Deer Hunters Rack Up Season Measured By Store’s Display, Many Shooters Came Home Smiling

By the looks of the decor at Black Sheep Sporting Goods, the deer hunting season in these parts was a success.

“Mommy … whoa!” a toddler gasped Sunday, gawking at the 100-or-so new antler racks mounted above rows of mittens at Black Sheep.

“‘Whoa’ is right,” mom replied.

It was the final weekend of deer hunting, busiest of the season.

Around here, that’s very busy. Venison is to North Idaho what the Big Mac is to everywhere else.

“I went out quite a bit,” said hunter Larry Sieverding of Coeur d’Alene. “My wife was pretty upset with me.”

That wall at the Black Sheep tells the story. It’s where hunters bring their big buck racks as a way to show off the game they nabbed this season.

This year, there is barely enough room to shimmy in a wee Rudolph, much less another big Blitzen.

“The past three days, we’ve had so many deer come in, it was ridiculous,” employee David Wyckoff said. More than ever before, in fact.

And Wyckoff proclaimed they were bigger, too.

“Healthy herds, healthy herds,” he said, beaming.

Sieverding, fresh from a Saturday excursion, said the deer were everywhere. “I went out with my little boy and bagged a nice, big buck,” he said. “I even passed on a few.”

They found that even the sharp whine of their snowmobile didn’t scare them off.

He’s still searching for the Great Beast, though: He swears he tracked an 8-point buck for a while, but it got away.

But ask Sieverding too much about it, and he’ll turn CIA on you. “I don’t want to give out too much information on him,” he said.

Paranoia? Nope. There’s legitimate reason to worry about the competition on the last weekend of deer season.

“There were just people all over the place. I’ve seen more hunters yesterday than I’ve seen all season,” Coeur d’Alene hunter Cliff Noll said Sunday. He and friend Jeff Chambers were hunting near Athol and both brought home “good, healthy, mature white-tail bucks.”

The woods were so flush with people, the deer went nuts. “There’s just human scent everywhere, and they have difficulty determining what to avoid,” Noll said.

Things were a little less dense off the main roads.

That’s because some places were “crotch deep” with snow, said one hunter, Rich Gerhard of Coeur d’Alene.

And then there was damage from the Nov. 19 ice storm. In places Gerhard and his buddies usually go “tippy-toeing” through the woods, they were instead “climbing over frozen trees.”

Gerhard’s friends dragged home deer Sunday. He said he didn’t see any to his liking that day, despite seeing “lots of track, lots of signs and lots of game, too.”

Maybe he can hook up with Sieverding. The Great Beast still runs amok.

“I’ll get him,” Sieverding vowed. “Next year.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo