Last week, Jamie Englund of Evansville was out hunting deer.
This week, he was rescuing one.
Englund, who works for the city of Evansville, was at a gas station in town Monday morning when someone noted that they had seen a deer trapped on the ice of a small lake outside town on County Road 5.
So Englund called up some of his friends to help with the rescue mission. They gathered a boat and some rope and headed out to the lake. Once there, Englund and one of the other men went out in the boat while the others stayed on shore to pull the boat back. Once close enough to the buck, Englund lassoed him and the others began pulling the boat back to shore. “I think right away it was scared, but after it realized what we were doing, it just calmed down and acted like, ‘Oh, you’re here to help me,’” Englund recalled.
Once close to shore, Englund had to remove the rope and hold the buck by the antlers as the men on shore pulled the boat in.
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“We had to get the rope off before we got to shore because then he’d have taken off with the rope tied on,” Englund explained. “So I unhooked the rope and held on to his antlers and they drug us the rest of the way in.”
Once to shore, the buck stood up somewhat unsteadily and began to run toward the woods. It was clear, however, that his legs were sore after the ordeal.
“I talked to the homeowner and she saw it out there that morning but she thought it (the deer) was a floating bog out there,” Englund said. “So it could have been there the night before or even the day before, and it was doing the splits. If you do the splits for two minutes you’re sore, and this one did it for many hours.”
Prior to the men rescuing the deer, the DNR had been contacted. However, they were not equipped to rescue animals from such thin ice and were unable to assist.
The other men involved in the rescue included Dan Evavold, Justin Evavold, Gavin Henningsen, David Berry, Trevor Englund and Ben Alan.
“If we saw another one, we’d do it again today,” Englund said.
