Deer in distress helped by the kindness of strangers on Wolfe Island

Volunteers from the Wolfe Island community helped one distressed creature hang on for deer life this morning, Thursday, Jan. 12, 2023.

“One of my firefighters phoned me and said that there was a deer trapped down at Dawson’s point at the dock where the ferry docks… he said, ‘We can’t get it out. We got to come up with another decision,’” Fire Chief Tim Hawkins relayed.

According to the chief, a Good Samaritan contacted firefighter Anthony Greenwood with a unique kind of emergency: a small deer had fallen down between some of the large rocks that make up the pier and was evidently trapped.

“I think what happened was it swam there and then it climbed up the rocks, but it fell down in between a couple… got its hips caught, and they couldn’t pull it out,”

So, the chief asked Greenwood, “Do you need us to call in or what do you think? And he said ‘No, we just need a solution.’”

“So,” the chief decided, “I’ll get a hold of Scott Hulton from Hulton Construction and get them to go down.”

Hulton arrived with a backhoe and was able to deftly move some stones around. “Then he lifted one stone from above the deer and then we reached down and pulled it up,” explained the chief.

The small doe was able to run across the parking lot right away, said the chief, before she did one more daredevil maneuver, “she run down along the fence and jumped in the water and swam over to the shore.”

The deer didn’t seem to have any more physical distress, Hawkins explained, “She had a bunch of cuts on her, but I’m sure the cold water helped out with that, and she actually swam right away, come up on the shore, run up the other side, and took off.”

As the young deer disappeared, for the volunteers with the Wolfe Island fire department and community, the day didn’t buck any trends — just another instance of helping out those in the community during a time of need.