Shaken up by stray bullets and overeager hunters, a couple that neighbors state endowment land in Coeur d’Alene has asked the state to close the area to hunting once and for all.

“You become a prisoner of your own home during hunting season,” said Pat Templeman, who has lived in the Cougar Gulch area with her husband Bart for 30 years.

The retired couple lives a couple hundred yards from nearly 500 acres of state endowment land, where public hunting is allowed.

The Templemans recently submitted a letter to the Idaho Department of Lands stating that hunting on the endowment land has risen to levels of concern over the past several years, and they want the hunting shut down before they or their neighbors are victims of a bad shot.

“When you’re driving right through there, you can see (hunters) from the car,” Pat said. “Kids are on the road waiting for the school bus. A lot of residents, including us, walk on the road.”

A couple years back, a bullet struck the couple’s barn while Bart was helping workers insulate it, he said.

And several days ago, Pat stumbled across a hunter who had shot a deer on their neighbor’s lawn, within shooting distance of her home and several others.

“I said ‘What are you doing?’ and he said, ‘I just shot this deer,’” she said. “I said ‘Yeah, but on private property. Look at all the houses.”

The Templemans have posted “no hunting” signs around their property. But hunters can’t see their home behind the trees, Bart said, and their fence can’t stop bullets.

“Most of those guns will shoot a mile,” Bart said.

Their neighbor, Christy Blazin, agreed she would like to see hunting closed down.

“We’re not against hunting, but we just feel there’s plenty of places for people to hunt that are not close to residential neighborhoods,” she said.

Another neighbor, Mike Hickle, who owns the property where the deer was recently shot, said hunters have shot game on his land before.

He is even more concerned about increased road hunting on Cougar Gulch Road, by the residential area, where hunters cruise up and down in trucks until they spot game, then pop out and shoot.

“I think the troubling part to me is you have people who are not very responsible carrying high-powered rifles and shooting in areas in close proximity to occupied homes,” Hickle said.

He is not, however, in favor of the Templemans’ request to close the area to hunting.

He would prefer to see more patrols from the Sheriff’s Department and Idaho Fish and Game, he said.

“I’m not really a big advocate of closing off more state lands,” said Hickle, a hunter himself. “That’s the property of the citizens of Idaho. They should have access to use it reasonably.”

Hunting is allowed on all state endowment land, said Roger Jansson, operations chief for IDOL northern offices.

Agency officials have only briefly discussed the Templemans’ letter, he added, and won’t take any action this hunting season.

“We do want to research this, see if we can come up with options, work with Fish and Game,” he said of the agency that oversees hunting in Idaho.

The state would prefer to leave the area open to hunting, Jansson said.

“It is the policy to keep it open,” he said.

IDOL area manager Mike Denney, who lives by the endowment land in Cougar Gulch himself, acknowledged that hunting is popular there, but he hasn’t heard many complaints.

Still, he is aware of other areas where bullets have strayed from state land to private property.

“That’s a concern I think is legitimate on any public lands at an open interface with homes close by,” Denney said.

Craig Walker, regional conservation officer with Fish and Game, said the property owners should post their properties to prevent hunting access.

With only 12 conservation officers for the five northern counties, Walker said, the agency can’t afford to spend much time there patrolling.

“Each guy has roughly 1,000 square miles of area to patrol. He does it where he can, when he can,” Walker said. “Of course officers would like to spend more time where there are violations occurring, but it’s the nature of the beast.”