Mike Kilen

mkilen@dmreg.com

Home from college for homecoming, three Decorah High School friends couldn't stop worrying about what they had witnessed just a couple hours before the football game.

A deer stuck in a hole.

So they decided to go back after the game and try to rescue it.

Gavin Nimrod and Eric Smorstad, both 20, and Bryton Meyer, 19, stopped at Wal-Mart to buy a rope and a clip. They drove out to the Winneshiek County field owned by Eric's dad Gary, where they had earlier discovered a deer had fallen in a 7-foot-deep sinkhole.

The northeast Iowa landscape is layered with limestone covered with varying amounts of soil, which can erode into holes, explained Joe Wilkinson, an Iowa Department of Natural Resources spokesman.

In one of these holes, a 10-point buck looked up with frightened eyes in the dark. It couldn't get out. The boys shined pick-up truck lights on the hole and looped the rope around the deer's antlers tight enough to lift its head.

Then they had to devise a way to pull off the rope once they got the deer out. So they fastened a slip knot to the clip, which required Gavin Nimrod to lean over head-long into the hole to tie it.

"I was almost down to my knees reaching down in there, so they jumped on my legs to keep me from falling in," said Nimrod, who was a bit frightened of joining company with a panicked deer in a hole.

"It was just something you don't get the opportunity to do, rescue a deer. So you get the chance and you take it."

Meyer had set up his smart phone on the truck to record the attempt as it unfolded – and later posted it on YouTube.

They pulled up the deer's head high enough that two of them could grab its front legs and lift them to the top of the hole. The deer paused, dazed, then got its footing and bolted for freedom while the men ran, hooted and hollered.

"The animal was in distress. These kids took a shot at it and in this case you've got to say they did the right thing," Wilkinson said.

Two of the young men hunt deer and the irony wasn't lost on them.

"Either one of us would have taken it if we had the opportunity to, so we wanted to let it live," Nimrod said. "It was the most fun we've had since we won the state in football."

It was fist bumps all around among former high school teammates

"In our minds, it was the right thing to do," Nimrod said.