Dustin Lyle wasn’t paying much attention to the wild horses on the side of the road until he heard his girlfriend Val scream.
“My instincts, I just got out and looked,” he said.
At first, Lyle could only see a mare on the side of the steep hillside above him, until seconds later when he spotted her foal, who was stuck in a web of branches on the edge of sheer drop.
“I finally seen the colt just laying in the sticks and I just jumped out really and just hoofed her right up there because I see nobody else was going.”
Lyle, alongside his girlfriend, his father, and his father’s wife, had been driving about 40 minutes southwest of Sundre, Alta., around 2 p.m. on Sunday, to a fishing spot that Lyle frequents. Sundre is about 110 km northwest of Calgary.
That’s when they, along with a few other sight-seers, happened to come across a band of wild horses. The herd had descended the steep bluff to the north of the road, and were grazing at the bottom of the valley – all but one mare and her foal, who had become stranded on their way down.
A daring mission
In a video posted to the Help Alberta Wildies Society’s (HAWS) Facebook page that now has over 230,000 views, the foal can be seen slipping and falling, coming to rest in a tangle of branches right at the edge of the cliff.
Helpless, it squirms and flails before lying still, its mother watching nearby. When Lyle decided to take action, he had no idea his entire rescue was being filmed.
“About 8 p.m. at night my daughter called me and told me she was all excited about it.… She called and said that it was [online] there and [was] like dad, you’re famous.”
Lyle, climbing the nearly vertical slope, first got level to the foal, whose mother had been standing by protectively. When the mare turned and moved a little farther along the hill, Lyle took his chance.
“I just grabbed it, grabbed it by the front leg and drug it up. And then I got it on its feet and then kind of pushed it towards the mom. She was pretty nervous about what I was doing.
“But anyways, I got it up as you probably seen in the video, and then she came back and got it.”
HAWS president Darell Glover said that without Lyle’s intervention, the fate of the foal would have been tragic.
“It was just one of those chance encounters that anybody could have missed, and it would have cost that foal its life had they not been there.”
“Everybody’s calling Dustin a hero and he probably says I’m no hero.… But the fact is, he didn’t even hesitate.”
Glover said wild horses frequent the precarious spot, and that they’ve lost several animals to the cliffs in the past.
“It’s a very dangerous spot, and up on top of that cliff that you can’t see in that video is a mesa with really nice green grass. So the horses come up from both sides up onto the top, and they’ll spend days up there on that grass.”
“But then of course, when they try to come down, the older horses can traverse that hillscape much better than the foals.”
The foal that Lyle saved was likely only a day or two old, estimates Glover.
When the foal and mare eventually made it to safety on the valley floor, the few people who had been watching the rescue gave Lyle a round of applause, said Debbie McGauran, who was there with her grandson.
McGauran is a member of HAWS and the one who filmed the entire ordeal. She said it was her 12-year-old grandson who first spotted the stuck foal.
Watching from below was a harrowing experience, said McGauran.
“You see clumps of the mud break free and roll down that hillside, and I’m thinking, oh my God, like the mare could fall off the cliff, the foal could fall off the cliff, or Dustin could fall off the cliff.”
What’s in a name
Glover said when he received the footage from McGauran, he knew it would go viral.
Since starting HAWS to help advocate and raise awareness for Alberta’s wild horses in 2014, Glover said their cause has resonated with people not only in the province, but from all around the world.
“These horses are unique to Alberta, so they don’t exist like this anywhere else. So that became something that we felt culturally responsible to … protect as much as we could.”
Lyle, on the other hand, has been pleasantly surprised by the reaction.
“[It’s] pretty unreal, like this morning, last night, I seen all the comments on there. Appreciate that.”
“I didn’t realize this was that important, but now I do. The wild horses are pretty amazing animals.”
He said it was a good feeling to see the foal and its mother back with the rest of the herd. After the rescue, he went fishing.
And McGauran’s grandson was given the privilege of naming the foal.
So what did he settle on?
Tumbler.
