So what do you do if you find a 1,000-pound moose stuck in a partly frozen lake in the center of a six-million-acre wilderness?

When rescuers arrived at Lake Abanakee in Northern New York, only the head of the moose was above the water. It had fallen through about 40 minutes earlier, and was spotted by an unidentified bystander in the vast forests of the Adirondacks.

The moose, a male that had shed its antlers, had walked about 200 feet onto the lake in Indian Lake, about 100 miles northwest of Albany, before falling into the frigid waters late on Thursday morning, according to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.

The rescuers saw that the moose was unable to get out of the water. An airboat, a flat-bottomed watercraft with a propeller, was on its way to help.

“I guess there’s no training manual for getting moose out of the ice,” Lt. Robert Higgins, a state environmental conservation officer, said with a chuckle later in an interview posted on the agency’s website.

He narrated the rescue like it was all in a day’s work, as if anyone would quickly dress in cold-water gear and venture onto a frozen lake with sleds and heavy chain saws, as the team had done.