Kim Garcia snuggles the horse she used to call Smoky. Now she's nicknamed him Frosty, after a nearly fatal fall through the ice.
"I could just see his nose and eyes," her husband, Bob Garcia said.
It was Bob who found the horse Tuesday night nearly submerged in a pond on their property. The horse had fallen through a beaver hole. "I just ran over and grabbed him and started screaming for my wife," Garcia said.
Kim called 911 and Bob held on until Goshen Volunteer Firefighters arrived and helped pull the horse out of the water.
They put the 450-pound horse on a big red tarp and dragged the horse 150 yards to the barn.
"My wife and firefighters started rubbing him down with dry comforters off the beds in the houses," Garcia said.
The rescuers tried to warm the horse by covering him with blankets until the veterinarian, Dr. Katherine Skiff Kane, arrived.
"We couldn't get his temperature to even register for two hours," Dr. Kane said. "My thermometer goes down to 88 degrees and he was below that."
The nearly frozen horse stopped breathing once. "We put an IV in his jugular vein and started him on drugs to prevent shock," Dr. Kane said.
All the hard work soon started paying off. "He was standing, eating, talking by the time we were done," Dr. Kane said.
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The horse's legs are cut up from the jagged ice and there is still the risk of infection or pneumonia. But he's alive, thanks to some determined rescuers.
"The Goshen Fire Department went way beyond their call," Bob Garcia said.
