Dennis Anderson: Deer opener is time well spent

Saturday was pleasant enough in this part of northeast Minnesota to make a deer hunter wish he were walleye fishing. All day the sun shone brilliantly, while a springlike breeze danced among the jack pines -- a far cry from the opening foray of whitetail season here a few years back, when the temperature sank to 16 degrees below zero.

Of the many ways deer can be pursued, we prefer in this region of the state to wait them out, hunting from stands. The country is so big and the whitetail population so relatively sparse that no hunting method other than tree-perching gives us much of a chance. Or so we think.

But erecting stands and maintaining them is a lot of work, and each fall in preparation for hunting these backwoods, we clear dead and fallen trees from trails and repair weather-beaten stands. This uses up at least one and sometimes two weekends before deer season.

Hunting with me Saturday on the first day of firearms whitetail hunting were my son Cole, 14, my brother, Dick, of Eveleth, and his son and daughter, Brian, 28, and Katie, 24, both of the Twin Cities.

We had kept our expectations in check in advance of the opener. Last winter was the real deal hereabouts, with deep snow and prolonged periods of zero and below-zero temperatures. Bothered already by wolves, and occasionally devoured by them as well, deer in this part of the world saw a significant decline in numbers by spring, and those that survived remain rightly paranoid of just about everything.

One hefty 6-pointer -- probably a 2 1/2-year-old buck (in time we'll age him definitively) -- wasn't paranoid enough.

"I didn't hear him coming,'' Dick said of the animal that materialized near his deep-woods stand about 11 a.m. "Maybe I heard a little something. Or maybe I just looked up at the right time. Anyway, just like that, there he was.''

Were whitetail bucks not in rut just now, cruising the woods for does, it's unlikely an animal like the one Dick drew down on would in forenoon on a warm Saturday be tiptoeing among the swamps, granite outcroppings and generalized wasteland that make up the landscape we hunt.

But there he was, at 11 a.m. sharp, and Dick put the crosshairs immediately behind his left shoulder and squeezed off a round from his .308.

Which made lunch Saturday cheerier than it otherwise would have been.

I, meanwhile, had seen only one deer by midday, and that was but a fleeting glimpse of his (or her) hindquarters. I had busted the animal while ambling to my stand in the early half-light, after walking with Cole to his stand, a newly placed steel contraption that Dick, Katie and I put up in a swamp a few weeks ago.

Cole was the only one among us to draw an antlerless permit this year, after what seemed like a long run of seasons in which the Department of Natural Resources in these parts doled these party favors out like candy on Halloween. Such generosity we considered amazing, because on a good opening weekend the bunch of us might see only four or five deer total, not exactly a surplus.

Still, as they say, you can't eat horns (and, yes, "they'' say horns, not antlers), so in some years at day's end we'd load a baldy into the back of the pickup and call it good.

"I'm going to shoot a doe if that's all I see and if it's a good one,'' Cole said. "I will say I prefer a buck.''

His older brother, Trevor, 16, had only a few days back recovered from the flu. Consequently, an entire weekend spent outdoors, rising early and going to bed late, would be ill-advised, he figured. So he was cooling his heels back home, hunting early and late with his bow and to his good fortune arrowing a dandy 9-pointer.

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After lunch, Dick moved to a new stand. Brian by then had helped drag Dick's buck somewhat nearer our trucks, then resettled into his tall swamp stand. Ditto his sister, though Katie's roost overlooked a ridge, and Cole, the swamp boy who by the minute was becoming evermore gender indifferent about any deer he might target. I, meanwhile, moved to the stand from which Dick shot his buck.

For a handful of recent opening days I haven't issued reports for the Sunday paper, waiting instead for the following Wednesday, Friday or Sunday, because the logistics of writing and filing were too cumbersome, given how far we hunt from a road, and given also the weather, which is usually cold and often snowy.

Not so Saturday, a day so pleasant that writing and hunting worked well enough in combination.

Throughout the afternoon I saw no deer. But for much of that time a blue jay flitted but 15 feet away. Also a grouse. A porcupine was up a tree on the other side of a creek. And a magnificent bald eagle spent long minutes carving huge loops against the bluest sky, the bird's wings rigid as it soared on rising thermals more familiar to September than November.

Eventually, darkness overcame all of this, and the day had been well spent, though no one pulled another trigger.

Dennis Anderson • danderson@startribune.com