On the walls surrounding a small bookcase in the southeast corner of my study hang a trio of framed images – one a small oil painting of a spaniel retrieving a cock pheasant; another a sepia-toned, circa 1882, Lewis Kingsley photo of my great-grandfather Willis Chapman Sanderson’s East Whately family, restored by Chris Clawson; the third a numbered print (3/999) of an Indian squatting down to read tracks in the snow.

It’s the third that I wish to focus on today: a thoughtful, spur-of-the-moment gift from friend John Nove, a bookbinder I got to know and like in many arenas after he moved to my hometown of South Deerfield around 2010 and ran the Grey Seal Bindery from his Mountain Road home.

John died at 77 on July 1, the day after my 72nd birthday. I’m going to miss him.

I knew John’s home as that of Ray Bergiel, a town cop with a daughter Elaine in my graduating class. I used to stand talking to John on the deck leading into his kitchen, pointing out the old shade-tobacco plots to the immediate north and south, and, east, to the high, lonesome North Sugarloaf Indian cave I frequented as a kid. I promised to take him there some day if he wanted to see it. It never occurred. I would have liked to lead him up there, assuredly telling him childhood tales from the South Deerfield I knew, a fun place that ain’t what it used to be.

John, a career scientist, took up bookbinding after retirement, training for two years at Boston’s prestigious North Bennet Street School, which teaches old trades. He was a good man, soft-spoken and fair, active in the community as chairman of the Deerfield historical commission and as Deerfield’s representative on the Battlefield Grant Advisory Committee researching the historic “Falls Fight” (May 19, 1676) of King Philip’s War.

John read my column and knew of my interest in deep local history, thus the cherished gift of this print he gave me on a thoughtful whim. Though I don’t know this for a fact, it must have come to him from someone in Old Deerfield as a memento of the 300th-anniversary remembrance of the 1704 attack on Deerfield.

I promptly had it framed and hung it in my study for posterity – now a daily reminder of my late friend. Soft-spoken and kind, John always treated me fair and engaged in interesting conversation.

I know I’m not the only person who’ll miss him dearly. He was a good, honest man. A straight shooter. Ethical to the core.

—

I would be remiss, if not dishonest, to let an error from my last column pass without notice.

The inaccuracy had nothing to do with the mid-19th-century painting I recently bought and featured in the column, but rather with what turned out to be a bogus example of artistic license I attributed to 19th-century artist Charles Louis Heyde on his circa-1852 oil painting Deerfield Toll Bridge, acquired recently by Historic Deerfield.

It was an unfortunate case of misreading the Heyde painting’s perspective. Because of my bad fix on the site, I inaccurately claimed Heyde had conveniently moved Mount Toby a few miles north as a convenient framing device. I was wrong – Heyde’s painting is actually a realistic depiction of the landscape he saw backdropping the bridge at the site of today’s Montague City Bridge from a spot on Greenfield’s Rocky Mountain near where Poet’s Seat Tower stands today.

My incorrect fix on Heyde’s easel placement placed it west and slightly south of the bridge, which crossed the Connecticut River just above the Deerfield River confluence. I figured it for somewhere between Woolman Hill and the Cheapside Railroad Trestle, and I stuck to it, despite failing to find a likely spot on maps or drive-through searches.

Perhaps, I pondered, Heyde stood on a hill that no longer exists – possibly on a promontory now long gone and hollowed into a massive crater at Trew Corporation’s gravel pit off the south end of River Road in Deerfield. My problem was that the site is a wee bit out of my domain, which begins a couple miles south of it and extends south and west.

With my site interpretation far in the rearview, JoAnn M. Costa posted a late 19th-century engraving that caught my attention on her popular Facebook page, “Historical Franklin County Massachusetts Realm of Wonders.” There she displayed a sketch of the Heyde painting described as a view of the Deerfield Toll Bridge from Rocky Mountain.

Lesson learned. In the future, I’ll try to stick to intimately familiar landscapes. For me, Rocky Mountain and the last mile of the Deerfield River are not among them.

—

Speaking of Facebook posts, there seem to be a lot of backyard and downtown black-bear sightings around the state these days.

Viewing the recent photo of a big bear lounging and munching on someone’s downed birdfeeder in a heavily settled, flatland, Franklin County neighborhood, a thought immediately came to mind: How many people born after 1980 viewing the post understand that, prior to that, bear sightings here and throughout the Bay State were rare indeed?

In fact, I would venture a guess that most people in towns like Greenfield, Deerfield, Whately, Montague, Gill, Bernardston, and elsewhere had never seen a bear. Even in the upland towns, sightings were rare.

Now the big beasts are not uncommon on city streets, or treed in thickly-settled suburban neighborhoods of Boston, Lawrence, Lowell, Worcester, West Springfield, Pittsfield, and you name it.

For this development we can salute Jim Cardoza, a retired MassWildlife biologist I often spoke with during my days as a fulltime newspaper man and outdoor columnist. Cardoza’s highly-successful bear and wild turkey restoration programs made the struggling, contemporaneous Atlantic salmon restoration program look like an exercise in futility.

Some tough-guy, NRA, sportsmen’s club types criticized Cardoza as an eccentric egghead who ruled from a strong academic bent. Not me. I respected him, viewed him as a friend, and salute him as an exemplary wildlife biologist whose restoration efforts were more successful than anyone could have ever dreamed.

Today, with altruistic hopes of annual Connecticut River salmon runs unplugged forever, state officials aren’t quite sure what to do with all the turkeys and bears brought back to the Bay State by “quirky” Cardoza and the restoration teams he led with aplomb.