Brenan Isabelle used to think deer were a nuisance but he's warming up to them after rescuing one from frigid waters off Martins River on Wednesday.
“My wife actually spotted the deer kind of thrashing around in the ice out in the bay, which is the ocean, in front of our house,” Isabelle said in a telephone interview on Monday.
He figured the deer was between 15 and 30 metres from the shore and was having a hard time either swimming to shore or mounting back onto ice in the bay.
“For some reason, it wasn't coming out onto shore, and it turned and headed off in the opposite direction, back across the bay where the ice was still a bit thicker,” he said.
He decided to grab his canoe, a strap and a paddle out of his shed and see if he could help the distressed animal.
“I thought it would have made more sense if it had just climbed out near our house and come out of the water but for some reason it headed back on the other direction, across the bay.”
Isabelle said he realized later the deer had probably fallen into the water off the ice on the other side of the bay, where the ice had thinned, then tried to swim across before turning back into the ice
“I didn't really have any thoughts of trying to get it into the canoe at first because it was fairly big and I just wanted to kind of steer it – block its way – so that hopefully it would swim back towards the open water and somewhere where it could actually climb out, because it wasn't able to climb out. The ice sort of got thicker and thicker and thicker in the direction it wanted to go and it just couldn't break its way through to the shore.”
Isabelle said he ended up sort of lassoing it with the strap around its chest and trying to tow it, but when that didn't work, he had to haul the deer into the canoe.
“At that point, I think we were both getting a little tired of the situation,” Isabelle said.
He tucked its head under the crossbar and got its legs in.
“It just kind of laid there. It was pretty docile while I was paddling back out of the ice. And it started to move around so I started to move forward so I was on top of it and tried to calm it down.
“What I really didn't want was for it to get up while I had it in the canoe, so I had it basically tied so it hopefully it couldn't move around too much but it started to kind of kick its hooves against the canoe and stuff.”
He got back to shore near his house and lifted it out of the canoe. It didn't do much besides stand beside the water, shivering, for a little bit, while Isabelle and his wife Danielle backed off to give it some space.
“It started to go back into the water and then came back out and we went inside the house and just kind of watched it and it eventually, after maybe 20 minutes of standing there and I guess warming up, it walked away, and that was that.”
The deer was a good size, he said, and probably more than a year old.
He also said the water was pretty cold.
“I got pretty wet in the course of things and I got pretty cold, too. I was shaking afterward. My pants were completely soaked.”
The 35-year-old said while not a hunter, it's been a long time since he used to rescue birds that would be stunned after flying into windows when he was a young child.
“I'm not really the biggest fan of deer in general,” Isabelle said. “I'm not really a deer lover or anything like that. They're a bit of a pest, especially on the South Shore. But I thought afterwards it was a nice experience being sort of able to touch it and help it. I actually sort of like them more, now. It was kind of a gentle creature, I guess.”
