Cowboy trooper lassos, rescues deer
Published: August 31, 2007
All Jim Collom had left to do was pick up a guitar and sing as he rode off into the sunset.
Collom, an Oregon State Police trooper, turned cowboy Saturday by lassoing and rescuing a black-tailed deer that fell into an abandoned mine shaft outside of Jacksonville.
With the help of Arild Barrett and his two sons, Collom was able to toss his makeshift lariat around the buck’s velvet antlers and haul the deer out of the 20-foot-deep shaft.
“After we pulled it out, there was a half-minute there where we thought the deer was dead,” Collom says. “We took the rope off. Then it woke up, stumbled around a bit and took off.”
The 8-foot-diameter pit is the same place where Collom helped rescue another deer three years ago. It is one of several old mines along a public trail system on city-owned land managed by the Jacksonville Woodlands Association.
While hiking the trails Saturday afternoon, Barrett and his sons, 10-year-old Nicholas and 13-year-old Benjamin, stopped to read some interpretive signs about the vertical shafts.
The boys decided to take a short side trail to a large shaft, where they stopped at the rim.
“My brother said it would be hard to get out if you fell down there,” Benjamin Barrett says. “Then my brother looked down and saw a deer in there.”
The family beat feet down the path and tried unsuccessfully to rustle someone out of the closed Jacksonville Police Department office, Arild Barrett says. They went home and called OSP, then met Collom and Senior Trooper DeWayne Price at the trailhead 30 minutes later, Barrett says.
They found the frantic buck not too keen on seeing his would-be rescuers.
“I don’t think the deer had been in there very long,” Collom says. “It was full of energy and there was only one pile of poop in there.”
The Barretts held back tree branches to give Collom a chance to play cowpoke.
“It probably took about 20 minutes before I could get a lasso around his antlers,” Collom says.
Though all present helped hoist the deer to its eventual safe release, Collom credits the Barretts for ensuring one more buck remains in the woods this summer outside of Jacksonville.
“Without their help, that deer would be dead,” Collom says.
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