>So here’s what actually happened last Saturday morning.

>First-off, there might not be a Casey’s or Kwik Trip between the Twin Cities and New Ulm that carries a blaze orange stocking cap. That’s a missed opportunity. Because I searched nearly every single one on my pre-dawn ride down from Minneapolis on Saturday morning to the appointed meeting-place on a gravel road to get wanded by Secret Service.

>Second, hunting is the most “Downton Abbey” thing we do in American politics. It’s not all foxes and hounds and horses and bugle calls. But it is a little silly. How can you shoot a bird with 20 reporters, 15 staffers, and five social media influencers in tow?

>Still, I get it. There is a romantic showmanship to the day. The prairie presents well. And you got to dress warmly, which my East Coast colleagues — in hoodies and sneakers — didn’t. We sat there for what seemed like an eternity until, right before 9 a.m., Walz’s motorcade arrived, and the governor got his pheasant-hunting credentials checked by the DNR officer.

>Then, yes, we did do a bit of “fake news.” One of the photographers requested views of faces of the hunting party — consisting of Walz, the president and CEO of Pheasants Forever, a local landowner, and a Nobles County hunter. So, for a performative few minutes, without taking any shots, the group walked toward the mobile media row, holding guns.

>Then, finally, around 9:09 a.m. or so, according to the time-stamp on my phone, the actual hunting started.

>Quickly enough, as we walked toward some increasingly tall grass, a fluttering ball of might — a male pheasant — flew out of the grass.

>“Rooster! Rooster!”

>*Bam.* The bird fell.

>Walz called out, “Nice shot.”

>The Nobles County hunter, Scott Rall, had downed the bird. But Rall’s intrepid dogs couldn’t actually find the pheasant in the cover. We searched for a while and kept moving.

>Over the next 60 minutes or so, with my phone increasingly teetering toward battery doom, we climbed through thickets, tripped over buried logs. The hunters communicated with each other wonderfully in a ridiculous situation. When a hen flew out, they’d call out “Hen! Hen!”, a hunter’s version of “stand down.” When the dogs excitedly dove up and down in the grass, Walz prepped everyone to get ready for a bird.

>Yes, he didn’t take a shot. Would that have played better or worse with undecideds in Pennsylvania? I don’t know. There may’ve been chances. Mostly hens flew out. In one moment, a rooster emerged, but the bird was quite young. Maybe other hunters would’ve pulled the trigger. A journalist from an outdoors magazine next to me told another reporter: “I would’ve blasted it.”

>Regardless, about an hour into the hunt, I was quite relieved the governor didn’t fire his shotgun. A rooster sprung up in the opposite direction, clear over the heads of the pursuing press corps. Everyone, with cameras, ducked. Everyone, that is, except me. I tried following the bird with my cellphone camera. When I turned, Walz — who’d called out “don’t shoot” — was clutching his gun upright. Then he broke the nervous laughter.

>“Every vice president joke there ever was was about to be made right there,” Walz said.

>The joke was probably his best shot of the day.

>Then we kept hunting. And hunting. Which for the reporters meant walking. And walking. I was reminded of the apocryphal Mark Twain quote: “Golf is a good walk spoiled.” Then, my phone died. Fortunately, I had a laptop in my backpack; I recharged my phone so that, about an hour later, I was able to record the governor just as he was removing his shotgun shells ... and apparently ending his political career.

>Then, we walked back to the farmsite. The social media influencers awaited. The Diet Mountain Dew needed to be swigged. One influencer asked the governor his favorite food. Another talked about restoring the country to “sanity.” I mostly just wanted to get on the road to internet and some beef jerky. But we had to wait for a security phalanx rolling a half-dozen cars deep.

>Bringing gun-toting hunters around a vice presidential candidate in this political environment certainly could be scary. But the most dangerous place, apparently, was the misinformation superhighway the internet has become.