People do all kinds of things in a deer stand. Why not read?

I’m not sure how it came to me, but some time before the first day of rifle season, I decided to download Anna Karenina to my iPod and read while I hunted.

This was before I understood how much territory a whitetail deer can cover in the time it takes to unravel a single convoluted 19th century sentence.

It may sound crazy to read while hunting, but let’s not forget that there are long stretches, even on a day when deer are moving, when there’s nothing doing on the ground. Why not profit from the peace and isolation by diving into a favorite book?

Downloading a book to an iPod or smart phone offers several distinct advantages to the literary hunter: your book is small enough to slip into a shirt pocket; there are no rustling pages to startle a deer; and adjusting the brightness of the screen offers the luxury of reading in low light.

I don’t have a lot of experience with e-books. I’ve always been prejudiced against them, preferring the weight of real paper and boards, and the unparalleled resolution of black ink on a non-virtual white page. I don’t like the idea of a book that can run out of power; or break if you drop it on the floor; or that might become unreadable if you switch e-readers. But I certainly wasn’t going to lug Tolstoy’s 700-page masterpiece into a tree.

Imagine my surprise when I went shopping for the electronic version of Anna Karenina on Amazon, only to find that the Constance Garnett translation had passed into the public domain. The download took all of thirty seconds. Best of all, the book was free.

As it turns out, my experiment in divided attention failed miserably, as any experienced hunter might have predicted. Deer don’t exactly broadcast their presence. Setting aside their near-perfect camouflage and their habit of slipping silently through the woods, at times the only way to see them at all is by noticing a very subtle difference in the landscape: a tree limb slightly out of place; a blur that might just as well have been an airborne squirrel; a shadow where there wasn’t one a few seconds earlier.

I have a tendency to fall headlong into a book — a good one, mind you, like Anna Karenina — and vanish. You simply can’t vanish for long stretches and have any hope of a successful hunt.

So I banished the novel from the deer stand, but it was surprisingly resilient. I found myself reading it on an iPad, the text no longer confined to the tiny screen of a smart phone, while I warmed up in the kitchen over a bowl of turkey gumbo.

Then I discovered another great advantage of e-books: your dictionary is always at hand. Books from bygone centuries tend to be larded with untranslatable words; or, if the word can be translated, the fabric, technology, or dish it refers to has often long since ceased to exist. Enter the Internet, with its infinite resources. With the world’s most complete encyclopedia literally at your fingertips, you no longer have any excuse for glossing over an unfamiliar word.

The more I time I spent reading with the iPad, the more familiar the experience began to feel: swiping pages, rather than turning them; pressing the “home” button, rather than closing the book when I was done reading. I got used to taking the book to bed if I felt like it, or onto the green sofa, places where poor lighting had, in the past, made reading hard on the eyes.

And then one blustery night during the hunt, our house lost power. I wasn’t too worried. The propane stove, which doesn’t use electricity, flickered happily in the corner, heating the upstairs. I had a good flashlight, candles, and plenty of food that didn’t require opening the refrigerator.

I was sitting at the kitchen table, peeling an orange, when it occurred to me that I could read by candlelight. How appropriate! I’d be reading Tolstoy with period lighting.

But then I remembered something even better: you don’t need candlelight to read an e-book. The page simply illuminates itself.

The power didn’t come back on until morning, but I didn’t mind. I read as long as I felt like it, then buried myself under the covers and let the day play out before my closed eyes. I’d hunted. I’d eaten well. I’d fallen into the bottomless well of an amazing book.

It didn’t matter that I’d read it on a screen. The delivery system was beside the point. A great novel obliterates your surroundings and blazes recklessly from the page.

Which is precisely why it doesn’t belong in a deer stand.