With hope waning, horse is found

On Nov. 15, two months of sleepless nights, searching, agonizing, and waiting for the phone to ring came to an end for Cloquet's Anne Gullion. Her 23-year-old horse Taz, which had disappeared from the Cutfoot Sioux Horse Camp in Itasca County in mid-September, had been found.

Without her horse, her world had become a blur.

Gullion and a group of friends had been at the camp northwest of Deer River, in the Chippewa National Forest, as they had done many times before. Taz had somehow come off his picket line while the group was having breakfast at a nearby campsite. When Gullion returned to her site and discovered the Arab gelding was gone, his tie rope was still attached to the line and the clasp was not broken.

"At first we thought a bear that had been sighted in the area had scared him," Gullion said. "But then we decided he was maybe scratching his head on the post, the clasp opened and he just walked off."

There were no signs of tracks to follow - no trampled brush, piles of manure or any other tangible sign of a large animal on the run. The desperate search that ensued lent no clues to his whereabouts. Taz, it seemed, had vanished into thin air.

Gullion reluctantly returned to her farm in Cloquet, but not before notifying the Itasca County Sheriff's Office, the U.S. Forest Service and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.

In the days that followed, she posted notices about her missing horse on social media, alerted numerous horse friends throughout the state and region, created scores of "Missing Horse" posters, and made the four-hour round trip to the national forest numerous times. She and her friends - alongside many people she didn't know - traversed the dense wilderness and roads on foot, horseback and ATVs.

Gullion also contracted with Rite Track of southern Wisconsin to utilize a thermal imaging drone over the forest, but two 12-hour sessions came up empty.

The paralyzing fear began to emerge that Taz might have been stolen.

Withering hope

On Oct. 16, Gullion wrote on her Facebook site, "After almost four weeks, there has still been no sign of Taz. If he's in the woods, hopefully with the leaves down and the hunters moving around, he may be seen around Cutfoot Sioux. If he was taken, however, I'm hoping he will show up for sale on Facebook or at a horse auction somewhere in the area or region."

On Nov. 1, Gullion also joined NetPosse.com, a national organization that searches for missing horses.

Time continued to pass with no breakthroughs, no sightings, no signs of a horse on the roads or in the woods, and no tips from horse sales about a horse that looked like Taz, with his reddish-brown coat and distinct white blaze down his face. Gullion decided to offer a $1,000 reward.

She then created and posted a whole new round of posters.

By the second week in November, Gullion had decided she'd give it one more week and then try to do whatever she could to let go of the hope of Taz's return.

"I knew I had to somehow move on," she said. "I needed to start sleeping at night."

That was easier said than done. Gullion and Taz had been together since 2012, and he was one of those horses that was unforgettable.

On Nov. 15, the call came that she had begun to doubt would ever come.

Spotted

Gullion was traveling near Madison, Wisconsin, when her cell phone rang. Despite her determination to let go of her heartache over Taz's disappearance, she couldn't help but feel that now-familiar quickening of her heart.

"It was the Itasca County Sheriff's Office, telling me a horse had been sighted near Pine Grove Lodge [about 7 or 8 miles from the Horse Camp]," Gullion said. "I let out a shout and wanted to turn around right then and there and head over."

That was not practical, given the fact it was nighttime by then and nearly a seven-hour drive back to the Chippewa. Instead, she called horse friends Eileen and Ed Menafee, who live near the forest, asking them if they could drive over and check it out.

"When I got the call from Anne," Eileen Menafee recalled, "I ran up to my husband, told him to hook up the horse trailer as fast and he could, and follow me over to the resort."

In the meantime, the unfolding drama continued in the deep woods of Itasca County. The sheriff's office received the call about the horse sighting from Brent Meyers of Inger. The office then contacted Mike Fairbanks, the DNR conservation officer assigned to the area. Fairbanks in turn talked with Pine Grove Lodge owner Shawn Wahlstrom and asked him to be on the lookout.

"I had been doing some yard work down by one of the cabins," Wahlstrom said. "I happened to look up and I saw the horse just walking by. I called Mike right away and said, 'He's here!'"

Fairbanks, who was already out searching, said he'd be right over.

Wahlstrom cautiously approached the horse, who was still in flight mode after two months on its own.

"I was trying to keep an eye on him and be quiet at the same time," he said. "And then I stepped on something - probably a stick. It spooked him and he ran down the driveway."

About five minutes later the Menafees drove into the area and spotted the horse as he worked his way along the woods. Eileen said she knew beyond the shadow of a doubt it was Taz.

By then, it was nearly dark. The odds the horse would be captured were beginning to dwindle. The fear was he would panic and disappear back into the woods.

Fairbanks approached the nervous horse with a plastic coffee can filled with pebbles in the hopes of drawing him in with the lure of feed.

"Mike just said to him, 'Hey buddy, you hungry?' and the horse came right up to him," Wahlstrom said.

Fairbanks eventually managed to loop a rope around the horse's neck while Eileen Menafee grabbed a halter and some grain out of her truck and was able to secure him and eventually load him in the trailer.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Emotional reunion

The Menafees housed Taz at their nearby farm, fed and watered him and kept a close eye on him until Gullion was able to get over to pick him up. They could tell he had lost a significant amount of weight during his sojourn in the wilderness and he had an injury to his groin area that was concerning.

She said Taz seemed downright grateful to at last be taken care of instead of responsible for his own fate. He ate, drank - and yes, peed, despite his swollen groin.

By the time Gullion and a small group of faithful "horse hunter" friends gathered for the reunion with Taz, emotions were high. When Gullion walked up to the corral fence and called softly to Taz, his ears swiveled, his head shot up - and he whinnied.

By then, Gullion, along with those gathered, were fighting back tears over the longed-for reunion that most of them had given up on.

With that innate sense that animal lovers develop over the years, Gullion knew better than to run up to him and fling her arms around his neck - though that was certainly what her heart was doing. Instead, she walked up to him slowly and quietly and simply rested her hand on his neck.

The circle, at last, was complete.

After a brief time of celebration and congratulations, the group looked on as Gullion loaded Taz into her horse trailer and pulled out of the yard toward home.

Two hours later, he was reunited with his pasturemates and the horses that board at Gullion's farm. Friends and family welcomed him with a giant "Welcome Home Taz" banner and a champagne toast to his miraculous recovery.

A subsequent vet visit determined he had lost 200 pounds while in the wilderness, contracted two tick-borne diseases, and needed treatment for the trauma in his groin area. The vet said the injury was likely due to malnutrition and therefore treatable.

Gullion is once again sleeping at night and her heart is happy, she said. By all reports, she isn't the only one.

Little did Taz know that trailer ride back to Cloquet was to be his "Oz" moment: one that would transport him back to the place his heart had been yearning for all along.

The irony - and the blessing - of it all was this: When Taz was finally spotted, after two months of wandering in some of the densest wilderness of the Chippewa, right in the midst of the Minnesota firearms deer season and on the brink of the first winter storm of the season, he had been headed east - toward home.