MISQUAH — The cover came off this week. Not all of it — the hazel is still holding — but the popple has gone and a person can see forty yards where two weeks ago he could see fifteen, and the shooting has improved accordingly.

What has not improved is the first half mile of every trail off County 6. Those birds have been walked at since the twelfth. They are gone, or they are educated, which amounts to the same thing for a person on foot.

Dale Ryberg, who has hunted these trails since the seventies and whose notebook I am still trying to see, reported four birds Saturday and volunteered without being asked that he shot none of them and had a fine morning. He also reported, and I pass it along because it is useful, that the dry ground is loud and that he has started hunting the low spots near water where the leaf litter is soft.

The dry is the story under the story this fall. Twenty-eight days without rain makes a woods that announces you. Three separate people told me the same thing this week in nearly the same words.

At the cleaning station: the rule holds. If you come in with fish and birds, the fish go first. Harold Aas has restated this twice this month from the bench, unprompted, to people who already knew.

A safety note that the substation asked to have repeated: two calls came in Saturday about shooting near the Loon Ridge Road, both from people new enough to the area not to know where the public land line runs. Nobody was doing anything wrong. The plat maps are at the county office and the courthouse has them online.