CARRABASSETT VALLEY – Dr. Ray Stone never saw it coming.

Skiing down the Haulback Trail at Sugarloaf/USA on the morning of Jan. 12 the family practice doctor, who lives in New Gloucester and works at Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston had a fine arcing turn interrupted by a whitetail deer that was attempting to cross the ski trail.

“I just never saw this deer coming,” Stone said from his ski chalet near the mountain Friday. “I was going pretty quick down the top half of Haulback, arcing from left to right and all of the sudden I just got knocked right off my feet and I was falling.”

The deer, too, went down. “Its legs were just pumping away really fast, they never stopped moving,” Stone said of the animal. Uncertain of whether it was a buck or a doe Stone, in a letter to the Kingfield-based weekly newspaper The Irregular, wrote, “My first thought was, ‘What hit me?…a (snow) boarder? drunk skier? linebacker?’ “

Others saw the collision from the chairlift said longtime Maine skier and ski writer Dan Cassidy. At a social event that evening in Stratton, Cassidy overheard some people talking about how they witnessed a skier hitting a deer. Cassidy said he, at first, thought they were joking and was wondering if they were “drinking something.” But he said the story checked out so he wrote about it, which eventually prompted Stone to write in to report he was the skier who hit the deer.

Cassidy, who has been skiing in Maine for 45 years and writing about skiing for 15 years, has never heard of a deer-versus-skier collision.

“Never, never, never,” Cassidy said. “I’ve never even heard of anybody encountering a deer on a ski trail, especially an alpine trail, I’ve seen an animal, like a fox, come out on occasion but never a deer.”

Stone recalls people hollering at him from the lift, and he raised his fist and pumped it in the air just to tell them he was OK. To the lift riders it appeared Stone was shaking his fist in anger over the deer ruining what would have otherwise been a nice run down one of the resort’s favorite expert trails, Cassidy said.

But Stone wasn’t angry just surprised. “I wasn’t mad, just signaling I was fine,” he said Friday.

After checking himself out for any injuries, the doctor skied down to meet his wife, Diane, at the chairlift. She was skiing ahead of him on the trail and hadn’t seen the collision.

When he told her he had just run into a deer on the ski slope her first question was, “Is the deer all right?” she said Friday.

Stone said he’s been skiing at Sugarloaf since about 1985 and is a “fairly conservative” skier. “I don’t think I even fell once last season,” he said. The run-in with the deer took him down, but his skis stayed on, he said. The deer quickly bounced back to its feet and continued across the trail and into the woods beyond, Stone said. “It never stopped running even though it was down,” Stone said. “Luckily we just glanced off each other. I’m just glad the deer wasn’t hurt.”