It was just a week before Christmas when two starving horses were discovered in the rugged mountains of British Columbia — hip bones protruding, backs blanketed in ice, weakened bodies teetering between life and death.

Logan Jeck, 21, came upon the pair while retrieving two tourists' snowmobiles in the snow-covered terrain. He went home and told his father, David.

David Jeck, a horse owner, sent his daughter back the next day with two things: a .44 Magnum rifle and a bale of hay.

"If they look like they're in distress, put them down," Jeck instructed his daughter, Toni. "If they look like they're able to survive, feed them."

The horses got the hay.

And the village of McBride got down to a made-in-Canada tale of animal rescue.

Fighting snow, freezing cold and winter's early darkness, dozens of volunteers from around McBride pulled together to save the enfeebled, snow-trapped horses.

They spent a week digging a kilometer-long passageway through towering snowdrifts and spirited out the 3-year-old mare and older gelding. And on Tuesday night, two days before Christmas, the horses and their rescuers trekked seven hours down a Canadian mountain to safety.

The residents of McBride, a village hit hard by mill closings and job losses, gave time and sweat — and in several cases, suffered frostbite in the process — to save two animals abandoned in the snow. The horses, Sundance and Belle, were placed in foster care by the SPCA and are expected to recover.

"This was probably one of the most heartwarming displays of compassion we've ever seen," Jamie Wiltse, a special constable for the British Columbia Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, said Friday.

"The people of the town of McBride are heroes. They saved the horses. They've been struggling lately, but they weren't thinking of themselves when they were digging out those horses.

It began when Logan Jeck happened upon the animals, clinging to a mountainside in a tiny snowed-in space on Mount Renshaw in northeastern B.C., near the Alberta border. They are believed to have been left there since September by their owner, an Albertan.

At first, Logan Jeck thought they were moose. Then he saw white markings on the forehead of one of the horses. "They were sick, disgusting-looking, starving horses," he recalled Friday.

The SPCA went in with a veterinarian a few days later to assess the animals' health. On a scale in which 0 is death and the ideal measure is 5 or 6, the animals' health was evaluated at 2.

Not only had they lost a third to half their body weight, but the gelding was covered in sores and was missing patches of hair. Urine had encrusted what remained of their tails.