Darick Kvam shot a deer this weekend, but not with a gun — a friend caught a video of him rescuing a fawn stuck on the ice.

Kvam, a lifelong hunter, spotted an animal slipping and sliding on the frozen slough near his father’s deer stand Sunday morning.

“I saw something on the ice and I was like, ‘What the heck is that thing?’ ” said Kvam, 20, who spent the weekend hunting near Morris. “I knew something wasn’t right.”

It was a scared fawn — or more specifically, a button buck, born in the spring but still without antlers — struggling to gain its footing on the ice. He knew he had to help it.

“I walked out there and he was extremely, extremely scared,” Kvam said.

He pet it for a while to calm it down. He first dragged it by a foot and then carried it to safety. The critter then skittered off, disappearing in nearby woods.

Kvam said he figured the deer had approached his father’s deer stand, gotten scared and skidded onto the ice.

Had he not helped, the young deer would have been “coyote bait,” Kvam said, since the family has caught coyotes on its camera.

There’s a misconception that hunters want to kill “anything and everything,” Kvam said. This was a chance to show people that hunters respect the animals they hunt.

“I’ve never had the opportunity to do anything like this,” said Kvam, who is from New Prague and attends college in Duluth. “I felt like I gave back to the wildlife.”

Erin Adler • 612-673-1781