Walz takes a break from the campaign trail to hunt in Minnesota's pheasant opener

SPRINGFIELD, MINN. — Gov. Tim Walz sat on the tailgate of a red pickup on Saturday afternoon, eating venison and talking about hunting dogs.

It could've been any other October morning for the Minnesota Governor's Pheasant Hunting Opener. The only difference, this year, was the roughly two dozen reporters watching him.

And the Secret Service team.

Oh, right, and a pool of digital influencers waiting to chat with him.

That's because, two months ago, Walz became part of the eye of the nation's political storm when Vice President Kamala Harris picked him as her running mate for the White House. He's rarely been back in Minnesota since then.

His weary staff members stood along the sidelines of Saturday's hunt in rural Brown County, trading tales of trekking to multiple states a day, living out of hotels and growing accustomed to metal detector scans by the Secret Service.

On Friday night, Walz's team attended the high school football rivalry game in Mankato, watching his Mankato West High School Scarlets pick up a victory.

On Saturday morning, the governor arrived wearing a blaze orange hunting cap and toting a Beretta shotgun in quest of a pheasant. Unfortunately, for the hunting party, which included landowner Matt Kucharski, Nobles County Pheasants Forever Chapter President Scott Rall and Pheasants Forever CEO Marilyn Vetter, Walz didn't get a bird. He didn't even fire a shot during his time walking through the tall grass.

But Walz — whose prowess around rural subject matter, from hunting to tinkering with vintage vehicles, has been touted by the campaign — let other hunters know when a pheasant flushed out by the inexhaustible dogs was a hen, which they couldn't legally shoot, not a rooster.

When a rooster did burst from the thicket and soared over the press corps, all dutifully wearing orange vests, Walz raised his shotgun vertically, making a joke about the infamous hunting mishap in 2006 when Vice President Dick Cheney shot a hunting partner in the face.

"Every vice president joke that was ever made was about to be made right there," Walz said to laughter from the crowd.

He had a chance at another rooster, but it was too far away. He has bagged birds at past governor hunts.

"Early season discipline in the long run," Walz said. "It was tempting [to take a shot at the bird], but it was too far."

Last month, Cheney said he would vote for the Harris-Walz ticket.

Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan also hunted during the opener; according to the Associated Press, she also didn't bag a pheasant.

After two hours of hunting, and a change of dogs, Walz's team returned to the farm site for an interview with social media influencers. While the governor avoided talk of politics on the hunt, Walz did speak with Vetter about a stalled farm bill in Congress.

"We passed three of them, and we did it [in a] bipartisan [way]," said Walz, who represented southern Minnesota in Congress for a dozen years before running for governor.

Later, Walz's motorcade wound its way north and east through farm country, past combines harvesting corn, to Sleepy Eye, where he slipped into a crowded downtown brewery. In many ways, the trip resembled any year for a pheasant opener, save this time the motorcade, a dozen vehicles long, stretched out of an alley.

One patron, who declined to give her name but said she grew up in Madelia and lived in New Ulm, was buying a six-pack of beer when she told the bartender, "Is that Walz? I don't got time for that guy."

Later, when Walz briefly emerged from a side room, a chorus of cheers greeted him from the balcony before he hustled out to the motorcade.