NEWPORT – Someone took matters into his own hands and dispatched an injured deer that had stranded itself on the ice last week in the middle of Sebasticook Lake.

“It appears to me that someone shot the deer from the shore,” Warden Michael Morrison of the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife said Monday.

A camp owner had notified the warden service late last week that a deer was stranded on the ice. Since part of the lake was open and the ice on the other side was unsafe, wardens felt it best to wait until the ice thickened before retrieving and dispatching the young deer.

Wardens did not want to risk human lives for the rescue, nor did they want to shoot the animal from the shore because the bullet could miss and skip on the lake and strike a person or a camp on the shore.

On Saturday, Morrison and Warden Troy Dauphinee decided to use an airboat to retrieve the deer. It still was a risky operation since the airboat broke through the ice almost all the way out, according to Morrison.

Morrison said the deer had been badly injured before it was shot.