Grouse inhabit my dreams now. I hear the thrum of their wings as they flush from dark spaces in dense alder or hazel thickets. I see their mottled shapes zip away through a picket of trees thin and thick. Sometimes I manage to kill one, threading a shotgun pellet through the maze and dropping the bird in the wet duff. Mostly though I swing, pull the trigger and watch the grouse fly into another stretch of the Minnesota North Woods.

It’s been three nights since my hunt for ruffed grouse ended, and each night I’ve dreamed about them — all the more significant because I rarely remember my dreams come morning. Maybe it’s because the hunt itself had a dreamlike quality. For three days we walked miles in freezing rain that became snow, through a fairytale landscape of damp young forest dotted with odd mushrooms and lit by the scarlet berries of viburnum and highbush cranberry.
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