Sundance, Wyo.
The deer hunter in 81-year-old Waldo Elwonger wouldn’t at all mind dropping one of the big bucks that regularly traipse through his small yard in this town in the middle of nowhere.
But the husband in Waldo Elwonger knows better.
“My wife feeds them,” he said. “She loves having them in the yard. They eat cookies right out of her hand. So whether I’d like to shoot a deer in my yard or not, it doesn’t really matter, now, does it?”
This is not to say that the deer are always safe in Sundance, a town with one toe nearly on the South Dakota state line. The villagers are prohibited from hunting with rifles in town – safety first, of course – but once in a while the deer still run into a bit of bad luck. In the form of an arrow.
Take the day a while back when an archery hunter with a buck tag shot a deer just a few blocks from the courthouse. He chased the wounded animal through a neighborhood of old homes near Higbee’s Café and – sound the irony alarm – the Arrowhead Motel. He clutched his bow in one hand and frantically knocked on doors with the other hand to ask if he could track his deer through backyards. The hunt ended when the deer collapsed out behind Woody’s Small Engine Repair shop. In a playground.
“I got calls from residents that a deer with an arrow sticking out of it was running through town,” said local game warden Chris Peter, who works and lives in a small brick home one street over from where the arrow of misfortune found the deer. “It was a legal hunt.”
Sundance is a town of some 1,100 people alongside the Black Hills National Forest. It was named for nearby Sundance Mountain, where the Lakota and other native tribes held a religious ceremony each summer.
It’s also the town where a legendary outlaw, convicted of horse thievery and locked up in the town’s jail, was given the nickname Sundance Kid. Which was a good thing because, frankly, “Butch Cassidy and Harold Longabaugh” would have made a lousy movie title.
And Sundance, like so many other places, is grappling with a surging population of deer – mule deer and a smattering of whitetails that have forsaken life in the dark, scary forest for an easier existence and the much better menu (flowers, shrubs and lawns) in town.
Oh, sure, every once in a while an archer in Sundance makes the deer unwilling participants in a somewhat twisted version of Pin the Tail on the Donkey.
But the Sundance deer have it pretty good compared with their relatives just 85 miles down the road.
In Rapid City, S.D., city workers in city trucks with flashing yellow lights on the roof pull up alongside herds of deer nibbling on the grass, roll down the passenger-side window and shoot the deer in the head with rifles.
“Sometimes they get within about 4 feet,” said Mike Kintigh of the South Dakota Department of Game, Fish and Parks and a resident of Rapid City. “The deer are pretty tame. (The workers) pull up in the truck and shoot them right between the eyes.”
Last week, a Wyoming Game and Fish official suggested towns in his state use the Rapid City method as a model.
“First, you have to decide how many deer you’re willing to tolerate in your town,” Joe Sandrini said. “Then we’ll issue permits. You can shoot after dark or with silenced weapons or whatever.”
He explained the biology.
“You have boy deer and girl deer, and they get together and have babies,” he said. “This isn’t Disneyland. Deer don’t die of old age. They get sick and get eaten by something or they get hurt and get eaten by something.”
Or the truck with the flashing lights pulls up.
For two weeks each year – that period is about to begin, in case you were considering a family vacation – a pair of Rapid City sharpshooters (one is a highway worker, the other from the engineering department) kill about 300 deer within the city limits. The deer are field dressed and the carcasses given away to townsfolk who have signed up to get one.
“They call the next person on the list and say, ‘Come get your deer,”‘ Sandrini said.
Rapid City parks manager Lon Van Deusen said the program is working quite nicely.
“We used to see herds of 30 deer all over the place,” he said. “Now we find 10 deer here and there.”
As you might imagine, complaints from gardeners are way down.
“Our program is low-key,” Van Deusen said. “You pop off a .22 at 3 a.m. and no one even hears it. They don’t even know we’ve been there. After two weeks, we put out a press release saying we’ve harvested 300 deer, and the program is done for the year.”
Back in Sundance, 12 deer sauntered across Cleveland Avenue, ducked past a gas station and headed toward the home owned by the Elwongers.
Where’s Waldo? He’s putting the finishing touches on a dizzying array of Christmas decorations in, around and on top of the home where he and his wife, Marlene, have lived for 51 years. The decorations have taken him two months to put up.
“And every day I’m out here, the deer come through the yard,” he said.
He looked around to see if his wife was listening. And then he whispered.
“I wouldn’t mind popping one of them,” he said.
