As two women were enjoying canoeing down an Alberta River, they had no idea they would have the chance to save a life.
The sun was out, the water was glistening, and the birds were singing, but the idyllic drift down the Kananaskis River was interrupted when a horse waded into the water under a highway bridge and abruptly blocked their course.
Looking to their right, they realized what the horse was after: a foal was seemingly trapped in deep water against the concrete side of a bridge support.
Anna Gleig and Ava Haddad, both students at the University of Calgary’s environmental science program, decided to lend a hoof to the stranded foal, who could only just keep its head above water.
Paddling toward the bank on the other side of the river, the two scared the mother horse away, which at least made things a little safer. Gleig, a former lifeguard, led the rescue effort as the two swam over to the animal. Gleig supported it while Haddad paddled and pushed.
“He didn’t fight back against us,” Haddad recounted to CBS News. “He just let us take him, so that worked out really well.”
“Somehow,” Gleig explained, they managed to get the 90-pound foal back on the bank. But there was another problem: his mother had run off.
They waited there in the midday sun from a safe distance, expecting the foal’s mother would come back to look for it, but she didn’t. At times they considered leaving the foal, but every time they paddled away it would wade back out in the water and require rescuing again.
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Eventually, they just put him in the boat and decided to paddle on to see if they could find help.
“I ended up putting my life-jacket on him and picking him up and putting him in the boat with us. And miraculously, somehow he was calm enough, and was OK with being in the boat,” Gleig said. “He took a little nap there because he was just so tired.”
After about 20 minutes, the paddlers were able to get a hold of someone from a First Nations community who knew exactly which horse the foal belonged to.
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The man loaded the foal into his pickup truck, and before the day was out the two women received confirmation the animal had been reunited with his mother.
They described to CBS News that they were proud and happy to have given the foal a “second life,” reasoning that if they hadn’t passed by, it’s likely the foal would have drowned.
WATCH the story below from CBS News…
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