Dennis Anderson: A laptop, a rifle, a tale from the woods

COOK, MINN. — You really want not to run out of battery power sitting in a deer stand on opening day, a laptop computer in hand, a long way from anywhere. The idea is to file a report while the cursor still blinks, thereby avoiding untold additional technological hassles, while, simultaneously, watching for worthwhile deer to pass through the swamp I am overlooking, or perhaps skirt it, within gun range.

Immediacy is what the world is about these days, or seems to have become, though this marriage of technology and nature here in the north woods seems somehow to have taken things a bit far.

Nonetheless, here we are, you the gentle reader and I the person with the .270 Ruger, waiting.

Together, let's see what unfolds.

• • •

A description first of what has transpired so far on this initial day of the state's firearms whitetail season. Skipping the business of the 4:45 a.m. alarm, the French toast and sausage for breakfast, the packing of lunches and so forth, we begin with the six of us hiking three-quarters of a mile off two-lane blacktop and into our hunting woods,

There we find, in the dark, our separate stands, and begin waiting.

This isn't the metropolitan area with its teeming population of deer, and typically we don't hear a lot of shooting hereabouts, opening day or not. Yes, gunfire cracks yonder here and there, with occasional multiple volleys. But compared to some places in the state -- say the Little Falls area where Gov. Tim Pawlenty is enjoying his last deer opener as governor -- the bang or bang, bang you hear here is intermittent, not continual.

Still, about 8:30, my son Cole, 15, let go a round from his .243. From my stand I couldn't know for certain it was him, because sound swirls with the wind in the woods. But the shot carried the staccato sharpness familiar to that caliber. And anyway I sure hoped it was him, and hoped also he had felled a big boy.

An hour or so later I joined Cole, and soon stood with him over a dispatched whitetail whose limbs were splayed helter-skelter in a swamp. This was a big animal, indeed. Though not a buck, a doe.

"She came down the trail in front of my stand," Cole said. He has killed deer before, bucks and does, by firearms and archery, and seemed now to appraise this latest matter matter-of-factly. "Thirty yards or so was all she was away."

Soon, kneeling over the animal, Cole pulled a knife from its sheath, pinched a fold of the doe's belly skin, inserted the knife sharp-side-up and scissored his way to the brisket.

"Big doe," I said. When the innards had been spilled and the pelvis split, I added: "Let's drag it to the trail."

The trail I spoke of was not exactly next door, and I could see Cole trying to puzzle out a different sort of resolution to our deer-transport problem.

"You and me?"

"Grab a leg," I said, and we pulled the deer over stump and swamp to the trail.

Scattered also in the woods, still in their stands, were Cole's brother, Trevor, 17, my brother, Dick, of Eveleth, his son, Brian, 29, of Champlin, and daughter Katie, 25, of Plymouth.

Leaving Cole again in his stand, I walked cross-country into a deeper part of our woods, toward Katie on her stand.

"Nothing," she said with a shrug when I asked whether she had seen any deer.

"But I think Dad shot."

Lunch was about a half-hour distant -- we had agreed to meet at noon -- so I angled also toward Dick's stand. Perhaps he had in fact squeezed the trigger of his .308, and if so, perhaps he needed help dragging the animal, or tracking it, or doing whatever might need doing, the possibilities of which are endless.

Which is the allure here, really, this lack of a script that accompanies the field sports, not just hunting, but fishing also. Often what occurs on any given day is a surprise. You can't plan for a bullet that hits a twig, for example, and caroms not into an animal's heart and lungs but its foreleg. Nor can you plan for getting lost, for being scented by an ever-alert buck, and can't plan, especially, for those times when everything goes just right, producing memories that will live on well past the grave, to be recalled by the next generation, and the next and the next.

• • •

Four o'clock now, and soon the magic hour approaches, the last piece of time before sunset, when light dissolves to dark and for a brief period the woods stir, unsettled.

Perhaps the heart of it now in early November, as days shorten and nights grow longer, is that winter will soon be upon us.

There. A shot.

Perhaps we have another deer, in addition to Cole's, to pull from the woods.

Or perhaps --we'll see what transpires in the next hour -- another deer still.

Dennis Anderson • danderson@startribune.com