Time gap in Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron

In Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, after the raid on the Lakota village where Spirit and Rain end up going over the waterfall, Spirit stays by her side that night. In the early morning, a patrol sees them and we watch as Spirit gets captured for the final time in the film. Towards the end of this scene, winter is just beginning. (Previously, there were fall leaves on the trees, but now snow is falling - and during the train montage, there is practically a blizzard). It is important to note that Little Creek saw Spirit get taken, and after tending to Rain's wounds (or getting her to safety so other Lakota could help) he sets out to rescue Spirit, following the train tracks. On foot.

After the train arrives, Spirit is unloaded along with other horses and we watch as the railway crews decide that blasting a tunnel will not work, and the locomotive must be hauled over the mountain. One of them says, "We have 5 days to connect with Utah, move out at dawn."

This means that they began hauling the train up the mountain essentially immediately after arriving. And yet during this sequence, Spirit breaks the other horses free and tries to escapes himself, causing a small fire in the process. The chain around his neck gets caught on a fallen log, but Little Creek arrives just in time to free him.

This is indeed an interesting timing issue, but it gets worse.

Unless Little Creek was able to keep up with the speed of a moving steam train, through a blizzard, there is no way he should have been able to appear at that moment. It is possible that Little Creek simply managed to stow away on the same or a different train, and it would be hard to miss a horse running from a falling locomotive, so finding Spirit wouldn't have been too hard.

However, that still leaves another issue.

Since the train set out at the start of winter, it makes no sense how after Little Creek and Spirit escape from the fire, they wake up and it is suddenly fall again! (we know this because Little Creek picked a pile of apples for Spirit, and obviously the ones from the previous year would have been long gone - and they do not ripen till fall. Even if we can explain away Little Creek suddenly appearing, and even if the train was going INCREDIBLY slowly to take all of winter to arrive, that still does not explain how they run from a fire in late winter, and wake up late enough in fall for apples to be ripe.

Is there any logical explanation that I am missing here for the seeming gap in the flow of time?