Sport owes Justin McCloud a steak. A 12-ounce sirloin steak, to be precise, straight off the grill, and with a little A-1 sauce on the side.

McCloud was just sitting down to dinner, lovingly prepared by his fiancé, Tori Miller, when the call came in to their Spring Lake home late Tuesday. A horse was stuck, very stuck, in mud at a Carthage farm.

Veterinarian Jim Hamilton was already on the scene and told McCloud, in so many words, that freeing the horse was going to take a lot more than gentle clucking or a carrot lure.

In their function as the North Carolina Specialized Mobile Animal Rescue Team (NCSMART), McCloud and Miller, both 32, are accustomed to such calls. The all-volunteer unit is often called to assist firefighters and other responders when a horse is in peril. Most of their rescue involves extricating horses stuck in overturned trailers, but occasionally a situation occurs that requires expertise and equipment only they can provide.

Such was the case on Tuesday with Sport, a 6-year-old thoroughbred, who’d gotten himself into a fine mess at Kitty Flowers’ farm. By the time McCloud and Miller arrived at the farm with their trailer and rescue gear, Sport was in the middle of a dried up pond nearly submerged in mud.

“All you could see was a little of his back, his head, and his neck,” Miller said. “It was too bad for the guys to stand in. It was that smelly, nasty swamp mud that sucks you down.”

Sport’s head was resting on a hard bank, which suggested the rescue might not be as difficult as they feared.

“I’m thinking at this point, it’s not going to be too hard if it’s that close to shore,” McCloud said.

But the incline from the pond to the shore presented a challenge. Sport’s head was facing in the direction of an inaccessible landing.

“At the easiest access point, it looked like they had torn down a metal barn,” Miller said. “We couldn’t take him through that.”

By now, McCloud and Miller had several firefighters from the Carthage Fire Department on hand to assist, as well as the fire chief.

“Nobody knew how long he’d been in that mud,” Miller said. “The fire chief had already been there a couple of hours.”

Because Sport was quite literally sucked into the mud, McCloud decided to use mud lamps to force air down the horse’s legs and break the suction.

“Once we actually broke the suction, we got the harnesses around him,” McCloud said. “You don’t want to break the suction and not have the straps ready. When we were putting the straps and webbing on him, he did thrash a little, but he was exhausted.”

McCloud instructed three people to stay with the horse. The others worked the hand lines to pull Sport out.

“It takes a lot of people to make it work,” Miller said of the process, which took about four hours.

McCloud and Miller also volunteer with the Moore County Equine Emergency Response Unit, which provides critical care transport. Tim Dwyer, the unit’s ambulance driver, was ready with his trailer in case Sport required transport to a vet clinic. But once Sport was pulled out of the mud, he rose to his feet and appeared to be fine, though in need of a bath.

McCloud and Miller went back the next day to check on Sport.

“The owners were very appreciative,” Miller said. “The horse was actually up and trotting around a little. They were washing the mud out of his tail.”

The couple will be holding a Technical Large Animal Emergency Rescue workshop next month in Hope Mills. The three-day course runs from Sept. 17-19, and registration is required. For more information, call Tori Miller at (910) 494-8210.

As for Sport? He’ll probably never venture too far from dry land again.

“Horses are curious creatures,” Miller said, laughing. “He might have seen something down there he just had to have, like a blade of grass.”