A MAN WAS shot and wounded in a steakhouse parking lot Saturday night while walking to his car with his wife.

Even as Moose spoke Sunday night, the Ashland shooting victim, whose name and home state have not been released, went back into the operating room for the second time in less than 24 hours. Doctors at the Medical College of Virginia hospital in Richmond sought to repair the damage caused by a bullet fired into his abdomen.

Authorities were investigating whether the Washington-area sniper who has killed nine people had struck again, for the first time on a weekend.

During that operation, a hospital spokeswoman said, doctors “were able to retrieve the bullet, which has been turned over to law enforcement” for tests that would show whether the shooting is linked to the sniper. It was not immediately clear whether the bullet was whole or in fragments.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms was to test the bullet at a lab in Rockville, Md., but it also was not clear whether the tests had been completed early Monday. A spokeswoman for the Montgomery County police declined to comment late Sunday night.

Ashland Police Chief Frederic Pleasants Jr. said it appears that the shot came from a wooded tree line behind the steakhouse, which is about 300 yards west of an Interstate 95 entrance ramp. Hanover County Sheriff V. Stuart Cook said witnesses heard the shot fired from the trees, but no one saw the shooter.

If the ballistics tests link the Ashland shooting to the sniper, this attack departed significantly from patterns many thought they had discerned. It was the first on a weekend and the first outside the immediate Washington metropolitan area.

Sunday, 150 to 200 officers were deployed in the area south of the restaurant where Saturday’s shooting occurred, focusing primarily on the dense, wooded buffer between the Ponderosa and the site of a future Wal-Mart.

Shortly after 9 a.m., dozens of searchers, including police cadets and officers from all neighboring counties and the city of Richmond, walked shoulder-to-shoulder in a line through the woods. The search lasted through the morning.

Saturday night, using a strategy that has grown more swift with practice though ultimately futile, the dragnet was fully deployed within about 10 minutes of the first shooting report at 7:59 p.m. Spokesmen for several law enforcement agencies said central Virginia police and sheriffs’ departments began working on a regional dragnet plan shortly after the sniper began.

“This task force has been meeting for weeks discussing the what-if,” Cook said. “Unfortunately the what-if hit us.”

Police said the man who was shot Saturday had been traveling with his wife and stopped for food and gasoline in Ashland, a town of 6,500.

When the shot was fired, the man’s wife told police she thought the loud noise coming from the direction of the trees was a car backfiring. She said she realized it was gunfire only when her husband staggered three steps and collapsed, saying, “I’ve been shot.”

The victim was taken by ambulance to Virginia Commonwealth University’s Medical College of Virginia Hospital in Richmond about 8:30 p.m. “He was conscious, and he was complaining of some pain in the belly,” said trauma surgeon Rao Ivatury.

The victim’s injuries were extensive, as Ivatury outlined them: “His stomach was ripped apart. … His pancreas was torn in half.”

Ivatury said the bullet also had grazed the man’s kidney and gone into his chest, causing bleeding. During surgery that began at 9 p.m. and lasted until about midnight, doctors removed his spleen and the left half of his pancreas.

The man has a breathing tube that keeps him from talking, but he communicates by blinking his eyes and he can move his arms.

“Because of his youth and good health, he has at least a fair prognosis,” Ivatury said.

The shot disconnected the victim’s stomach and intestines, and Ivatury said Sunday night’s surgery was planned to reconnect them.