ATLANTA  Fishermen saw heads bobbing in the water: 38 exhausted dogs struggling to stay alive.

These hound dogs had jumped into a Mississippi lake chasing a deer during a fox hunt. Bob Gist, fishing on the lake, knew they needed help.

“A deer can swim the Mississippi River, but those dogs won’t catch it,” he recalled.

Gist, Brad Carlisle, and guide Jordan Chrestman rushed over in their small boat.

“There were dogs everywhere, swimming in circles,” Gist said.

As the dogs’ owners watched anxiously from the shore, the three men started grabbing as many dogs as they could. With too many to fit on the boat, they made three trips to shore.

Gist took a photo showing Carlisle grinning in sunglasses with hound dogs on the bow, their fox hunt numbers painted on their sides. Other dogs stood behind the seats, two calmly looking ahead as Chrestman steered.

“The hero here is Jordan,” Gist said, crediting the guide for speeding the boat over. “If it wasn’t for Jordan, there would have been 38 dead dogs.”

The dogs had been in the water for 15-20 minutes. Some were so tired the men had to lift their heads out of the water and heave them aboard.

By the time they rescued the last dogs, they’d been in the water for nearly an hour.

Dogs can “follow game relentlessly,” said Chris Gurner of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who called it rare for them to go that far from shore. Despite the fox hunt, the dogs chased any animal that startled them.

“Opportunities to help are always in front of us,” Gist said. “If you see something, do something.”