A Mystery in the Woods

I was in Wisconsin for most of last week - minus a 3+ hour delay on the runway at La Guardia which neared the limits for many things and, briefly, seemed to jeopardize my whole trip. For most of the non-airport portion of the week, I was at the family cabin in the northern part of the state. My stay started with the surprise of a taxidermied duck (a gift from my mom's cousin that I long ago demanded be hidden from view) rolling out of its storage box onto my foot when I was looking for bedding, and continued with a new episode in a long-standing mystery: someone has been leaving various "decorations" on our walls over the years. One year we arrived to discover four deer hoofs mounted next to our "animal tracks of north woods wildlife" poster, which were quickly vanquished to another undisclosed location (probably the same box as the duck). Others, we have found a series of game fish:
Exhibit A - which is small enough that it hardly seems like it was a fair fight (it's also where the deer feet were - clearly showing that whoever is doing this doesn't take a hint).
Exhibit B - Admittedly, more vicious looking, but still.

There's a third fish on another wall, and some antlers elsewhere - presumably related to the hoofs, but, frankly, I'm not the kind of detective who wants to connect those dots. For a few years, the once-alive wall ornaments stopped - perhaps because the culprit found another cabin interior decoration job.

And then, this year,


Exhibit C arrived. We don't know exactly where it came from, but the most likely story seems to be a gentleman named Rockin' Ron's woodshed. Rockin' Ron confirmed that, at one point, he had taken in a sign like this - which goes with a sign for a "Deer Trail" sign at the entrance of a nearby condo development - prominently displayed next to the "Private Drive" sign that has kept my parents and I from so much as setting foot inside in the 24 years that we have been going to the woods - my mom once made me trespass in the Wisconsin state capitol, so the sign clearly carries an abnormal weight of "keep out"-ness. However, he hadn't seen the sign in a while, and he wasn't entirely sure what had happened to it. My mom suggested that, somehow, maybe the sign had gotten outside and into the water and washed up somewhere - only to be "rescued" by whoever our fisherman is. This seems improbable. So, we are at a bit of a dead-end - so many unanswered questions -if it is the same sign, was it in a third location before being liberated to our porch? If not, how did the thief know to look in Rockin' Ron's woodshed? Has he/she wearied of hunting game, perhaps converting to vegetarianism and replacing the thrill of the hunt with cat burglary? If it's a new sign and there is no foul play, why would anyone have a sign made so closely matching the other one?

Is the culprit trying to attract bears? If so, I hope the bears in the neighborhood remain illiterate.