While Marylyn Jenkins filmed it, her husband Monte helped De deliver her foal.
It was, appropriately, Mother's Day 2004.
He did the imprint training, tapping on the bottom of the foal's hooves to prepare him for shoeing some day, gently inserting his fingers into the foal's mouth to get him used to a bit being placed there in the future, pressing on his back so he would one day know a saddle could sit there.
Monte set the foal down in the straw on the barn floor and they watched the little thing try to stand for the first time.
“He rolled backward and did a perfect backflip,” Marylyn says with a laugh.
“You know,” Monte had told Marylyn and their daughter Julie, who had discovered De pacing and sweating in the barn prior to the delivery, “this is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see a foal born.”
“What a great name,” Julie decided. “Chance.”
And so there he was: Chance, son of De, which is short for DeCaf, so named because of her calm demeanor.
Chance grew into the perfect horse, an easy favorite in a family that loves all five of its horses, and two mules.
“I mean, he's practically a dog!” Marylyn says. “He absolutely loves people. He's the first one to come running when you go out to the corral, and he comes right up and rests his chin on your shoulder. He has personality-plus.”
So it was no surprise that it was Chance, now a 4-year-old sorrel gelding, that Monte was riding last month on an elk hunting trip up the North Fork of the Blackfoot trailhead outside Ovando.
They were about nine miles in, near the south end of Lake Otatsi. As he had done many times before with Chance, Monte used a lead rope and halter to tie his horse to a tree while he left on foot to scout for signs of elk.
When he returned, the lead rope and halter were there.
Chance was not.
In some ways, you could trace Chance's history back to 1942.
That's when the Food and Drug Administration approved a drug called Premarin. A hormone replacement therapy, the drug relieved the symptoms of menopause in women.
You could also trace his history to the state of New Jersey, headquarters of Wyeth, a pharmaceutical giant that has made billions and billions of dollars off Premarin sales over the course of half a century.
The thing about Premarin, you see, is that it is made from the urine of pregnant horses. With 9 million women using the drug earlier in this decade, that required a lot of pregnant horses - 40,000 of them.
Wyeth signed contracts with hundreds of farmers, most of them in western Canada, to breed tens of thousands of horses every year in order to collect urine from the pregnant mares.
It angers animal rights activists, who say keeping the mares confined in narrow stalls for 20 hours a day, months on end, all the time hooked up to machines to collect their urine, is cruel and inhumane.
Maybe worse: 40,000 pregnant mares result in 40,000 foals being born each year. Most were sent to auction, where lucky ones would be bought for recreational use but most were purchased by “killer buyers” who shipped them off to feedlots for fattening and slaughter.
Horse meat, it turns out, is popular in Japan and Europe.
It all changed dramatically in 2002, when an independent study testing the safety of hormone replacement therapy reported that women taking the Premarin-type drug were prone to higher rates of heart attacks, blood clots, breast cancer and dementia.
Demand dropped through the floor, and Wyeth began producing a lower-dose version of the medication.
Almost overnight, Wyeth only needed 20,000 pregnant horses, not 40,000, and canceled many of its contracts with the Canadian horse farms.
Which left farmers stuck with thousands of unwanted pregnant mares.
“Dateline NBC” reported all this in 2003, as well as efforts by some Americans to save the newly unwanted horses from the slaughterhouse. Monte and Marylyn Jenkins were watching the show.
“I was one of those women” who had been taking Premarin, Marylyn says. “I asked my hubby if maybe we could look into adopting one of the horses, feeling guilty that a horse may die because I wouldn't still be on the drug.”
They went on the Internet and picked out a horse, but someone else got to it first.
“So we just said send us any horse they had,” Marylyn says.
They hooked up with a woman in Plains who was adopting 30 of the pregnant mares, and she volunteered to bring a horse back to Ronan the next time she went to Alberta to collect more of hers.
The woman delivered them Angel, whom the Jenkinses soon renamed DeCaf.
She was pregnant with Chance.
One of the first things Monte Jenkins noticed - besides the fact that Chance was missing - when he returned to the tree where he'd tied the horse, was fresh bear scat in the area that he hadn't seen before.
He's pretty sure it was a bear that panicked Chance, and caused him to wrestle free of his halter.
Monte tracked the horse back down toward the trailhead.
Chance's tracks led him onto the Paws Up Ranch, but they had just moved 100 horses through the area, and Chance's hoofmarks were lost in a sea of others.
Monte contacted the ranch's staff, and even though they assured him they would have noticed a strange horse among their herd, they let him look for himself.
No Chance.
Since that day on Oct. 18, the Jenkinses have contacted sheriff's departments, the U.S. Forest Service, the state brand inspector, outfitters, ranchers and veterinarians in the area. They've placed ads in the Missoulian. Helena Independent Record, Great Falls Tribune, the Lake County Leader in Polson and Blackfoot Valley Dispatch in Lincoln.
Marylyn, a Realtor with Re/Max Bayside Real Estate in Polson, sent an e-mail to 1,000 of her colleagues across the state. Thirty reported back that they hunt in the area and would be on the lookout. Another forwarded the e-mail to 40 friends and clients he knows who hunt there as well.
Monte returns as often as possible to search for the horse, and was back on Tuesday, this time in the Lincoln area.
On Monday, the Jenkinses got a call from the Lincoln Chamber of Commerce. Two local teenage boys had spotted a saddled, riderless horse in the Alice Creek area eight miles east of town.
Their initial euphoria - “Chance is alive!!!!!!!!!!!!” Marylyn wrote in an e-mail Monday evening - has been tempered somewhat.
They initially assumed the boys had spotted the horse over the weekend, but it turned out the sighting occurred on Nov. 2.
And there was one other thing that puzzled them.
“They described him almost down to a T, as far as the gear that was on him,” Marylyn says. “But they said he had a red halter on, and when he was lost, of course, his halter was laying on the ground.”
Maybe someone found the horse, put a halter on him, but Chance escaped again?
Has someone found the friendly horse and kept him?
“I just can't believe anyone would do that,” says Marylyn, who can't help but cry every time she talks about Chance. “Find a riderless horse with a saddle on and not report it, knowing there could be an injured hunter out there in the woods?”
They're praying that an outfitter wakes up one morning and finds an already-saddled horse milling around with his pack. Or that a rancher discovers a friendly stranger on his spread. Or that a driver sees a saddled horse walking near Highway 200. Or that a hunter spies a lone horse in the woods with a small white star on his forehead and a white sock on his left rear foot, and can get word to them quickly about his location.
They've been told there's still plenty of grass for Chance to feed on, and he can, of course, drink from many lakes, rivers and streams in Montana's mountains.
But they know winter is bearing down, and time is running out. They want a chance to rescue their horse before that.
They want Chance.
Reporter Vince Devlin can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at vdevlin@missoulian.com.
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Lori wrote on Nov 12, 2008 11:25 AM:
" Vince: Please keep us all updated on this story. I hope that someone finds the horse or if someone already has, that they do the right thing and return him to his family and his home. Your article brought tears to my eyes and I wish I could go up there and help the family look for him right now. I think your story will help and it shows how much Chance means to his family. "
Bill wrote on Nov 12, 2008 8:38 AM: