Behind the Badge - Fishing for Deer
Fishing for Deer
District Game Warden Greg Hastings
I’ve been a game warden for long enough to know you normally don’t go fishing for deer. Unfortunately, I had to back in the spring of 2020.
Neighboring wardens and I had been working a large deer poaching case in the Valley City area.
When the poachers heard we were onto them, their ill-gotten trophies just happened to disappear.
After multiple search warrants and countless hours of being lied to of where they could have ended up, I started to think outside the box.
Now it was early spring, on a hunch I started checking any spot that had open water on the river in the area.
I found below the Mill Dam, in Valley City, was ice free with the moving water which would have made a perfect place to get rid of deer parts.
The current of the river is plenty strong, but I was able to get the Army Corp of Engineers to slow the flow of the river by somewhat closing off Baldhill Dam.
We had one shot with a limited time window to get in below the Mill Dam and see if it was worth our time.
Luckily the Stutsman County Search and Rescue Team was able to assist as they have a remote operated vehicle.
Their ROV is built to go under water, has sonar, live feed video, and a claw to recover things that are found.
It was a long shot, but we had to try.
Once we were all set up I sat anxiously waiting and deer racks started showing up on the riverbed floor.
The ROV was able to grab onto the deer racks so we could pull them in from the ice-cold water.
Some of the deer racks we could match to pictures of deer we obtained from the poachers earlier in the investigation.
Other ones we used DNA testing to match to poached deer carcasses we had found around the county.
However, we were still missing other deer that we knew the poachers had killed.
Later into the summer we finally were able to get more information on where another location was the poachers dumped poached deer parts.
This time it wasn’t a river or a lake, but a basement of an old house.
The house no longer was there, and the basement was used as a garbage pit and was full of water.
We were told we could find a deer under an old mattress among the rubbish.
Sure enough we flipped the mattress and found a very stinky decomposing deer carcass.
Now that we knew the information we had was good it was time to find the other deer parts in the basement.
We used a large treble hook on a string to try to recover antlers from the garbage soup of the basement.
This was sort of effective, but ultimately we borrowed a large water pump from the Rural Water District to drain the basement of water.
This was one of the grossest things I’ve had to deal with as a warden, but we were determined to end this poaching ring.
Once the basement was drained, we were able to rummage around and find the other deer parts we needed to mostly finish the case.
In the future I hope to never have to go fishing for deer again, but you never know with this job.