That evening, I check my take at a local convenience store. As customers pass through the swinging front door that opens with a jingle, an expressionless clerk/DNR license agent shuffles out to inspect my deer. "Nice doe," he grunts, "but there ain’t much to eat on that other ’un."

Like many great conservationists, Leopold understood that hunting was an important part of game management.

He’s right. The next day I drop the pair by another station where local management folks weigh and age the deer. Amused, the record-keeper notes the mass of my first Wisconsin whitetail.

"I believe you’ve set a record," he announces with twinkling eyes. He flips through pages of previous years’ records. "Mind you, it’s not official," comes the solemn pronouncement, "but best as I can figure this here thirty-nine pound button-buck is the smallest deer we’ve ever checked from that property."

I take the good-natured ribbing with a grin. I knew the animal was small--young of the year--when I shot. What I didn’t know was that the deer had previously mangled its front leg at the joint above the hoof. Hopelessly scarred and malnourished, his death would have come by inches from starvation or from the fangs of a hungry coyote. Teasing aside, I felt very good that my bullet had speedily delivered the little buck from a more painful fate.

Come evening I’m at it again, skulking enthusiastically through the forested flats along the river bottom. Mike generously offers to let me use his own tree stand, arguing convincingly that I have a better chance of taking a buck from the air than the ground. He’s right, but I decline. I’m a wanderer, not a settler.

I discover the rubs of what appears to be a sizeable whitetail smack dab in the middle of a large DNR property. As the sun casts it final rays against ashen birch trunks in a tiny meadow near the rubs where I stand watching, the maker fails to appear.

Thanks to the generosity of the Aldo Leopold Foundation, I spend this night alone in "The Shack." An inspiring fire of good oak burns brightly on the hearth, which Leopold himself built with the help of his children. Oil lamps cast enough light for reading, so I pull a copy of A Sand County Almanac from a shelf and wander the pages. A paragraph in which the author considers the various components of outdoor recreation captures my attention. One of these includes physical objects--wild crops such as game and fish, and the symbols or tokens of achievement such as heads, hides, photographs and specimens. "The pleasure they give is, or should be," he wrote, "in the seeking as well as the getting."

I brew some tea, clean my rifles and ponder. Two more days could be wrung from the calendar, but quite frankly, I’ve had enough. Tomorrow I’ll head home. Not with a trophy, but with an ageless reminder more than 1,000 miles in the making: Take pleasure in the "seeking" and the "getting" doesn’t really matter.

As I doze in my sleeping bag on the floor near the fire, a final thought percolates from the soft pillow. Will Leopold’s logic also apply to Christmas presents and spouses?