PEMBINA, N.D. _ At first glance, Jake Cosley says he wasn't quite sure what he was seeing Wednesday afternoon, Feb. 7, while snowmobiling on the Red River south of Pembina.
It looked like a dead deer, but something else seemed to be going on, too, he said.
"I saw all this stuff going on around its head area and I'm like, 'what kind of a buck was this?' " Cosley, 23, said.
As he got closer, Cosley, of Pembina, says he could see a buck that still was alive sprawled on the ice, locked at the antlers with the head of another buck.
Judging by the vertebrae hanging from the entangled head, which was all that remained of the animal's carcass, the second buck had been dead for quite some time.
There didn't seem to be much life left in the surviving buck, either, Cosley says.
"He was just laying there until I got up to him, then he tried starting to get up," said Cosley, who graduated in 2016 from the University of Minnesota-Crookston with a degree in agricultural systems management. "All he would ever do is just walk backward. He never tried to go forward or anything else."
Even though he was alone and didn't have a saw or any other tool to pry the antlers apart, Cosley knew he had to try and free the living deer.
First, though, he decided to shoot some video to document the unusual encounter with his iPhone, which quickly died in the cold. Cosley put the phone in his pocket to warm up and was able to coax enough life back into the battery to shoot a couple of photos and some video.
