Thomas Barr, who goes by T-Barr, drove 14 hours from his home in Pennsylvania to bowhunt southern Illinois. It was early November, the rut was ready to rock and a cold front was on the way.  The next afternoon he one of those classic Midwest funnels you read about. It was a narrow strip of timber and brush bordered on either side by a cornfield and a clover plot. A deep creek with steep, nearly vertical banks cut the middle of the cover. His stand was in a tree that swept up and out over the water. An old, crumbling barbed-wire fence ran hard along the creek and beneath the tree stand.

“I climbed up and was pumped,” says T-Bar. “The weather was right and it looked like a great spot to kill a buck.”

About 3:45 the wind died and the deer started moving. T-Bar saw some does and a couple of small bucks flashing through the woods and brush. Then he heard dry leaves rustling out front of his stand. He stood, shivered and readied his bow for action. “I just knew it was a buck,” he says. The crunching got louder and louder and the animal popped out of the cover.

“It was a black and tan puppy, about the size of my hand,” says T-Bar. “What the heck was it doing out here? I wondered how it had survived. Earlier that day I had spotted a couple of coyotes, and I saw my first bobcat while hunting. To top it off it was cold and getting colder. The leaves and ground were hard and frozen. How could that little guy make it? I couldn’t believe what I saw.”

The pup kept coming, sniffing the ground and tracking T-Bar to his stand.  The dog put his little front feet up on the tree and stared skyward. “I pulled down my face mask and started whining and making puppy noises,” says T-Bar. “I wanted him to know he had found a friend. But I tried to be quiet in case a big buck was coming.”

The pup hung around T-Bar’s tree, ripping up grass and chewing on it. “I could tell it was starving,” he says, “so I pulled a bologna sandwich out of my pocket, broke it into little pieces and dropped them on the ground. The pup gobbled them up.”

A few bits of bread and bologna hit the wire fence, caromed right and rolled down the steep bank. T-Bar was a little concerned that the dog might try to retrieve the food and fall into the creek, but he soon forgot about it. With a full belly, the pup curled up at the foot of the tree and took a nap. T-Bar pulled up his facemask and went back to looking for a big deer.

Buck time came—that still, gray, chilly half-hour before dark. “I was seeing some deer and a few of them were drifting closer, moving out into the fields to feed,” says T-Bar. “I knew if I was gonna shoot a buck in this funnel, it was going to happen anytime now.”

Then the pup woke up and began shuffling around, searching for more food. T-Bar watched him sniff the crumbs closer and closer to the creek bank. Before he could yell, “No!” it was too late. KERPLUNK! The dog fell into the water with a whimper and a splash.

T-Bar had to think fast. If he climbed down from his stand and tried to save the pup, he’d spook some deer. Maybe the pup could make it to shore? Maybe not? It took T-Bar a nanosecond to make up his mind. He frantically unbuckled his safety harness and ran down the tree steps.

The pup sunk and bobbed up, sunk and bobbed up…. The current was slow, but it carried him steadily downstream. “I guess the dog was too small to swim, and the cold water must have been a shock,” says T-Bar. “I knew he’d drown in seconds.”

T-Bar couldn’t just jump into the creek. The bank was too steep and the muddy water was way too deep. He ran along the bank, looking for a long stick that he could use to reach out and rake in the pup. He found none. He slid halfway down the bank, dug his boots as best he could into the slippery, half-frozen soil and reached down for the whining dog. “It was just like in the movies,” he says. “I stretched as far as I could, but I was always a hand’s length away from the sinking dog. I though he was a goner.”

Then T-Bar remembered the barbed-wire fence on the bank. He reached back with one hand, grabbed it and pulled with all his might. The fence creaked and stretched a foot, but how long would it hold? T-Bar laid out across the creek, stretched his arm as far as he could and plucked the pup out of the water with two fingers. He took off his coat, dried the shivering dog, wrapped him up and held him close for a while. The pup warmed up, settled down and dozed off. T-Bar placed the bundle beneath his tree and climbed back up to hunt the last few minutes before dark.

Back at the lodge that night T-Bar held the puppy and fed him dinner scraps. Everybody listened intently to the rescue story. A hearty cheer rang out when T-Bar told of plucking the dog from the watery grave. Some one said, “You’re hunting in Illinois, so you need to give that pup a local name, like Illini.” T-Bar liked the idea. He shortened the pup’s name to “Illy.”

T-Bar had a couple of days left to hunt, but Illy was in good hands. Some kids kept the pup at the hunting lodge. They fed him and played with him and rolled around on the floor with him. And of course they got thoroughly attached to him. When it was time to go home, T-Bar told the kids’ mom that they could keep the pup if they really wanted it. “But she seemed to sense that the dog was special to me,” he says. “She told me to take him home.”

T-Bar and the pup loaded up and drove all day back to Pennsylvania. “It was late when we got home and my wife was asleep,” he says. “I walked in, flipped on the light, threw the pup on the bed and yelled, ‘We’re home, meet Illy!’ She laughed and hugged the pup, and we’ve lived happily ever after.”