Wisconsin's 2008 nine-day gun deer season ends before 5 p.m. Sunday afternoon. The exact time depends on where one is hunting.

After the first weekend, Wisconsin's Department of Natural Resources released registration figures for the first two days. Those numbers raised some eyebrows, stimulated a few vocal hunters to call folks in the DNR and maybe even gave some hunters reasons for coming home without a deer. In other words, the deer population was low, many were saying, maybe lower than forecast.

The numbers that were released didn't tell us everything about how the opening weekend hunt fared. These are preliminary registration numbers, not total kill numbers for the first two days. Deer don't have to be registered until 5 p.m. the day after the season closes on Sunday. So hold off making any judgements about deer numbers until at least the end of December.

Hold off, in fact, until all the seasons have ended, Jan. 4.

Here's a ridiculous question to ask a hunter, so don't. Do you believe there are as many deer as the wildlife biologists are estimating?

Here's why. As hunters, most of us probably do not know enough facts, all of which would be necessary to make some type of judgement about whether there were 1.5 million deer before the seasons began.

What do 1.5 million deer look like spread over Wisconsin? How many square miles of land make up the state? How many acres are there is a square mile? How many deer would one expect to inhabit a square mile, on average, if there are 1.5 million deer? And how many deer should there be on 40 acres, on average?

Here are some answers to those questions, just in case someone asks. There are 54,314 square miles of land in Wisconsin, not all of which is deer habitat. That figure does not include land covered with lakes and rivers. A square mile is 640 acres. With 1.5 million deer, on average, there would be 27 deer per square mile, or about 1.5 deer per 40 acres.

But deer are not distributed evenly. Deer are difficult to see without snow as a backdrop. Baiting and feeding hold deer in some of the poorest deer habitat.

So lets not judge this season after two days of registration, or after a few hours of hunting. And just maybe, we shouldn't put so much weight on deer numbers when judging a season.

But if you must...

In 2008, a four-day October hunt returned. How many deer were killed during that season? Don't know yet. The early archery season figures have not been examined extensively, either.

The method Wisconsin uses to estimate the deer herd comes from a rather elaborate formula known as Sex-Age-Kill, a formula that has been reviewed many times by nonresident scientists who give it credibility. What we saw Monday afternoon gave us some portion of the last third of this SAK formula.

So hold tight on judging the season. Look instead at how satisfying the camaraderie was during the hunt. Look instead at whether you learned anything about deer, people, nature and weather.

Did you do anything to help a fellow hunter or landowner? Did you donate a deer? Did you see anything unusual? Those are things that make a season memorable, as much as killing a deer does.

Earlier this autumn I was in Bayfield County talking to a grouse hunter. He's part of a large group that has a hunting shack in the midst of the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest. He told me, without being prompted, that the group's 2007 gun deer season was perfect, not a single hunter killed a deer!

That says a great deal about how some deer hunters view this annual November event. It can be fun, rewarding, even perfect without putting a tag on a buck or doe.

Many deer hunters are in the initial stages of the five steps of a developing hunter, as described by psychologists.

In time, when we get to stage four or five, we may understand what the man in the northern forest meant by a perfect season without killing a deer.

Backtag is a 2008 column by Jerry Davis, outdoors writer, chronicling the gun deer season and will appear daily through the season.