What started as a knock on their door as Cole and Darcy Busslinger were finishing dinner turned into an animal rescue caught on video.
At about 5:30 p.m. Thursday, two snowmobilers turned up at the acreage east of Calgary, asking for help freeing a deer they saw stuck in a nearby barbed-wire fence. The two snowmobilers said they didn’t have any tools to use to free the animal.
Cole and Darcy grabbed a knife and tried to make their way through waist-deep snow to the deer, which was about 200 metres away. They eventually hitched a ride with the snowmobilers.
“It wasn’t even a question of whether we’d go set it free or not, we just immediately ran out to go set it free,” Cole told Global News on Friday.
According to Cole, the deer appeared to have some netting tangled in its antlers which was caught in the fence.
WATCH: Here’s Gil Tucker with some people who sprang into action to help one lucky buck.
In a video of the rescue taken by Cole, Darcy is seen cutting the buck free as one of the snowmobilers held the animal steady.
“Eventually after cutting, my dad finally cut the last sort of loop that was on its antler and it just kind of pulled back and looked at us,” Cole said. “And it just kind of hopped the fence and away it went.”
“The snowmobilers said they just barely saw him because the snow was so deep — he just dug himself in. So if they didn’t end up seeing him he probably wouldn’t have made it through the night.
Cole said the deer ran off to join five or six other deer in the area.
He called the whole ordeal a rewarding experience to have been able to share with his father.