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Eighteen-year-old Nathan Wimmer shot this nice bear on the morning of Oct. 17.

He was hunting on Bent Mountain when he saw the bear about 100 yards out. When it got inside 20 yards Wimmer grunted to the stop the bear and made a good shot with his new Hoyt Alpha Max. This is his first bear.

Have you ever seen a good bluefish blitz? The kind where a school of big chompers just attacks a school of prey? It's unreal.

I felt like I was in the middle of a blitz on Sunday when, after getting some project supplies at Home Depot, I swung into the soon-to-close Sportsman's Warehouse.

The place was an absolute zoo, with lines at that registers that stretched back toward the middle of the store.

Now, I could understand a buying blitz if everything in the store was 50 percent off. But most of what I saw was discounted 10 percent, although fishing terminal tackle was 20 percent off. The best I saw was 30 percent off hunting clothes, some of which already had previous discounts.

Now, 10 percent is better than nothing, 20 percent is getting somewhere and 30 percent is good. But the 10- and 20 percent discounts have been common at the store. All you had to do was get your hands on the discount cards SW handed out like candy at outdoors events and meetings.

The only thing I can figure is that everybody showed up looking for killer deals. When they saw the huge crowds they figured they better get in on the action, even without killer deals, for fear the items they were after would quickly sell out.

"I've had my eye on this tin of pellets for a while but I just couldn't do it when they were $3.99. But now that they're $3.60, I'm all over it! Yeah, man! I saved 40 cents! Now I excuse me while I go spend the next half hour in line."

Strange.

 My feature on the Outdoors page in today's Roanoke Times was about three guys -- Mike Bowling, Bob Hage and Matt Ireland -- who recently hiked deep into the James River Face Wilderness for a deer hunt.

They didn't see many deer -- about a dozen total over five days. But they saw a couple of good ones, including this giant 13-pointer Bowling killed three days into the hunt.

The story was about more than the deer, but I had hoped to run this shot with the story. We didn't have space for it, so here it is.

I'm intrigued by a dilemma Radford city leaders are facing. At issue is who should get priorty use on a tract of 250 acres in Montgomery County that the city owns.

The short of it is the city has long permitted hunting on the property by special permit. Recently some bikers helped build about 6 miles of trails. Bikers surprised to find out that hunting is allowed during all open seasons, not just the two-week general firearms deer season, as they assumed, recently asked the city council to change its policy and allow hunting only those two weeks. The council is waiting to decide what to do, and will hear public comments at a meeting in October.

As I wrote in my Sunday column, I'm confident a reasonable compromise can come out of this. No one will have to give up much.

Apparently, others aren't so confident. Our lead editorial today discussed the same topic, and the writer/writers are much more pessimistic.

Maybe I'm a hopeless optimist. I know there's no perfect solution. But I have full confidence the hunters, hikers, bikers and Radford City leaders will prove me right and come up with a good solution.