Yes, the brook’s roaring, the songbirds’re singing, the snowbanks’re shrinking, and my last load of cordwood’s drying ever so slowly, stacked under the eaves of the sunny carriage sheds. No, it isn’t time for stream-fishing here in the northern tier of Franklin County. Too much snow, way too much, in fact; even worse, annoying mud […]

They’re raising a ruckus in the sleepy Hampshire County hilltown of Chesterfield, where officials are threatening to shut down a longtime camp on a Boy Scout reservation in a dispute over a temporary summer shooting range. Although I don’t intend to research and devote a lot of time to the case — surely, much to […]

Another evening phone call at my Recorder desk that got my wheels spinning. Gotta love it. The caller was a dear old friend, one I see far too little of now that we’ve “grown up” and gone our separate ways. That’s life. But he touches base now and again, usually at my workplace, to rattle […]

By now, the stink bait must be getting pretty ripe, sun-baked in a covered, five-gallon, galvanized pail with a bail handle — what we used to call garbage cans back in the day. If you’re confused, relax, you just aren’t familiar with catfishermen and the bait they use. Aficionados brew special bait for a catfish […]

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 […]