The other morning in a goose blind, autumn was more plainly in sight than anything. Over the distant horizon the warming sun burned a hole in the blush sky. A few birds were aloft but not many. The air was chilled, the grass wet with dew. You really want to drink in these moments while you can. I was, as they say, spending my time wisely.

A friend has a habit each year of calculating the number of autumns he has remaining, actuarially speaking. That the number now hovers close to single digits seems not to infuse him, as Thomas Wolfe wrote of autumn, with a "sense of sadness and departure." But rather with, as Wolfe also wrote, "an unexpected sharpness, a thrill of nervousness, a swift elation."

My earliest memories are of autumn. My dad smoked and in early morning on North Dakota backroads his lit cigarettes returned the soft glow of dashboard lights. This was before dawn, and the roads traveled were either gravel or gravel covered with snow. Our black Labrador was in the trunk, the decoys in the back seat and our guns cased. September's harvest moon had come and gone; so, too, had October's hunter's moon. The crops had been gathered, the soil turned.

Differences exist among people who have felt firsthand autumn's cold blade across their skin, and those who have not. Bonfires and ballparks are pleasant enough between summer and winter. But lie in a stubble field as mallards wash over you against a gray sky, a swirling pallet of muted colors, and the world does indeed seem ordered, everything in motion, and purposefully. Whether this is true is beside the point. Vanities and regrets are forgotten here as nowhere else, and life renewed.

A friend phoned the other day from California, where he lives. He has health issues, but who doesn't? The news was he had purchased a 3-year-old Elhew pointer from a Michigan kennel and a fine 20-bore with a burled stock, the latter over the Internet. My friend had once earned the nickname "Double Big Foot," for the speed with which he traversed South Dakota prairies. He had hung up his guns some years ago. But the memories of past autumns had overcome him, he said; times when he followed a pair of Brittanies here in Minnesota in search of grouse and woodcock. Now he wanted nothing more than to relive those days, and create them anew. So he copped a reverse mortgage, bought the gun with a credit card and told the Michigan kennel owner to ship the dog via air freight.

Fishing in September and October also can be memorable. Good trout can be caught then, and river waters flow more clearly beneath the seasonally adjusted angle of sunlight. Also the biggest bass of the year are landed in autumn, and during the full moon of October, oversized walleyes are suckers particularly at night for crankbaits. All of this while leaves gather on shorelines beneath oaks, birches, maples and aspens.

In autumn, life passes through the narrows of an hourglass. Not everyone or everything will see the other side. Not the deer in the rifle scope, not the tired horse in the far pasture, not the old man, foretelling his own end, with only enough wood cut and split to last until Christmas.

Yet, "Everyone must take time to sit and watch the leaves turn," as Elizabeth Lawrence said.

The other morning in the goose blind, two friends and I watched as birds skirted our decoys. They heard our calls but flew on regardless. You want most of these to do just that. You want also not to be hunting with someone who yells, "Kill them," when the birds are in range, and you particularly don't want someone to offer you a high-five when a bird is felled -- behaviors some outdoors television programs offer up as ironic proof that far too few people have read Leopold's "A Sand County Almanac." Or even Miss Manners.

The sun was well in the sky when two Canada geese came from behind us, over our left shoulders, a surprise. Wolfe's "swift elation" followed. We shouldered the guns and the big birds cartwheeled to the ground. All of it seemed as familiar as those days long ago in North Dakota. You really do want to drink in these moments while you can.

Dennis Anderson • danderson@startribune.com