"Trophy-hunting," Leopold wrote, "is nothing to apologize for. The disquieting thing in the modern picture is the trophy-hunter who never grows up, in whom the capacity for isolation, perception and husbandry is undeveloped, or perhaps lost."

Maybe it’s Leopold who is laughing. Here I am in his backyard, tromping glaciated heaps of earth and stone from which spring all manner of splendid trees, but hardly noticing one speck of this beauty on my fervent quest for a doe deer. Undeveloped capacity for perception? It certainly describes this hunter at this moment.

For two more days I buck bad weather, content to tramp the woods as a naturalist in the face of poor hunting. Fascinated, I watch as a Tom Thumb of a red squirrel chases a fat gray cousin who has strayed near his store of kernels up and down the trunk of a gnarled hardwood. In the squirrel kingdom, it seems, as in the world of men, ferocious temperament is often more than a match for superior size.

A short time later, watching a deer trail that funnels animals from the hills onto an alfalfa field below, a feathered streak of black and white swoops from a treetop and lands on a branch just feet from my face. A male downy woodpecker, sporting a jaunty cap in holiday hues of red, eyes me with suspicion. "To what purpose is this strange lump perched at my tree?" he seems to ask, turning his head to and fro. When at last I swivel my eyes to peer up the trail, the tiny tapper of bark flits away, giving me a final quizzical stare from twenty feet up a slender oak.

Why, I wonder, is this one bird so intrigued with my presence while dozens have swooped over my motionless form without a second glance. Faced with similar questions, Leopold offered this insight: "It is fortunate, perhaps, that no matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all of the salient facts about any one of them."

The author enjoying a rare treat: a night alone in Leopold’s writing shack. Ballard investigates a rub in the rainy Wisconsin hardwoods.

Late in the third day of my "attitude adjustment," hunting conditions suddenly improve. The sky brightens to blue around noontime and a noticeable calm descends on the woodlands. Figuring that deer will respond to the improving weather by feeding, I ease along a low rise overlooking an expanse of scattered timber on the floodplain of the Wisconsin River.

In the pervasive stillness, movement in the undergrowth ahead can mean but one thing. Peering into the tangle I spy a browsing whitetail. Its head carries no antlers.

Descending slowly onto my belly, I rest the rifle on an earthen berm and find the deer in the scope. At the shot, it leaps, then falls motionless in the yellow grass. At last I’ve earned my buck tag.

Twenty minutes later, I garner another. Still-hunting into a faint breeze, I spy a fat doe just as she spots me. She bolts, then slows to a trot, white flag waving above her back. Without thinking, I chirp like a calf elk. She stops and my finger again tightens on the trigger.