The state thinks it ought to know how my elk-hunting trip turned out last fall. This request, which sounds to me more like a demand, as it came with the words andquot;requiredandquot; and andquot;mandatory,andquot; has got my back up a little.

Although to be fair, andquot;pleaseandquot; also shows up several times on the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Web site.

My reticence to divulge any details in this matter has very little to do, though, with any suspicion about the state’s motives, or with my instinctive distaste for the government snooping about my affairs.

I’m just ashamed to admit to the elk experts at ODFW that in three days of tramping around the woods I not only didn’t shoot at an elk, I didn’t even see an elk.

Or anything that even superficially resembled an elk, unless you count mule deer and one fire-blackened stump.

And I actually aimed the rifle scope at the stump, it was so lifelike.

The truth is, I don’t begrudge the ODFW for asking me if I got skunked over in the Lookout Mountain unit last October.

The agency sold me the tag, after all, so I suppose it’s entitled to find out whether I got any meat out of the deal.

This is the first year ODFW has taken such an interest in whether hunters actually went out in the cold or stayed in camp by the fire.

In the past the agency telephoned perhaps 10 percent of hunters each year and asked them when they hunted, and where, and whether they had to pull out their wallet and rifle through receipts and credit cards to find their tag.

This approach left ODFW sort of thin on statistics, and in particular for general season hunts in which hunters aren’t confined to a specific unit, said Joel Hurtado, who works at the agency’s headquarters in Salem.

Starting this year, however, a new state rule, which the Fish and Wildlife Commission approved last year, requires all hunters who bought a tag for a deer, elk, pronghorn, cougar, bear or turkey season in 2007 to report to ODFW even hunters who never left their living room during the season.

The rule doesn’t apply to upland game bird season (except turkey) or to waterfowl hunting.

Hunters lucky enough to get a bighorn sheep or mountain goat tag have for years been required to check in with an ODFW office before and after their hunt, so they’re not affected by the new rule.

I think those hunters should have to report twice anyway.

That might be because I’m jealous.

In enforcing this new reporting mandate, ODFW is acting like a state trooper who stops you for going 72 in a 65 but lets you off with a friendly warning.

The agency won’t punish hunters in fact it has no legal authority to do so, Hurtado said who fail to report the results of their 2007 hunts by the June 1, 2008, deadline ODFW has set.

Since the agency debuted its reporting system on April 14, more than 5,000 hunters have checked in, Hurtado said. More than 90 percent of those hunters used ODFW’s Web site rather than the toll-free phone number.

It’s pretty painless. I went to the Web site www.dfw.state.or.us/resources/hunting/reporting/index.asp and I finished in less than two minutes. The phone number is 1-866-947-6339.

(Despite the new reporting rule, ODFW will continue to phone selected hunters every year.)

ODFW’s goal is to bridge that gaping gap in its data which I mentioned earlier. The agency knows how many hunting tags it sells it sells them, after all but it hasn’t such a strong grip on how many of those hunters bloodies a knife and how many slink home with blisters on their feet and a knapsack filled with unfired shells, Snickers wrappers and slivers of beef jerky with lint on them.

I know at least one of those latter hunters, because he’s me.

The way I figure it, it’s better for me that ODFW know that neither I nor my father-in-law and two brothers-in-law killed an elk in the Lookout Mountain unit last year.

Now that the agency realizes the elk in that unit have little to fear from me, probably it won’t mind selling me another tag this year.

If ODFW had to guess instead, it might have assumed that at least one of our party had killed an elk. And the more elk ODFW thinks hunters killed even if the agency is wrong the fewer tags it will sell.

The bottom line is that in the absence of hard facts, ODFW will, by necessity, be more stingy with tags.

Although I never saw an elk last autumn our party did meet a hunter who claimed he saw several elk sprint across a road just a few minutes before we showed up.

He seemed sort of agitated about this, although it’s possible he was just running low on cigarettes.

The hunter never told us his name.

We called him Cooter.

But not to his face.

Jayson Jacoby is the editor of the Baker City Herald.