The rain has let up now, and occasional slits of blue sky materialize among the clouds. I survey the soggy landscape from my platform 12 feet up a birch tree. There's a .308 Winchester across my lap.
My friend is half a mile south with a rifle in his lap, too. It's the first week of Minnesota's firearms deer season. He says he's holding out for a buck. I will settle for any gender of venison on the hoof.
We are the only two hunters on this broad swath of county land north of Duluth. Midweek in Minnesota's 16-day season, the woods are nearly empty. Gunshots are infrequent and distant.
It is not particularly hard to hunt deer with a rifle, which may be why close to half a million hunters do it each year in Minnesota. Most of them do it the way my companion and I do today -- plopped on a wooden platform well up a tree, clad in blaze orange, scanning the countryside.
To be a deer hunter requires generous portions of two qualities -- vigilance and the ability to remain still. From your lofty perch, you scan the surrounding countryside. The profusion of spruce to your far left. Acres of young aspen before you. The clearcut ridge in the distance. Rotating your head deliberately, like a periscope stuck in molasses, you survey these places again and again. Spruces. Popples. Clearcut. Spruces. Popples. Clearcut.
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But while your eyes travel the same country again and again, your mind is free to travel at will. And it does. You imagine where a deer might appear and if you could make the required shot. You think about your children and the choices they are making in life. You think about the insulating qualities of Thinsulate, the shape of a particular cloud, Democrats and Republicans, the myriad voices of ravens, a moonrise you witnessed in Paris, your father's detached retina.
In this way, deer hunting becomes almost a kind of meditation, though I'll admit you rarely see someone in a transcendental state with a high-powered rifle in his lap.
It occurs to you that you have not allowed yourself to slow down this way for a long time, that deer hunting is the very antithesis of the rest of your life. And you think that maybe this is why so many Minnesotans do this each fall, that it might have little to do with antlers or venison.
You decide that this is a good way to live. Sitting high and looking far and breathing clean. Smelling the withered ferns and watching the rain dry on the aspen trunks. Noting the waning candlepower of the afternoon.
Spruces. Popples. Clearcut.
Wait. A deer has appeared in a clearing where there was no deer before. Yes, that's a deer. It's looking at you, twitching one big ear. A doe, it appears, but you cannot be sure until you take a look through the scope.
Now the clouds and the ravens and the moon in Paris are no more. There is just you and the deer. And a decision to make in the next three seconds.
SAM COOK can be reached at (218) 723-5332 or scook@duluthnews.com . For previous columns, go to duluthnewstribune.com.
