It was the perfect scenario to experience a mid-December muzzleloading excursion for whitetails. On a Friday night, my wife, Elaine, and I were to journey to the General Lewis Inn in Lewisburg in order to profile the Greenbrier County town for a general interest magazine. The forecast was for sleet and snow on Saturday afternoon, thus quite likely ensuring that deer would be actively moving throughout Saturday morning.

Additionally, Saturday morning was to be clear, cool and heavily overcast -- more ideal conditions for hunting. Moreover, the Greenbrier County farm where I often hunt was only a few miles away from the inn, instead of the some 80 miles I usually have to drive to go afield there.

However, on Friday morning, I awoke with a badly inflamed right big toe, and a trip to a doctor after work that day revealed an infected nail that had to be removed. The next morning in Lewisburg, I arose to find that the toe was so swollen that I could not even partially put my right foot in a boot without suffering excruciating pain. I had missed what likely would have been a better than average chance to smoke a whitetail.

Many Mountain State smokepolers, though, did not miss their opportunity to score this past December. The 2007 harvest was 7,658, a considerable jump of 11 percent from the 2006 tally of 6,886. However, the 2003 through 2005 harvests of 16,272, 15,104 and 9,064, respectively, show that the 2007 harvest was not very extraordinary.

In fact, the harvest was only the 16th highest on record and was 41 percent below the five-year average tally of 12,957. The West Virginia Division of Natural Resources (DNR) listed several reasons for the smaller harvests of late: new licensing requirements that took effect in 2006, no either-sex hunting in nine counties and portions of five more areas, and the limiting of hunting for an additional either-sex whitetail in 10 counties and portions of six more. As a counterpoint, the increased harvest was at least partially attributable to more counties being open to either- sex hunting in 2007 than in 2006.

Nevertheless, some counties did sport some solid harvests. The top 10 counties (with harvest numbers in parentheses) were: Braxton (403), Lewis (356), Preston (321), Monroe (320), Greenbrier (293), Fayette (275), Upshur (274), Mason (258) Jackson (252) and Grant (240).

Around the Mountain State, some districts fared better than others as well. As has been usually the case in recent years, District I (the Northern Panhandle and surrounding counties) led the way with 1,846 deer checked in, a fairly small drop from the 2006 tally of 1,903 but a major decline from the 2005 figure of 2,513.

Coming in second was District VI (covering much of the northwestern part of the state) with 1,524, down sharply from the tallies of 1,988 and 1,852 from 2005 and 2006, respectively. District II (the Eastern Panhandle and surrounding counties) finished third with a tally of 1,262, up from the 2006 harvest of 1,169 but a far cry from the 2005 results of 1,444.