RICE LAKE, Wis. >> Dave Greschner sees stuff that most of us don’t.

Greschner, of Rice Lake, has spent much of his 70 years in the outdoor haunts of northern Wisconsin capturing details that most of us would miss because we move too fast, aren’t paying attention or simply haven’t yet learned to “see” as he has.

Luckily for us, Greschner has assembled bits and pieces of a lifetime outdoors into a new book, his first, “Soul of the Outdoors, Reflections by Dave Greschner.”

Greschner spent nearly 45 years as the sports and outdoors editor at the Chronotype weekly newspaper in Rice Lake until his retirement in 2020. In the late 1980s, he started the outdoors page in the newspaper and wrote an outdoor journal, which continues to run weekly in the Chronotype, the Eau Claire Leader-Telegram and the Ashland Daily Press.

It’s the kind of book that makes readers wonder why it took the author so long to publish. But Greschner said it wasn’t until he retired that he felt he had the time and energy to look back at his favorite stories and think about writing a book.

“The answer lies in the life of a sports editor, with my outdoors page taking a back seat to the 50 hours a week covering games and games and more games,” Greschner told the News Tribune. “It was just too hard to come home and sit at a keyboard and shift gears to putting together a book, at least for me it was. My outdoors writing outlet was the 300-word outdoor journal I wrote each week, along with some outdoor features and columns.

“I do wish I had put together a book earlier,” he said. “But I think the retired time I had in the past few years to work on the manuscript was not only more relaxing than it would have been while I was still working, but it also gave me the time to plan, refine and edit without stress.”

Each of six sections in the book covers two months of Greschner’s ramblings — hiking, driving, skiing, snowshoeing, wood-chopping and hunting across his “home” landscape in Barron County, where farms meld with forests, lakes and streams. The stories are short but packed with detail.

Greschner grew up on a farm (near the village of Prairie Farm) at the south end of Barron County, graduated with a journalism degree from the nearby University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and took his first newspaper job in Rice Lake, where he stayed his entire career, all within about a 60-mile radius of his hometown.

Some of the stories are edited versions of Greschner’s newspaper columns over the years, and others are from his blog, davegreschneroutdoorjournal.org, which he started when he retired. In his book, Greschner cites Aldo Leopold and famed canoe-country writer/activist Sigurd Olson.

But he said his biggest inspiration for writing came in college, when he picked up a copy of Annie Dillard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” at a garage sale. The book, essays on a year she spent wandering through nature in Virginia’s Roanoke Valley, was transformative for Greschner. Dillard wrote of using perception in new ways to see the world, that it’s important to open the mind to new ways of seeing.

Greschner doesn’t just know the northern Wisconsin landscape well from a lifetime of being outdoors there. He has an uncanny knack for observing, an eye for detail and a penchant for taking notes on top of great recall. His book takes readers through the full breadth of seasons that northern Wisconsin has to offer, starting in winter and, since it’s our longest season in the Northland, circling around at the book’s ending as winter sets in yet again.

Greschner indeed has mastered Dillard’s art of seeing nature’s smallest, finest details, but also the attribute of understanding nature and then, best of all for his readers, how to capture what he sees and understands in prose. Greschner’s short stories capture the magic of his subject, be it a chickadee or bobolink or his dog lying on the front deck of his house on a warm July morning.

“I join Smokey, sit down on the deck tight against him, and together we watch the new day starting. I practice seeing. A hummingbird flies from the blooming bergamot at the base of the deck and alights on a birch branch. To pick out a hummingbird on a branch is indeed an exercise in seeing. The resident chipmunk pokes its head out of the firewood pile. The squirrel takes another high-wire trip. A robin lands in the rock garden, and Smokey’s head rises just a bit. A few hours later he’ll chase all the players in this scene. But for now, in dawn’s light, it’s as if even Smokey is amazed by morning rising from the dark.”

Greschner is a grouse hunter, deer hunter and an ice fisherman, and we read a bit about those endeavors, but he spends more time hunting for photos, fishing for glimpses of nature and understanding of the natural world, more time hunting for memories than for meat on the table.

In one chapter, he takes readers on a grouse hunt, when a male grouse was, oddly but not unheard of, drumming in the fall, giving away its location. But Greschner forgoes an easy shot with his scattergun and instead goes back to get his camera, then returns to the grouse for a photo of another magic moment outdoors.

Another chapter takes us on a Greschner deer hunt. But don’t expect the usual “me-and-Joe went hunting” story of big-antlered, heavyweight bucks.

“This is about deer hunting but not about points and pounds. It’s about a fisher and a three-toed woodpecker, nuthatches and chickadees, and bittersweet berries.

“I’ll walk through a dark field on opening morning of the deer hunt, wondering what it will be this season that finds me as I try to find deer. What will it be that awes me, simply because I have absorbed myself with some stealth in nature’s world?

“It’s the hunt within the hunt, what happens during all those hours when deer aren’t moving past, when rifles aren’t raised. It’s the little things that one looks forward to and remembers as much as the buck that falls. As the hunter grows older, it’s those small portals into the natural world that keep pulling the hunter back to the woods, long after has passed the thrill of the kill.”