Sandy Arbino noticed something odd when she looked outside Thursday morning. When she opened the door to look closer, she saw an animal swimming in circles.

“I looked out my back door and noticed my pool cover was inside my pool and all of the sudden, I see something swimming around. I didn’t know what it was. I opened up the door and it was a deer,” Arbino recalled. “It kept trying to get out, but it was just so tired it couldn’t get out.”

Arbino has seen other animals in her pool before, but a deer was a first.

“Ducks will come and they’ll swim around in the cover, but that’s it,” Arbino said. The deer could only swim in circles since it was apparently too short to touch the floor of the pool. Arbino wasn’t sure what to do, so she called the Deer Park-Silverton Joint Fire District.

“The deer was swimming around the pool. It couldn’t really couldn’t touch the bottom,” said Chief Denny Meador. “You could tell it was a little bit scared. It had been in there for a while. It looked really tired.”

Meador and his crew spent about 15 minutes trying to get the deer out of the water. One firefighter tried to encourage the deer to move toward a set of steps by using a skimmer net. That didn’t work, so they decided to use the pool cover to save the deer.

“We actually got the deer to get itself tangled into the tarp, and with the crew that we had, we were able to pull the deer out, got him on the ground. We used some towels to kind of try to dry him off,” Meador said.