Sometimes when the world rolls treeless and bare toward November, an oddity for normally snowy Alaska, I find myself thinking about my father sitting there all Thoreau-like in his beloved Minnesota tree stand with only his eyes moving. That was how he liked to hunt whitetail deer, but there was more to it than just hunting. Some sort of wilderness immersion therapy went on with him.

On the return from these hunts, he would talk not about the deer he killed, of which there were many, but about the chickadees that landed on the barrel of the custom .257 Roberts built by my Pennsylvania gunsmith uncles, He'd describe them dancing up the barrel thinking the rifle and the man attached to it were part of the tree. Or he'd remember the gray squirrel that climbed down from on high to squat on a branch only a foot or two away to contemplate the unmoving object that it knew did not belong in its environment -- until the object blinked, and the poor squirrel ran in fear, realizing it had stumbled upon one of the deadliest predators in its world.

Patience is what made him that sort of predator. Almost no matter where you are in North America, if you can identify a well-traveled game trail and sit by it long enough, you will see wildlife to shoot. I never had the patience for this sort of hunting, which did not sit well with my father. After five or six hours in the cold up a Minnesota tree, the chill finally starting to sit in, he would sometimes climb down and ghost through the woods for a half mile to where I was supposed to be up another tree, watching another deer trail, waiting. I was always long gone off tramping the woods.

More than once, he claimed to have caught glimpses of deer slipping through the bottom lands toward my stand as he eased along behind them, confident that when he pushed them across the shooting lanes hacked in the woods that I would shoot. He was never happy when this hunting tactic failed. And I never really believed his claims about the deer until the day I shot my first buck.

It came on the last day of the season as we were heading home. My father told me to walk as quietly as possible along the old, long-abandoned wagon road that followed a bluff above the Crow Wing River back to our car. He said he'd work his way through the cottonwood and box elder into the thick aspen in the floodplain below and see if he could push out a deer. We were halfway to the car when I heard the words, "deer, coming your way.''

The statement was firm, but not loud. I froze, eyes scanning the aspen running uphill toward thick, jack-pine forest, and then there was the deer, bounding up the hill. I aimed the rifle down the old road that split the hardwood forest of the lowlands from the softwood forest on the bluff. And when the deer stepped into that opening, I squeezed the trigger. The animal died there in the middle of the road. My father came up the hill shortly after to congratulate me and guide the business of turning a once-live animal into meat.

Having shot, gutted and skinned about a thousand gray squirrels by then (acorn-fed and the size of rabbits, they were some of the best tasting game I've ever eaten), I knew what to do, but I had advice anyway.

"Hold that skin up and put two fingers under it,'' my father said as I put a knife into the deer's belly. "You don't want to nick the stomach."

I didn't. I zippered open the deer's abdomen neat as a surgeon, and rolled the liver out for my father to grab. Liver and onions was a traditional, post-hunt meal in our house. My father saved it. I reached up inside the deer, sliced around the diaphragm and pulled out the heart and lungs. My father saved the heart, too. We ate that and the tongue. My grandfather loved nothing so much as cooked venison tongue.

Once the deer was gutted, we each grabbed an antler and dragged it a mile or so to the car. In the heavily roaded world of America, it was easy to get a deer to a vehicle so you could drive it home to hang. Our deer (the family usually seemed to have a few though the limit was but one per hunter) hung in the garage's cold for several days to age before they were skinned, butchered, wrapped and packed away in the freezer.