So what do you do if you find a 1,000-pound moose stuck in a partly frozen lake in the center of a six-million-acre wilderness?
When rescuers arrived at Lake Abanakee in Northern New York, only the head of the moose was above the water. It had fallen through about 40 minutes earlier, and was spotted by an unidentified bystander in the vast forests of the Adirondacks.
The moose, a male that had shed its antlers, had walked about 200 feet onto the lake in Indian Lake, about 100 miles northwest of Albany, before falling into the frigid waters late on Thursday morning, according to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.
The rescuers saw that the moose was unable to get out of the water. An airboat, a flat-bottomed watercraft with a propeller, was on its way to help.
“I guess there’s no training manual for getting moose out of the ice,” Lt. Robert Higgins, a state environmental conservation officer, said with a chuckle later in an interview posted on the agency’s website.
He narrated the rescue like it was all in a day’s work, as if anyone would quickly dress in cold-water gear and venture onto a frozen lake with sleds and heavy chain saws, as the team had done.
“We knew that time wasn’t on our side,” Evan Nahor, a forest ranger, said in the interview. “It was, ‘Do what we can with what we have.’”
The airboat had not yet arrived, so the rescuers walked onto the ice, using a spud bar, which is a long, metal tool with a chisel on one end, to find the most solid path to the moose.
“Every minute counts,” Lieutenant Higgins said of the rescue.
They weren’t worried, they said, about needing to be saved themselves if they fell through. Their dry suits would keep them warm and afloat and their safety ropes would be used to pull each other out.
Kneeling on sleds — to spread out their weight across the ice — they began using a chain saw to remove sections of ice and pushing them away to open a channel to the shore.
The video shows the crew attacking the ice surrounding the moose as it calmly treaded water — maybe a little too calmly.
“We tried poking it with a couple of different things, but it didn’t seem afraid of them,” said another forest ranger, Matt Savarie. “So, finally, we pushed the jet sleds that we had up close to it. And for whatever reason, it was scared of those. So once we got behind it, we were able to direct it.”
The bull moose, which can weigh around 1,000 pounds, paddled briskly through the narrow channel and made it to shore. By then it had been in the water for about two hours.
“It was really tired,” Lieutenant Higgins said. “It was shivering. It just didn’t have much energy left. We didn’t know if it was going to be able to stand up or not.”
It took about 15 minutes for the moose to find its footing and strength. “It tried a few times and eventually it stood up,” Lieutenant Higgins said.
Then it shook off the ice and took an easy stride on a different path, into the forest.
