It’s pushing toward dusk on a pleasant summer evening and I’m returning from my nightly trip to the top of the hill where I run my dogs. I round the corner and approach the scalped, lime-green hayfield where the bales had been removed earlier in the day. There it stood — a solitary, erect, tawny […]

An orange dawn crept in over the faraway Belchertown hills, first a faint hue then a bright sliver that, within a half-hour of peeking over the horizon, burst into a blinding orange sphere. Quarter past 7 on a Whately hardwood ridge. An old idyllic haunt of mine reaching back to my untethered teens, a friend […]

There’s nothing like wood heat for my taste. But if the wood isn’t right, well, it’s another story altogether. Then there’s real potential for problems, which is my current predicament, quite annoying. I’ve just brushed off from a trip to the woodshed, a place where I’ve spent far too much time lately, trying to make […]

A pale, yellow, crescent moon cast a wry, toothless grin from the clear, southern, predawn sky, remindful that it wasn’t going to be easy. The message was unnecessary. For me, it seldom is. But there was reason to be optimistic on this, the first Friday of muzzleloader deer season. A discovery made late the previous […]

When I think of squaretails, native squaretails, our royal native trout, I always think back to the monster, circa 1970, being lugged up the hill home on a stringer by a boy of 8 or 10, tail dragging on the pavement, hot summer eve, accompanied by his older brother. It was caught in a local […]