Lucky Lady

BIG LAKE — Maybe she’d rather not have wound up hypothermic with frostbitten toes, but having her horse Lady alive and well was a Christmas miracle for Sally Beach.

Beach came to the Mat-Su Valley Oct. 2 from Kansas. She said God called her and husband Jim to Wasilla to do volunteer work with the Wasilla Lake Church of the Nazarene. She and her family brought Lady with them.

On Christmas Eve, Lady and her son, Beach’s other horse Marshall, got out of their pen. Beach said there was a problem with the electric fence — a problem they were going to fix when her husband got home the next day.

“Just that particular day they decided to get out and go for a run and got in trouble for it,” Beach said.

Beach said Marshall came back alone. The horses had been staying with friends near Big Lake and when Lady didn’t come back, Beach’s friends went looking for Lady. In an e-mail recounting the event, Beach said it took her an hour to get to the scene and when she showed up she took Marshall out to join the search. Marshall seemed very intent, refusing to head down certain paths. Finally, Beach said she just threw the horse’s rope over his neck and let him lead the way.

Marshall took members of the search party to a creek along Hourglass Lake and soon enough they found Lady — in water up to her shoulders. Temperatures had dipped below zero.

“I kept talking to her and telling her not to give up and to keep fighting,” Beach said. “She is shivering so bad, her breathing very labored, and is so tired that I’m not sure she will survive.”

She and her friends tried to get the horse out with no luck. They called for help.

Big Lake Fire Chief Bill Gamble said his initial assessment when he got to the lake was much the same as Beach’s.

“When I first got there I didn’t think the horse was going to last,” he said. “(Lady was) just worn out from trying to get out of there.”

The first problem was getting to the horse. Neighbors and church members pitched in to help. One plowed a driveway to the lake with a Bobcat. Church members made a trail with their snowmachines. Gamble said he had rescued plenty of dogs and other animals, but never a horse. Still, rescuers knew what to do. Having donned survival suits, they looped straps around Lady’s belly and started to pull.

“It’s just pure manpower,” Gamble said.

And it wasn’t just the horse’s 800 pounds of flesh they were working against. Gamble said the horse was up to its belly in sucking mud.

“It took every bit of strength we could muster to extricate the animal,” Gamble says a statement recounting the rescue.

Despite the temperatures and it being Christmas Eve, Gamble said he wasn’t wanting for manpower.

“When the pager goes off we have people,” Gamble said. “Anything that we can do to help somebody, especially being involved in our community as much as we are, we’re ready to help as much as we can.”

During much of the rescue, Beach was in an ambulance being treated for hypothermia and frostbite. She’d been out in the cold almost three hours, she said, and had put her foot into water up to her thigh trying to get to Lady.

“The way those creeks run, it’s not Kansas,” she said. “You can be standing on snow thinking you’re on solid ground” and end up wet.

But when she heard Lady was out of the water, Beach said she couldn’t sit still. “I begged the EMTs to let me go to her and reluctantly they let me out.”

Of course, having been pulled out of the water, Lady wasn’t out of the woods. Beach recounted that the horse’s blanket had frozen to her back. Beach got the frozen blanket off and put on a new one.

Gamble said his crews had nothing to feed the horse except what they themselves eat on scene — Nature’s Valley granola bars. He said they fed the horse bar after bar — honey and oat-flavored variety — until feed was brought in.

A heated trailer arrived in short order, Beach said, but the doors were frozen shut. With the help of a blowtorch, Lady was loaded and on her way to the horse hospital in Chugiak.

As of Friday, Beech said, Lady is doing well.

“As long as she doesn’t develop pneumonia she’s out of the woods,” she said, and vets have her on medications they hope will prevent that.

Beach said she’s grateful for all the help she received.

“It was overwhelming that they would come do that for a horse,” she said of her neighbors and rescue personnel.

And, she said, as almost an added blessing she got a job out of the deal as well. The veterinarian who treated Lady had just that week lost her assistant on short notice, Gamble said. Beach said she’ll be going to work for her in January.

Beach said she sees a hand at work there, though, she joked, it might have been better if God had left her to read the want ads.

“It’s like, ‘hey, God, I can read the newspaper, you didn’t have to go to crisis extreme,’” she said with a laugh.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.