Horses of McBride
Horses of McBride based on effort to save stranded animals
Made-for-TV movie dramatizes real-life mountain rescue of starving horses.
Two horses discovered starving on the side of a snowedin mountain spurred a town to action and led to a new TV movie based on their tale.
Written and directed by Edmonton-born Anne Wheeler, executive-produced by Due South’s Paul Gross, The Horses of McBride fictionalizes the 2008 true story of a family who rallied an eastern B.C. mountain town to dig out the emaciated creatures. The pack animals were abandoned by an Edmonton hunter in the fall of that year near McBride, west of Jasper National Park, and by winter had lost hundreds of pounds and much of their fur from sleeping on ice. They’d even eaten each others’ tails.
Because the two were too weak to barge through snow up to three metres deep, the people of McBride put aside their Christmas plans and by hand dug a trench more than a kilometre long to get them to a logging road.
Aidan Quinn, who stars as outfitter Matt Davidson in the film, walked away from the elaborate production with “a renewed respect for rural people. When there’s a problem they tend to just get the job done,” he says from New York City, where he’s filming CBS’s Sherlock Holmes series, Elementary.
Quinn’s out-of-luck character is based on David Jeck, 55, who tells his story over the phone. “My daughter went with a hay bale and a gun,” says Jeck. “She told me they could make it as long as they were fed. My first thought when I saw them was, ‘I’m going to work at it and get them out.’ Man, they were thin. But they still had life.”
Conducting interviews with the Jecks and the people of McBride, the award-winning Wheeler (Knockout, Living Out Loud) explains why she fictionalized her leads, including Quinn and bright-eyed Mackenzie Porter as his daughter, Nicki. “There were so many people involved in digging out these horses, other heroes. You have to focus on who you think can carry the story. People became metaphors, groups of younger people, the native people, the media. You have to sort of crystallize them down to one or two people.”
The production last winter was daunting. As difficult as getting two undernourished horses off the side of a snowed-in winter peak was, imagine hoisting a film crew into the same circumstances. Wheeler created the scene on a frigid Kananaskis set, where everyone had to be brought in by Skidoo daily to the recreated pit the horses had carved out for themselves. “It was also a big challenge not to get footsteps close to our set. We had to use fairly long lenses to keep our cameras outside the set. We had to think out and organize quite a bit.”
Every day, the blanketed animals would be led into their pen of solid snow, the exits then filled up and blown over again. These horses had to look the part as well. “We did it back as swards,” laughs the 66-year-old director, who was given an Appaloosa pony herself when she was 11 years old.
“I chose two beautiful healthy horses in the fall for shooting with colourings I hoped we could find,” she says of the “before” creatures.
The production had to wait till the last minute to find two matching emaciated horses, as keeping them down at that weight until winter would have been inhumane. “We started looking for horses around Calgary, but that circle quickly widened into B.C. They also had to be looking poorly but be strong enough to go through this experience.” One was a rescued animal, while another thin horse loaned by its owner wore prosthetics to carry the illusion of starvation.
A vet approved their stamina. Even before shooting, the two gained a couple of hundred pounds. Luckily, the narrative contained a built-in fattening of the creatures as Nicki and others cared for them.
Having already worked with Albertan wrangler John Scott on the set of Legends of the Fall, Quinn appreciated the animals. “The most important thing is you have to be relaxed — horses feel energy. If you’re nervous, they’re nervous. I ended up feeling quite a bond with both sets of horses.”
Wheeler laughs again: “These horses I’m sure were like, ‘What has happened to me? I was standing in a field starving to death, nibbling on dry grass, feeling miserable. And these people came and picked me up, brought me to Calgary, cleaned me up and gave me the best food horses can have. And then they started cutting my hair down, putting makeup and prosthetics all over me, covering me in blankets on a snow-covered mountain.’
“These horses must have thought, ‘These are the craziest animals on Earth!’ ”
The fattened horses, Lady and Slim, are now living in good homes.
As for the real-life horse survivors, they recovered and have new homes in B.C. The animals’ owner, Edmonton lawyer Frank Mackay, pleaded guilty in McBride provincial court to animal cruelty and was fined and ordered to pay restitution to the B.C. SPCA. Mackay said he left the horses on the mountain in September 2008, after becoming stuck in muskeg following a trip to drop off supplies for a friend hiking the Great Divide Trail.
The uplifting film also has grit, thanks in part to Quinn’s haunted performance. The 53-year-old American actor notes of playing Jeck: “I wasn’t trying to ape physicality; we’re not talking Daniel Day-Lewis here,” he jokes. “But we are talking paying respect to the essential spirit of the man and the family.”
“He (Quinn) acts because he loves it,” Wheeler says. “The roles he takes, he takes because they present a personal challenge for him.
“He was up on that mountain, 40 below and 10 feet of snow and saying, ‘Well, when do you guys stop? When does it get so outrageous that we stop shooting?’ ”
Says Quinn: “When the blizzards kicked in, you just huddled together with the crew, grinned and bore it and tried to get a hot chocolate.
“Sometimes, for the acting, when it got really, really cold, it’s just hard to form words. It was tough going, but I love all that.”
Wheeler was impressed that Chicago-born Quinn honed up his Canadian accent. “I’ve gotten quite urban-sounding over the years living this close to New York,” says Quinn, whose movies include Michael Collins and Frankenstein.
“When I listened to the tapes of Dave, I thought it was really important to get rid of that. ‘Out and about’ is a big one.”
The real family got to visit the set and meet Quinn. Jeck, now a gold miner, was impressed with the realism. “The condition of the horses and what they looked like was surprisingly accurate. The whole setup blew my mind away.”
“We’re going to have a party and watch the movie at my daughter’s place,” Jeck says. “We’ve got pictures of (Quinn) on the wall. It was an occasion in our life. The whole thing, when a person looks back five, 10, 20 years, you can date your life to it all.”
The experience was even more than Wheeler bargained for.
“I don’t even know if Paul Gross knows this,” she chuckles, “but I thought all they were asking me to do was write it. I thought he was going to direct it.
“It’s not that being a senior citizen and overweight had anything to do with my thinking, but I wouldn’t probably be the first choice someone would make.
“You get a bit soft living on the coast here. I was glad I had those Alberta genes sitting on that mountain or I would have never made it through.”