Mitchell Wolfe is used to seeing elk and other wildlife while doing his rounds in oil fields south of Rock Springs, but something about a bull elk he glimpsed lying by the roadside Saturday morning made him turn his truck around.

He initially thought the bull, which had one of its rear legs tangled in a barbed wire fence, was dead because it was completely still.

But when he got close, he could see the bull’s ribcage rhythmically rising and falling.

“I thought, ‘He’s breathing. He’s still alive,’” Wolfe told Cowboy State Daily.

He retrieved some tools from his truck and spent the next 15 minutes or so freeing the elk’s leg from the tangled wire.

After doing his best to comfort the nearly catatonic bull and saying a prayer, Wolfe went on about his business.

His greatest hope was that

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