Wooded mountains provide the backdrop and heavenly choirs sound as if directed by St. Peter himself.

Robert DeNiro steadies his rifle. Something dramatic hangs in that moment.

Thirty-one years ago, "The Deer Hunter" took its place among the heavy-handed movies of the day, realism with a toe in the waters of the surreal.

Mr. DeNiro played Michael Vronsky, a blue-collar Pennsylvanian who enlisted with some of his pals to fight in Vietnam. The still water of his existence running deep, Michael lives by a very specific code when it comes to hunting deer.

"One shot is what it's all about," he says. "A deer's gotta be taken with one shot."

His marksmanship usually does the trick in this regard. Back from the war and scarred, he tracks a deer through the rugged terrain, waiting for his shot.

Cue the singers.

At the critical moment, Michael lifts the barrel and fires errantly into the forest. The deer escapes. The hunter yells into the wilderness, "OK?"

Cue the catharsis.

The movie portrayed American life in a particular place at a particular time. For that, it got awards and caused conversation.

Despite its title, "The Deer Hunter" was about deer hunting like "The Godfather" was about baptismal sponsorship.

A more literal adaptation might have involved highway mayhem.

Folks at State Farm Insurance put pencil to paper and determined that if someone wanted to smash a vehicle into a deer, Pennsylvania would be a good place to do that job.

Not quite as good as West Virginia or Michigan, where deer apparently spend so much time on roadways that they should have operator's licenses.

This proves an annual exercise by the company, calculating the likelihood of any one vehicle hitting a deer over a given period of time.

Using a calculation whose elements are estimated number of collisions and total motor vehicle registrations, State Farm found the likelihood of crashing into a deer in Missouri is one in 155.

In Kansas, it's slightly less likely, one in 204, or about the national average.

The science involved is not precise. The formula takes into account a hard number and a speculative one. It ignores such things as road miles and rural landscape.

Further, it presumes that in low-probability states such as Texas, the deer aren't gunned down before they are run down. This proactive approach would certainly help the numbers.

Many people live in St. Joseph for what it is and what it isn't. They do not have concrete underfoot at every turn. The city has green spaces and trees and the sort of surroundings that a deer might mistake for comfortable habitat.

Within the corporate limits, they will appear incongruously from time to time. These are delights, sightings about which to tell friends.

But deer were never made for traffic. The mingling of one species with another and its machines usually comes to a bad end.

Nothing exudes nature's grace like Bambi running in the wild.

Nothing exudes adrenaline like a deer flashing from nowhere to become a hood ornament.

In Northwest Missouri, we approach the season when these agile creatures, stirred by bullets or lust, spring erratically into the human world.

We hope they steer clear of our grillwork. We can't divert that one shot.

Ken Newton's column runs on Sunday and Tuesday.