“I didn’t think I’d have to deal with this today,” Spencer Warren said when he arrived at work only to find ]a baby moose stuck between his float plane and the dock. Spencer had just pulled up to work when he heard a strange bleating coming from the lake.

When the pilot-in-training at Destination Alaska Adventure Co took a closer look he saw the trapped moose. The only problem with trying to save the calf was that the mama was right there and when she saw Spencer approach her baby she ran towards him.

Spencer is all too aware of how dangerous a protective moose mother can be, so he backed away, hid behind a nearby shed, and then slowly weaved his way back to his car, carefully making sure he was never directly in the upset mama moose’s path. He then called for help.

Police arrived 15 minutes later and thankfully the mama moose had backed away from the dock to protect her baby. That allowed one officer to park his police cruiser between the moose and the floatplane. And Spencer and the other officer were able to run over to the calf and pull him out of the water.

“The officer actually kind of just grabbed it by the scruff of its neck, and I got its rear end a little bit,” Spencer told news outlets. “We just lifted him straight out. He wasn’t tangled in anything. He was just wedged.”

The poor baby was waterlogged, scared, and shaking from the cold. But he found his way back to his mother and sibling for a happy reunion. The family stuck around for a while and Spencer said the rescued calf took a long nap on the porch. They wandered off into the woods a little bit later.

Of the rescue, Spencer said, “Anytime you can rescue a little critter, it always makes you feel good.”