A touching moment: A hunting guide rescues a deer from a frozen Canadian river after it fell through the ice
- Marty Thomas, 63, rescued a deer that fell through the ice in British Columbia, Canada.
- The deer was spotted by a man struggling in the icy waters of the Kettle River.
- Mr. Thomas used a canoe to reach the deer and towed it back to dry land with a rope.
- The deer could hardly move because of the cold and was so exhausted that he could not stand.
Touching footage has surfaced of a hunting guide rescuing a deer from a frozen river in the Canadian wilderness.
The video, filmed by Marlene Thomas, shows her husband Marty, 63, pulling a deer out of the ice-covered Kettle River in Grand Forks, British Columbia, in a canoe.
The film shows Mr. Thomas, a hunting guide, using a piece of rope to pull the deer behind him as he maneuvers his boat through the icy water, and eventually manages to pull the mammal ashore.
Marty Thomas with a deer he placed in a heated mini hut wrapped in blankets to get well. The animal was gone by the time he returned at 4 a.m. the next day.
Footage has surfaced showing a man rescuing a captured deer that fell through ice into the Kettle River in British Columbia, Canada.
Mr. Thomas of Grand Forks, British Columbia, said the deer was first seen by another person on Monday afternoon while wrestling in the river.
“They called me and said that the deer went through the ice, so I asked my wife Marlene and my grandson to come down to look.
“And there was a deer that broke through the ice,” Mr. Thomas said. told Global News.
Initially, Mr. Thomas and another man planned to get to the deer to save it, but the thick layer of ice covering the surface proved to be too much of an obstacle.
Then Mr. Thomas decided to go alone in a canoe, since it could break on the river ice if two people were in it.
He added: ‘[The deer] was just in the water. And then I had to pick up the canoe and go around it into the open water. And from there I just towed it down the open passage.
The young deer spent the night in a haystack carefully prepared by Mr. and Mrs. Thomas before setting off.
After making his way through the water, Mr. Thomas picked up the deer and helped him to the shore before taking him to the premises to recover.
“We got the canoe to the bottom of the embankment and then we had to get the deer out of the canoe and then we had to drag it to the shore.”
Mr. Thomas said that the deer could hardly move from the cold and was too exhausted to stand.
He guessed that the deer was about three years old and thought he weighed about 150 pounds.
After pulling the deer out onto dry land, he let it rest in a heated mini-house with hay and a blanket.
When he next went to check on him at 4 am, the animal had already escaped into the wild.
“For 38 years, no kidding… it makes me emotional, in fact I was a hunter and taxidermist for 38 years,” Thomas said. said CBC News.
“It was my whole life, I made a living from the wild, and so helping, yeah, giving like that, was easy, you know, it was nice.”
Mrs Thomas wrote on Facebook: “My husband failed when pulling a canoe. Fortunately [the river] it wasn’t very deep where it happened, I strained them both.
“Thanks to all the people who were there to help and the canoe that belonged to Jan Dehann, someone looked after all of us.”