It's about as atypical a scene as you'll find on a college campus anywhere in the country.

It's an autumn Saturday morning, the leaves fluttering to the ground and making it hard to see the sidewalks. Voices leave mouths as wispy, frosty clouds. The chill suggests a Homecoming weekend or some other festival suited for a college life.

But you glance around the Unity College campus and you realize that something is missing: Students.

It's a virtual ghost town. No one is around -- no one heading to a football game, no one kicking a soccer ball across the quad, no one shuffling off to the cafeteria for some Egg Beaters and bacon.

"I remember it was one of the reasons I came here, one of the things that hooked me," said Joe Saltalamachia, a 1995 graduate of Unity who is now the school's associate director of admissions. "I came here on a Saturday, and there were no students around. (I was told) that a lot of them were out deer hunting, probably half the student body was out there."

Today's Unity College boasts approximately 550 students. Numbers taken through surveys indicate that almost 40 percent of those students, both men and women, are hunters. Some years, Saltalamachia says, spike as high as 50 percent of the tiny campus' population.

Julius Koenig said the lines at the security checkout in the darkness of a weekend morning can be viciously long. The senior from Vassalboro said that picking up or dropping off a shotgun from the security office is like no other experience -- with people excited about heading out for a hunt or swapping stories upon their returns.

"I have friends from the Boston area, going to school there, and a lot of them just don't get it," Koenig said. "I think more kids here skip class to go hunting than anything else."

More than the idea of a hunting culture on a college campus is the practicality of it at Unity. Seeing it in action -- almost daily, as hunters pose with their deer, turkey, partridge and more in front of the college's sign at the head of the campus -- is important to the faculty at the college.

"Everybody here's got an opinion on things, and it's not the same one all the time," said John Zavodny, the academic chair. "It's not as homogenous as you might imagine. ... When you go out into the real world, most are going to be in the minority. It's a niche school -- when you get here, you're surrounded by people who love the outdoors but they're coming from wildly different perspectives."

The inclusion of those different perspectives begins early. Zavodny, whose background is in environmental philosophy, uses an exercise for first-year students, pairing them off with people whose outdoor values are different than their own.

That means, in short, hunters are paired with vegetarians for different projects. They learn quickly that there is room for both consumptive and non-consumptive outdoorspeople. Those who don't get it, well, they don't stick around long.

"When we were hiring the new president, we had a candidate on campus who probably didn't know Unity College as well as we thought he did," said Mark Tardif, Unity's public relations director. "He saw students with their firearms going to be stored, and he just about fainted."

Needless to say, he didn't get the job. That honor went to Mitchell Thomashow almost a year and a half ago. Thomashow, a keynote speaker for national pro-hunting organization functions, sees hunting's important place in the culture of both the school and the public at large.

"It's our goal at the college to broaden the constituency of conservation," Thomashow said. "Historically, hunters and fishermen have contributed to that. It's an old way, in a sense. It's an old way to develop an intimacy with the outdoors, and I think it's important."

Students at the college say they got exactly what they were counting on when they hit campus.

"There's something about the outdoors," said freshman Jared Mitchell of Rockport.

"I grew up hunting, and I knew I wanted to do something with that (as a career). I think I knew what I was getting into here, and it's been what I expected it would be."

The "it" says Saltalamachia is a common bond.

"It's like hunting camp every morning here," he said with a smile. "It's not a unique place in that there are people here who hunt. It's unique in that more people here do it, and more people embrace it here."

Travis Barrett -- 621-5648

tbarrett@centralmaine.com