A Cheshire, MA Firefighter Left His Restaurant Kitchen Friday to Help Pull a Deer Out of Cheshire Lake

When the call came in Friday afternoon, C.J. Garner was at his Cheshire restaurant, Common Table on Route 8, doing prep work for the evening. It was around 3:00 p.m., and a deer was struggling on the ice at Cheshire Lake.

The Cheshire Fire Department is all-volunteer, and another crew was already tied up on a medical call. So Garner bolted to the station to meet up with whoever was available. He linked up with fellow firefighters Mike Sabato and Cory Wilcox, and they headed to the lake.

Garner has been a firefighter for 19 years and said he's only seen this situation "2 or 3" times before, a deer stuck on ice that kept giving way beneath her.

The ice on Cheshire Lake was far from solid. The crew picked their way out very carefully.

"We found stable enough ice for us to be able to traverse out to the deer and we got about 30 feet or so away from the deer and it broke through," Garner told us on air this morning. "And at one point it was fully submerged and had gone underneath the ice shelf and we could see where the deer was and she made her way back to the hole, luckily."

As the crew closed in, they broke through too. Garner went into the water. Cheshire Lake runs about nine feet deep. But he managed to hook the deer, and Sabato and Wilcox pulled both Garner and the deer out of the water and onto the rescue sled.

The doe weighed roughly 85 pounds. A DCR officer arrived and administered a tranquilizer so she could be safely transported. Garner explained why they didn't just release her right there: "If we had released the deer at the scene, she would have ended up back on the lake or on Route 8."

Once she was transported to Pittsfield and woke up from the sedative, she was released back into the wild.