LAKE MINCHUMINA, Alaska - “Go across, Mr. B…. Careful there!... Easy — easy — Good boy, Mr. B.!”

It’s hard enough traveling in difficult country with seasoned pack horses, but when my sister Miki and I suddenly found ourselves 50 miles from home with a single inexperienced horse, we had to carefully balance encouragement with a crash course in wilderness travel. Our young Icelandic gelding was understandably upset when his two companion pack horses escaped and ran away just north of Straightaway Glacier below Denali. While trying to decide what to do that night, we considered B.’s frame of mind.

The old horse, Dropi, would not have left camp, but when he accidentally turned loose his darling Meyla, the energetic little mare dashed off and took him along. After a frantic night trying to locate them, we had to make a wrenching decision: wait in that remote camp for them to return, retreat to search our back trail, or head straight home.

If Meyla allowed Dropi to take the lead, he’d return to us or simply head for the river that he knew would eventually lead him home. But with Meyla in the lead, she might run for miles before stopping for grass. Then, being unfamiliar with the area, she’d either backtrack the route we’d just come, or ramble carelessly across the 1,200 square miles of wilderness between the Foraker and McKinley rivers.

With Mr. B. as anxious and unsettled as we were, we decided to backtrack. B. carried our supplies as we hiked almost 35 miles in 3 days across brush-laced tundra and dashing glacier streams. We hoped to overtake the two runaways, or at least find their tracks, but spotted no sign of them en route to the trapping cabin we’d left a few days earlier. That meant another difficult decision. Should we return to the high country, where our chance of finding them was less than the chance that they returned home unaided? Or take a shortcut across lower country so we could get home quickly and start searching by air?

The rivers were rising with glacier melt, and we didn’t want to jeopardize our remaining horse — or ourselves — in the July floods. However, taking the shortcut meant following a trail we’d never done with horses before because it crossed many small bogs and drainages. Could the little black gelding do it?

The first creek, Whisper Creek, ran swift and swollen with rainwater. It reached hip deep, but had a solid bottom. The second drainage, had such a boggy bottom that we dragged all the feed and gear off Mr. B.’s saddle and led him across unloaded.

The horse’s natural confidence and his trust in our judgment served him well as he carefully made his way over the hummocky drainage. After that, many times per mile we repeatedly scouted bogs or drainages, walking B. across the soggy waterways, usually over shrubby growth where he was less likely to sink through floating mats of moss. Two anxious days of travel brought us to the West Line trapping cabin.

B. and the dogs took a day of rest while we replaced the sod on the cabin roof and then we set out on the most challenging leg of the journey home. With the river high, we could only travel down the sand bars for a few miles before the braided river contracted into a narrower channel that became too deep to safely cross from one sand bar to another. That meant clawing our way through the brush along the riverbank, and Mr. B. didn’t like it at all. His bulky saddle panniers and the top-load bag with our tent and sleeping bags crashed into dense alders at every step. He twisted and staggered, breaking two-inch trees as he forced his pack through alders that sometimes were so close together Miki had to pry them over or around his packs.

The young horse didn’t understand why we couldn’t just march on down the sandbars. When we paused breathlessly beside the riverbank, searching for a route through the brush, he took charge and confidently stepped off the bank into the swift water.

While Mr. B. usually did his best for us, he could be headstrong when he disagreed with our directions, so I immediately wrapped the lead rope around a tree to stop the wayward horse. Miki lunged for the rope, too, catching it just as B.’s hind feet dropped into the chest-deep water. The force of his tumble bent B.’s head against the lead rope, twisting his nose down into the water so he couldn’t breathe.

“You’re pulling his head under — let go!” Miki shouted.

An instant later B. had dragged Miki in and they were both swimming. I either toppled in or jumped in — I don’t remember — and trailed behind through the roiling silty water. B. swam strongly for the sandbar across the river and Miki towed along behind until she crashed into a log projecting from the cutbank. She clung to the log to catch her breath, then climbed over and followed B.

I rolled over some sweepers, hit the log, hung up, climbed over, and swam after her. Our three dogs gamely followed us through this ridiculous scenario.

The river was clearly too deep now, but we couldn’t travel along the west bank because of a range of bluffs downstream. We took advantage of the sandbar as long as we could, and found a shallower, safer crossing some ways downstream.

Mr. B. now understood that he had to trust our judgment as we guided him through the thickets. Progressing slowly, we could eventually angle farther from the river to avoid the alders, but this meant guiding B. around and through numerous bogs. “Careful there, Mr. B.!” One narrow stream with bottomless muck lay in a steep ravine and our loaded pack horse had to jump the drainage and land on a steep slope. “Go across, Mr. B.!” His hind feet missed solid ground and it took him a minute to muscle his back feet out of the mud, but he still trusted us.

One day we traveled only four miles, and I felt like I was snowshoeing as I plowed through dense hip- and shoulder-deep dwarf birch that ripped at our clothes like coiled cable, air-conditioning my jeans. The shrubbery carpeted thigh-deep holes, tussocks and ditches as well as the bone-wrenching deadfall of an old forest fire.

Despite a cracked screen, our GPS drew us back to the river where the terrain demanded that we cross. The water level had been fluctuating by seven inches and we worried that we might have to wait for low water to cross without swimming, but after some scouting we found an island with one hip-deep channel and a second chest-deep channel. We crossed safely to a sandbar just above a confluence with one final river.

“Go across, Mr. B.! Careful there! Good, good boy!” Chest-deep in water and sinking into quicksand, B. dropped his head and hauled himself forward. He stopped on command to rest on a firm spot in knee-deep water, then plowed across the final yards.

Another day’s trek carried us across the charred remains of a recent burn to a supply cache and a canoe. With nothing but alders along the riverbank for the last 12 miles, we threw B.’s load into the canoe and let him stride unencumbered through the brush. Two days later his month-long journey ended with a fine romp on our overgrown lawn. Mr. B. learned a lot about bogs and rivers on his odyssey, and with him safely home we could turn our attention toward searching for his missing companions, who as of this writing are still at large in the wilderness!

Julie Collins is a trapper and freelance writer who lives near Lake Minchumina.