I must admit I love it when stories come flying at me, even if they arrive before I’m out of bed in the morning, especially when preoccupied with pheasant season, always looking for an opening to bust free through a thorny covert.

So, obviously, I didn’t object one bit to a dawn phone call Tuesday. It was 6:30 and I was awake. My wife wasn’t. The call woke her. Sleeping next to the phone, she answered, asked who was calling and handed it to me.

“Dave Kalinowski,” she said.

“Hello?”

“Hey, where’s all the deer?”

“I dunno. Ya seein’ many?”

“Yeah, I got a beauty last night. It’s gotta go more than 200 pounds. I haven’t even checked it in yet. Was waitin’ for Bitzer Hatchery to open.”

“Well, why don’t you stop by? I’d love to see it.”

“OK. Let me get a coffee. I’ll be there in about an hour.”

I remained in bed for a few minutes before rising to throw on my bathrobe, get the coffee going, fill the wood cradle, feed the woodstove and open the damper wide before going to the green La-Z-Boy by the window to grab the new Rolling Stone and read Matt Taibbi and another piece on the mushrooming Occupy Wall Street movement. (If you want to know why people are protesting, read Christopher Ketcham’s disheartening “The Reign of the One Percenter,” written and dummied into the November/December issue of Orion magazine before the occupation began. The piece, about New York’s culture of greed, freakin’ blew me away, totally.)

But let us not digress. After finishing Taibbi and wading into the longer OWS feature, I caught a flash in the driveway, looked out and, sure enough, a Navy blue, full-sized pickup truck. I placed the magazine on a TV tray, stood, went to the door, opened it and walked through the inset porch to the truck. Kalinowski, wearing a cap, was standing at the back of the pickup, the usual devil in his eye, smiling like the cat that ate the canary.

As I approached the truck, I could see antlers, thick and wide, poking out the back but not the body until he pulled the bed’s vinyl cover back. It was a beautiful buck, an 8-pointer that would have sported 10 points had it not broken off two short prongs on one of the brow tines, probably in battle. A rough measurement of the trophy antler spread was 24 inches. The animal’s neck was thick, its snout showing a hint of gray, head masculine, legs and body long and heavy. Yup, looked like a 200-pounder all right, one of the big boys.

My curious wife even came out in her bathrobe for a quick peek. Why not? It was right there.

“Wow!” she said before returning to the “Today Show” in the parlor right off the driveway.

Then Kalinowski started telling me his story. He had only been in his stand 25 minutes when he heard something below him. When he looked down through two of his permanent stand’s 2-by-4s, there was the buck, its nose buried into a doe’s tail. Kalinowski had no shot and couldn’t move, so he waited and the buck walked away with six does. Where they came from, Kalinowski wasn’t sure, but they were right there under him at just before 4 p.m.

“I could have spit on them,” he said, spitting onto the lawn.

The buck was enthralled with the one doe it was trailing, nose right in her tail as she slowly moved away. When finally a clear shot presented itself about 25 yards out, Kalinowski, bow drawn, gave a short whistle. The buck turned broadside and froze, and Kalinowski delivered an arrow into the deer’s lungs at 4:01 p.m.

“I knew I hit him good,” Kalinowski said, “because he ran out of there like a bottle rocket. When I got down and found the blood trail, I knew he would die and didn’t want to jump him.”

He called a couple of friends on his cell phone and went out to his truck to wait for them to assist him in finding the animal and dragging it out of the woods. They did just that, beginning with flashlights around 5 p.m., finding the heavy blood trail, losing it after 100 or so yards, fanning out, walking downhill, communicating back and forth, finding the carcass and field-dressing it. They were back to the truck with the deer at 7 p.m. The animal had run downhill about 500 yards and expired in a heap within earshot of the Mohawk Trail in Shelburne.

The quarter-mile drag back to the truck was no easy chore, according to Kalinowski.

“When I first grabbed it by the horns to drag it,” he said. “I went about 20 feet and said to the boys, ‘It’s heavy, fellas, I’m going to need a hand.’”

When he asked me in my driveway to estimate the buck’s weight before he left for the checking station, I guessed 215 pounds. He figured 220. The Bitzer scales read 198, somewhat disappointing. Yeah, right, the kind of “disappointment” hunters dream of.

“Damn,” Kalinowski said on the phone. “Two pounds short of the 200-pound club.”

“Yeah,” I responded. “I guess you cleaned him too good.”

Two hundred pounds or not, there’s no denying it was a beautiful buck, one most hunters only dream of. This one will be a conversation piece for years to come, because Kalinowski said he’ll have it mounted, a wise move.

Why not? It was a classic Franklin County buck, all man.