually don’t know what has become of the horses, but I do know that their story has been told via this book…

I’ve ordered it.  (No affiliation).

You can, too, by clicking here.

UPDATE:  I FOUND MY ORIGINAL POST!  CLICK HERE TO GO TO ORIGINAL STORY ABOUT BELLE AND SUNDANCE!

I’ll tell  you all about it, once I’ve finished the real story… we’ll see how good my memory holds up after reading the actual account.

I bet there is a happy ending… I can just feel it.  ;)

HORSE AND MAN is a blog in growth… if you like this, please pass it around!