The ring-necked pheasant won't exactly rule in the new Cabela's store in Rapid City.

Oh, the South Dakota state bird - a flashy import that attracts hundreds of thousands of hunter and hundreds of millions of dollars to the eastern two-thirds of the state - will be a featured attraction this fall, all right.

But with the western edge of the state's true pheasant country more than 100 miles to the east, store manager Mary Bollock isn't sure how featured it should be.

"We're still trying to juggle the idea of how big will pheasant hunting be for us," she said. "We know people from here will go east to hunt. But are people also going to fly into Rapid City, then drive to Pierre and places like that? If they do, we may have an awesome pheasant season here."

But it won't result in the kind of rooster madness that hits each October at the Cabela's store in Mitchell, which happens to sit within an hour of the best pheasant hunting on the face of the earth.

Visitors to the Rapid City store will still see plenty of ring-necked pheasant gear - the right shotguns, shells, clothing and hunting-dog paraphernalia - that's right for hunting roosters. But that gear also can be used for other upland birds, like the West River native sharp-tailed grouse.

And like other Cabela's outlets, the Rapid City store is designed to highlight the area's outdoor offerings. In Rapid City and the Black Hills, that's trout. It's also deer, elk, antelope and wild turkey.

"We do that with all our stores," Cabela's media representative Gail Shore said. "Each part of the country has its particular outdoor attributes, and we try to feature that."

The Mitchell store has a fly-fishing section, for example. But the Rapid City store has a complete fly shop for Black Hills stream fishing, as well as a wide variety of equipment and lures to catch trout in lakes.

"You can get anything you need for Black Hills lakes and streams," fly shop manager Garrett Clapp said. "We've got the waders, the materials, the flies, all the other gear. It's a full-spectrum fly shop."

The store's aquarium, which is smaller than the multiple fish tanks in the Mitchell store, also will focus on cold-water fish species, trout and probably salmon.

But outside the fly shop, the new Rapid City store has an extensive selection of other types of fishing gear. And it caters to prairie bass and bluegill fishing, walleye and smallmouth bass fishing in Orman and Angostura reservoirs, as well as an abundance of equipment and lures needed for the Missouri River reservoirs.

Big-game will dominate the hunting sections. The Black Hills deer and elk seasons, plus West River prairie deer seasons are among the big three of hunting in western South Dakota, with wild turkey not far behind.

While it's still a bit early for buck fever and its related "illnesses" in other types of big-game hunting, hunters will likely feel the symptoms coming on when they see the guns, the gear and the mounted big-game specimens on display at the store.

Cabela's spokesman John Castillo felt the fever even as he gave a recent media tour of the store.

"I'm a little deer crazy myself," he said. "So walking through here really gets me excited."

Contact Kevin Woster at 394-8413 or kevin.woster@rapidcityjournal.com