Spence Turner is trying to be quiet in the little cabin beside the quietly flowing Pine River. He is no more noisy than a seal colony in breeding season. I force open a gritty eyelid, see faint gray light outside, like a coal miner's underwear, a hint of dawn. It is 6:45 a.m. on the first day of our annual grouse hunt and wild horses could not keep Spence from greeting daylight.

No matter that a grouse is a civilized bird and does not need to be hunted like a duck. Little kids always leap from bed at first light on Christmas morn to see what's under the tree--maybe a bull grouse.

Spence is a little kid swaddled in middle-aged flesh. The cabin is icy, but warming in the early morning. We'd turned off the gas heater to sleep because it knows only two settings--off and full-blast. I snuggle back into the down sleeping bag, enjoying its luxurious warmth. I'm a little kid, too, but I've figured out that there are more hours of grouse hunting in a day than I'm capable of occupying.

Spence has been restless all night. So have I, for a different reason--last night was the annual Lutheran Church lutefisk dinner. No court in the nation would hesitate to institutionalize a person who would travel 900 miles to eat lutefisk.

A stale echo of lutefisk rises and explodes as a greasy belch and I groan. Ted Lundrigan, our host, is a lanky Norwegian who practices law when the grouse season is closed. He is a devotee of the put-on and I think has convinced the entire town that it is wonderful fun to wait for our schedule before they set the annual Lutheran Church lutefisk dinner so they can make it coincide with our visit.

LUTEFISK IS GOD'S REVENGE on Scandinavia for having a good time in a beautiful place. The first time I ate lutefisk, I got a bellyache as fierce as a Norwegian blizzard. That was even before I discovered the recipe for the stuff. Norwegian alchemists combine fish with toilet bowl cleanser and the result is fish Jell-O, a palpitating blob that looks worse than any description you could give it. It also tastes precisely like you would expect fish Jell-O to taste.

Perhaps the lutefisk dinner is a rite of passage. Even six or seven hours scrambling through the tangles of Leonard Woodcock or the hidden bog sucks of Uncle Willie's is a snap after lutefisk.

Uncle Willie's is the code name for one grouse covert. The coverts are strung together, like jewels in a necklace, each rare gem bearing an exotic name: Leonard Woodcock, Byron's Demise, the Disco Kid. Anyone overhearing us talking in the cafe about Wanda's Wet Spot might get the wrong idea. It's just another grouse covert.

Grouse hunters talk in code, naming their coverts not for landmarks, nor other normal devices, but for attributes known only to those allowed to hunt there.

Turner's is where Spence ran into a fall of woodcock that threatened to melt the gun barrel. The shooting largely was ineffective, but fun. Ted, listening to Spence's futile barrage nodded sagely toward the distant hillside and said, "Turner's," and so it has been ever since.

We love ruffed grouse for all their perverse stupidity. They are the loose cannon of the game bird world, totally unpredictable. They'll sit for a dog or maybe walk off or maybe fly up in a tree or maybe flush wild or maybe do all those things in sequence or simultaneously (grouse are suspected of flying up their own rear end, the only explanation for how they can vanish so efficiently and quickly).

Writers are fond of encomiums to the sagacity of the ruffed grouse. There is no sagacity--merely monumental indecision which leads them to do the unexpected, not because they're smart, but because they're dumb.

GROUSE EXIST OTHER THAN in Minnesota. Hunters fight through laurel hells in the northeast and there are ruffed grouse atop Western mountains, but ruffed grouse hunting for me is north of Minneapolis where people named Smith are as rare as people named Olson are common.

This is a great soggy ground where a bog lake is only a foot in elevation below where you're standing. Ruffed grouse are a muffled rataplan in the dark corridors of an alder bog in Minnesota. Sometimes you come up on a slight hill, an esker, compliments of the last Ice Age, and you can wander among the shattered gold of aspen leaves, ever hoping for a thick sprouting of gray dogwood whose pale yellow berries guarantee a grouse-in-residence.

Spence is brewing coffee and the sumptuous scent fills the cabin, promising a stiff jolt of caffeine to frighten away the gentle ghosts of sleep. Damn it! The dawn has taken hold and I hear the muted gossip of a hen mallard bustling past, in company with three silent boyfriends, just beyond the window that fronts the river.

My grouse hunter's uniform lays jumbled on my duffel bag, near the bed. There's brush pants, nicely washed for the beginning of the long bird season, not rumpled and caked with blood and dirt, the way they'll be in a couple of months. It's a sin to wash brush pants during the season. If they get cleansed by a drenching rain, fine, but they must not visit a laundry room until Jan. 16. Soap dilutes the accumulated magic.

The red chamois shirt is thin at the elbows and will not survive the season. A new blue one is stuffed at the bottom of the duffel bag, emergency provender. The boots are shiny and sticky with dressing. They are in their third season and lean tiredly like old combat soldiers after a forced march.

The wool socks are new, my gift to me each season. By season end--perhaps by the end of the day if Ted has a marathon planned--they'll be as thin as Kleenex at the heels, possibly full of holes if the puppy finds them. Pulling on the second new pair tomorrow morning, after six hours of hunting today, will feel as luxurious to my ruined feet as if I were wading on Dolly Parton.

I CHECK MY SHELL VEST to make sure it has the one indispensable item for the bewildering Minnesota bogs, a compass. Ted moves quickly and surely through his beloved swamps, but I am a bleating lamb, ever lost. The nearby Iron Range with its overpowering magnetic attraction, doesn't do much to quell my deep suspicion of compasses in general. They always point to directions that cannot be. Believing in a compass is like believing in a Higher Power. You can't see magnetism, nor explain how it works, but you'd better have faith in that tiny, quivering needle because your wet bird dog is cold comfort when you're lost and trying to sleep in a swamp at 20 degrees.

The effective grouse season is from Oct. 1 through Nov. 1, maybe a little later in a clement year, a little sooner if winter drops by early. Winter is short-tempered up here, but global warming or perhaps just luck has tempered the weather during our recent hunts. Only once have we hunted in snow, a hefty fall that turned the woods into silent white corridors and vast rooms.

The rush of a flushing grouse was a hushed sermon in an empty cathedral. Then the sun came out and everything turned to slop, including, as I remember, my shooting. Only rarely does it rain in October, the month of magic. Mostly, the days are bright, sharp mornings turning to brisk shirtsleeves afternoons. Grouse and their little spiritual cousins, the woodcock, prowl the edges of alder bogs and any point could be of either bird. It confuses those hunters who are load-specific, but I jam a couple of No. 7 1/2 field loads in the double and don't worry about it. I generally don't hit them anyway, so might as well be shooting rock salt and nails.

The dogs are in their kennels in the car, not yet gimpy and bleary-eyed from stiff duty in the grouse swamps. Today they bounce out of the vehicle and yawp around the yard, swapping ends and barking, hysterical at the sight of men in hunting garb.

Ted is fooling with Salty, a diminutive white setter who knows more about grouse than any dozen bird dogs anywhere. She is quiet and shivery, like a combat veteran who knows what it's really like, while the Missouri dogs act like brash recruits with too much vinegar and not enough common sense.

WE OPEN AT THE OLSON BROTHERS, several hundred acres of prime grouse woods. Frank and Walt are Norwegian bachelor farmers, straight from a monologue about Lake Woebegon. They carefully monitor their empire and trespassers are treated with neither kindness nor respect.

We fight through the tangle of Leonard Woodcock, a thicket of young aspen, jail bait stuff which annually attracts a fall of bogsnipe and usually holds grouse, too. McGuffin du Calembour, my friend for 10 years, runs right through a woodcock, which twitters through the tall saplings without offering a shot. Guff is chastened and I snarl terrible threats at him.

It is a grouse hunter's dilemma. Do you scream instruction at the dog, alarming every grouse in the neighborhood, or do you let the sinning dog go unpunished. Probably better to leave it alone--Guff knows he screwed up.

He is chastened for at least five seconds, then is off again. Why doesn't he act his age? He still approaches each hunt with unbridled joy, acting like a puppy. He's an old dog, in dog years the same age I am. Why don't I act my age? Why do I approach each hunt with unbridled joy, acting like a kid?

I am one with this eager little red- and-white dog who sprints through the tangle, mindless of rips and bruises, who quivers on point as if he would explode with suppressed energy. His front feet splay and his head is thrown high, lips parted to help him whuffle the wondrous grouse smell, like a wine taster inhaling vintner's special reserve. Grouse-stink is vintage wine, sharp and clean in the October sunshine. A grouse flushes almost beneath my feet, angling to the right through a narrow corridor of aspen. The rule of thumb on grouse is that if you can see the bird you can kill it. Shoot and estimate where the bird would fall if the shot took it. Grouse are not hard to kill. They often are, however, extremely tough to hit.

I HAVE BEEN KNOWN TO MISS 26 straight shots at grouse, a feat that qualified me for enshrinement in the Grouse Hunters' Hall of Shame, but I mount the gun on this bird as if I knew what I were doing, touch the trigger as the gun butt slides onto my shoulder, and the grouse cartwheels to the forest floor.

It might not happen again all day. I might miss a half-dozen birds or not shoot at all, either eventuality part of grouse hunting. The difference between grouse and woodcock is that I KNOW I'm going to kill a few woodcock. I know where they'll be, I know they'll hold for the dog and I know that I'll hit a comfortable percentage of the shots. But my grouse prospects are like those of musky fishermen or wild sheep hunters--the sport is in the hunt, not in the kill.

Guff rarely retrieves grouse. He prefers to pin down live birds and pull feathers from them, an indignity for the bird and a hell of an irritant for me. This bird is dead and he stands over it until he sees I know where it is, then he's back into the game. I pick it up.

There is a limp finality in a fresh-killed grouse, perhaps more poignant than in any other game bird. The feathering is soft and I smooth displaced feathers. The bird's head lolls. I look at the fan. Gray, the most common color phase in the north country, and with an unbroken band which indicates a male. Its breast is plump and warm, just as it will be nestled in a bed of wild rice. There is a bright drop of blood at the nostril, a sharp speck of color in the gray woods and one that gives me a momentary feeling of sadness.

Grouse are not a lightly taken bird. For all their bird stupidity, their elemental brainlessness, they are a wonderful creature. I've photographed them on their drumming logs, a dozen feet away, as they advertised their maleness. I've photographed them on the nest, constantly rigid with apprehension as only a prey species can be. I've flushed a hen and her brood and been delighted at the frantic flight of the precocious little chicks as they labored after their mother into the woods. And I knew that perhaps I would gun down one or more of those chicks, grown with thunder in their wings.

THEN I REALIZE THE REST of the hunters have vanished and glance in sudden panic at my compass which points to north, but not to where I want to go...and I can't remember what direction Ted said that was.
Even Guff has gone from sight and I'm alone in the great north country. It's silly to panic. As big as the Olson place is, it's not endless and there are roads that bound it on two directions, bogs on the other two. Few if any timber wolves left, never seen a bear. The Sioux are running a casino down at Mille Lacs, so the perceived threats are nonexistent. I'd probably survive.

But I'd rather not explain how I got lost again to fellow hunters who shake their heads and look at me with amusement.

Then I catch a glimpse of Ted's orange cap and, stuffing the grouse in the shell vest, hurry to catch up.