It was Opening Hunting this weekend, as anyone who's been on the road could tell you, so I've spent the last few days three hours from my computer and roughly an hour north of what could be considered "my element."

This was a good year for us: the weather was passable (though the first few hours are always chilly) and with ten hunters we ended up shooting seven deer on the first day.

The meat is a huge bonus. I'm looking forward to my share of the free-range venison, even though I'm a little disappointed that there won't be any steaks this year. Steak recipes are so good and easy.

Red squirrels bedeviled me the entire weekend, chittering like madmen, crashing around unseen and deerlike in the fallen leaves, and occasionally trying to climb one of the trees my stand was in. At one point I stared down a squirrel that was perched an arm's length away inside my stand; he left, but I couldn't read those black eyes well enough to gauge his emotional reaction.

So much of deer hunting is about hearing, which is great because I think that's probably my one sense that's better than average. (I have excellent hearing, but some issues in determining the direction of sounds.) I could hear everything from my stand, so I spent some of the downtime reading The Disposessed.

(I finished the book today, and I liked it, even though it sometimes reminded me of Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. Which I detested, if you can grok such a thing.)

I saw two deer: the first was a doe, and it crossed the deer path at the far end of my line of sight so quickly that I couldn't get a bead on it in time.

The other sighting occurred 15 minutes before I was going to leave my stand for the day. I initially mistook the second deer for a particularly aggravating squirrel — I had some angry thoughts about squirrels as I looked up from my book — but the sounds turned out to be coming from another doe, ascending from a nearby swamp behind some trees. It was coming almost straight towards me, and I took my first shot then because I was worried it would turn left at the fork in the deer trail and obscure itself behind a bunch of trees.

Historians generally agree that this first shot was entirely ineffectual.

Except in one respect: the deer, apparently in possession of the seldom-seen "runs towards loud noises" gene, panicked and turned right at the fork. This brought it even closer to my stand, about 30 feet away I think, and I downed it immediately with a second shot to the torso. I'll put up a picture when I get one.

(When he saw where the deer had ended up, Matt opined that I could have just as easily knocked it out by throwing my gun at it.)

Since I'd seen two demonstrations earlier, I gutted the big doe myself, even though the last thing I'd gutted was a frog in ninth grade. Suffice it to say that, even with supervision from two of the other hunters, I made a huge mess of things.

Disposable gloves are awesome, but there was considerable splatter. I was in the shower as soon as we got back to the cabin.

We watched Beerfest that night at camp: the plot of that movie is held together by spit and duct tape. Maybe I'm misremembering Club Dread, but I worry that the Broken Lizard troupe is becoming the M. Night Shyamalan of comedy.

We were up very early again today (4 something), but no one shot anything this morning. I saw a blue jay (wow, does their singing suck) and a chickadee landed on my rifle very briefly. That split second was probably the highlight.

Matt and I had carpooled, so we jetted out of there at noon and I dozed on and off as he listened to the Vikes game. Judging from the radio commentary, I gather that our running back is the second incarnation of Jesus H. Christ.