Nick Brisson was planning to take off work to hunt the rut this week. He wasn’t expecting to stumble across the craziest action of the year on his commute. Brisson, a 36-year-old visiting nurse from Voluntown, Connecticut, was driving to see a patient when he happened to glance at a pond beside the road on Nov. 14.
“I saw a buck swimming, and you don’t see that too often anyway,” says Brisson. “And then when I looked closer, I’m like, ‘There’s two of them.’ So I ripped the car off to the side, put my hazards on, and started watching them.”
As you can see in the video above, the two bucks weren’t just swimming — they were fighting. Brisson captured most of the encounter in footage that he shared with his buddy, who runs the Outdoor Drive Podcast, where it went viral. The smaller-racked buck at the back is the clear aggressor, even though he’s pursuing a bigger buck, which appears exhausted and keeps slipping under the surface as the buck in the back savagely and repeatedly head butts him. In between attacks, the rutted-up buck shakes his head like a wet dog and blows droplets out of its nostrils.
The deer’s grunts, which Brisson says sounded incredibly loud echoing off the surrounding timber, didn’t quite come across in the video due to the noise of passing cars. When the bucks got to shore, they both climbed out of the water, then jumped back in as the bigger buck re-engaged. Eventually, they climbed out again and Brisson says the tired buck in the front tried to shake off his aggressor, and both deer eventually ran off into the woods.
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“The front buck never engaged. You could tell he was pretty tired and just trying to get away,” says Brisson. “Which is funny because he’s got the bigger rack, so you’d think he’s probably older, but maybe he just wasn’t as spunky. It was clearly a one-sided fight.”
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