Before eight chimes on the Monday-morning tall clock — gray sky, heavy air, cup of coffee in hand and headed for my customary parlor reading station by the window — it walloped me like an open, clammy palm across the puss from Mother Superior. Ah yes, that first overpowering fragrance of spring lilac, a sweet harbinger of summer. So uplifting a scent to brighten a new day, a new week.

Four hours later, exiting my truck for our daily mile or two walk through upper hayfields and around the perimeter of lower floodplain marsh, large riverside apple displaying its white-blossomed coat, I was immediately greeted by visual stimuli. This time it was a new, invigorating, sea of deep yellow dandelions pulsating in the same strong south breeze that had earlier delivered lilac to my nostrils. Again, what a splendid way to start a walk, sensory stimulation everywhere to unleash effusion. The dogs seemed energized, even liberated by the bright yellow carpet complemented so nicely by a verdant clover underbody like only nature can match it, a rich sight indeed. Stunning. Fresh. New. Inspiring.

It doesn’t stop there. I cooked my first batch of local asparagus from the Hatfield/Whately line Saturday evening for dinner guests. Plus, upon retuning from my Monday-morning romp with the dogs, there was sister-in-law Jan from the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont on her knees collecting our first cut of rhubarb from a small patch at the barn’s sunny southwest corner. Oh how sweet that first cut of rhubarb, even if it does occur before you can mix it with native strawberries. No problem. That tasty alternative will soon ripen. But rhubarb crisps and pies are just fine without strawberries, thank you. Some even prefer it.

And, oh yeah, how can I forget yet another long overdue sign of spring that appeared? Yes, last Thursday, finally my first neighborhood turkey sighting, a solitary hen, about 11 a.m. A small drab bird, it was walking south in snappy caution, head and neck extended toward a neighbor’s gray, knoll-top colonial home. On my way home a few minutes later, there it was again, scratching under the same home’s front-yard apple tree. She must have had a nearby nest temporarily covered with loose brush for a quick feeding maneuver. I knew I’d bump into a turkey sooner or later but was actually starting to wonder. I’m confident there will be more.

Next day, Friday morning about 9, sitting comfortably in the front parlor talking to an overnight guest — an old Vietnam triage nurse and college friend of my wife’s — a gray Ford pickup truck pulled into the yard. Hunting buddy Killer was passing by on his way up the hill turkey hunting. He walked the sidewalk up to the open window, sheepishly apologized through the screen for invading my privacy and, smoking a butt, asked me to come outside. He wanted a quick tutorial on the art of making an old Lynch box call sound like a love-infested hen turkey.

The box, his late uncle’s, was in great shape, looked like cedar, maybe walnut. He had never used it and wanted to give it a try. Desperate, he wanted to offer a new voice to silent turkeys in a habitat where he had yet to hear so much as a gobble, despite twice running into a boss gobbler on his way into the woods, shotgun slung over his shoulder, hands occupied by decoys. He had solved the problem of being unable to quickly shoulder a shotgun with his hands full of decoys by tying them to a backpack for transport. Now he wanted a little primer in the art of getting a box call to mimic the sounds of an amorous hen in waiting, sounds that may just lure in a big lonely boss man with long beard and spurs.

Unfamiliar with his rubber-banded contraption, I fiddled around with it from different angles, got it singing a sweet, seductive song, and handed it back to him for further instruction. Just then, departing guest Marylou exited my home and requested a little lesson of her own, which, of course, produced a suggestive, humorous narrative to explain precisely what a caller is trying to accomplish with a series of yelps, clucks and purrs. Hey, you’re apt to have a lot of flexibility when dealing with an old Vietnam triage nurse, even if she did rise to the rank of lieutenant colonel before recently retiring from the Air Force Reserves. Trust me, she can handle gutter talk with aplomb. Been there, done that. Seen a little of everything. Can handle about anything to the horrors of bloody, mangled young death. And when the conversation touches the right chord, she can even contribute, and then some.

A beautiful, cool, bright sunny morning had me in a playful mood. So, I figured it was high time to get my old hunting buddy cranked up.

“Hey, by the way Killer,” I interjected, “with a proud retired Air Force lieutenant colonel here with us on this fine spring day, what again was your classification as an military marksman?” I asked.

“Expert,” he replied with a gleam.

“See that,” I told her, “here with us today is a man who could cut it on the rifle range. He just never liked to follow orders.”

They both laughed, he in full agreement with my assessment, her understanding those who aren’t cut out for the military. Then she was gone, off to Quincy in her Subaru sedan, he up the hill in his truck on a turkey mission.

I hadn’t seen the last of my buddy. Just after noontime, me sitting on my John Deere tractor to start mowing the lawn for the first time this year, my buddy was back, his day of hunting complete. He parked in my driveway, exited his truck and quickly approached, saying, “I can see you’re busy and don’t want to hold you up but … I have to share with you a little conversation I just had.”

I disengaged the mower blades and idled the engine down to hear his tale, which I trusted would be either amusing, interesting or both. As it turned out, the story was, more than anything else, a confirmation of something he had told me earlier. Finished hunting and on his way to his vehicle parked on the side of the road, a shiny black SUV had pulled up to a stop and the driver hit the switch to slide down the tinted passenger-side window. The man, an expert turkey hunter with whom my pal and I are both familiar, wanted to inquire as to what my buddy had been seeing, if anything, while hunting.

“Well,” he said to me, clearing his throat, “I wasn’t going to lie to the man. I told him I’d been out for two weeks and hadn’t heard a freakin’ gobble. He wasn’t surprised. He said he hadn’t heard one, either. He hadn’t been out at the crack of dawn because of a new puppy. But he’s surrounded by turkeys daily, was up early enough to hear gobbles and hadn’t heard a one.”

Hmmmmm?

I can’t say I doubt either of them for a millisecond. On the other hand, I do believe that due diligence could put a gobbler in their game bags regardless of whether there’s gobbling. Silent approaches are not rare. They’re just not nearly as exciting as big boss toms sounding off with earth-rattling enthusiasm as they race toward hunters’ romantic invitations.

All hunters must learn that sometimes it’s necessary to settle for boring yet successful alternatives.

Fiddleheads and turkeys are today’s topics, plus potential peripheral musings that can always develop.

It’s that time of year, I guess, when nature’s magic pokes through the forest floor overnight in bright green color, or maybe furtively peeks from behind a large, stately shagbark hickory anchored atop the edge of an escarpment, below which a bulbous Paleo lake once lay as a Lake-Hitchcock-drainage puddle.

Let’s start with fiddleheads. I have been monitoring a patch for some weeks and was thus stunned when stems shot to the heavens six inches or more overnight after just the previous day displaying only an inch-high, tightly clenched, scaly brown fist protruding from the forested wetland floor. There were many other tall ostrich ferns nearby, all of them first appearing like dense little brown periscopes camouflaged among dead fallen leaves two weeks ago, following a soaking midnight rain. And there they sat for two largely uneventful weeks, monitored daily and showing little progress until Monday morning, when, likely inspired by hot daytime temperatures and summer-like nights under a bright Full Corn-Panting Moon, they shot up like curlicue-capped stilts, growing an unbelievable six or more inches in 24 short hours. Ah, for the wonders of nature and springtime fertility.

It’s funny. A week earlier, an old friend and fiddlehead picker I’ve on occasion joined for the spring ritual phoned to inform me he’d picked his first batch not a mile upstream from the ones he knew I monitor. “We didn’t go all-out because I still have a lot of frozen fiddleheads and fiddlehead soup piled in my freezer,” he reported. “But I thought I’d warn you that they’re out, and that someone had already beaten me to mine. I don’t know what’s happening in your spot, but you better watch them. It’s going to happen fast.”

No truer words have ever been spoken, because fast indeed it did happen when they finally popped this week. Overnight, in fact, with a light touch of Mother Nature’s wand. If I get around to it, I’ll pick a plastic-bagful and go through the labor-intensive cleaning process in the sink before placing them into a hot cast-iron skillet and aggressively stir-frying before tipping down the heat and sautéing them in olive oil to the desired tenderness. When done to perfection, just a dab of butter and a dash of salt and pepper to please my pallet and nourish my body with wild greens, all natural, no preservatives or pesticides. Fiddleheads are fine for those trendy Paleo diets so many health nuts have wandered to these days, and they complement that diet’s wild game just fine.

As for wild turkeys, well, although I still haven’t seen any in my neighborhood, word has it that someone else has, right were I’m accustomed to seeing them. Maybe they’re there early and late in the day when I’m away, because they are not there midmorning to late afternoon.

If I had time or wanted to run on fumes coming down the stretch on work nights, I’d gather my gear and climb a familiar trail up to a large red pine tree inside an old stonewall where I have shot many toms. I’d set up comfortably at the base of that tree before first light and wait for the sky to light up with the sound of throaty roost-top gobbles piercing the gray, twinkling twilight air.

Without hesitation I’d sacrifice sleep and punish my body to set my grandson up for his first kill. But the kid’s young yet. His day will come. I can’t wait to watch him light up like I once did to the sights and sounds of turkey hunting, which, if it doesn’t get your blood boiling, you had better get your pulse checked.

I can’t say I don’t think about turkey hunting when the season begins. These days, during my self-imposed respite from an invigorating, challenging spring activity I genuinely enjoy, I’m still learning about turkeys’ springtime routines and habits. To be honest, when hunting the birds and calling them to my customized shotgun, I didn’t fully understand what was happening in the turkey world. All I knew was that I’d get them going early off the roost, hear the fly-down, and call them in by simulating the yelps, clucks and purrs of amorous hen turkeys as frantic gobbles approached my stand, momentum building. My assumption was that the nesting and hatching occurred after the season, which, from talking to my professorial Maine brother-in-law and state Turkey Project Leader David Scarpitti, I recently discovered was not quite so. The fact is that increased daylight triggers breeding activity as early as March in these parts, and many turkeys are now already into their nesting mode and unreceptive to gobblers’ advances.

By late May, some broods are indeed already on the ground, while some unfortunate hens have lost a nest or two to skunks, raccoons, bobcats, opossums or other predators and egg-eaters that contribute to a woeful 70- to 80-percent mortality rate. The renesting that results provides eligible gobblers with additional spring mates in addition to others that become receptive to late breeding due to biological and physiological factors. For instance, yearling hens that survive from second and third nests and then winter, develop late and can provide last-ditch mates for aggressive males that are always searching when without.

From what I have gathered of late, once a hen is bred by a gobbler, an internal string of up to a dozen eggs will form in decreasing size from back to front. Hens lay an egg a day until they’re all in the nest, covering their clutches with brush when they leave the nest briefly to feed and patrol. The eggs laid early lay dormant in delayed development until all the eggs are assembled. Then the gestation period begins and lasts 25 to 31 days, at which time the whole nest hatches en masse. Heavy spring rains are murderous to hatchlings, which die of pneumonia from cold saturation, again stimulating rebreeding and renesting by hens that provide more mates for gobblers and opportunities for diligent, late-season hunters seeking a late kill.

So, fellas, take it to the bank: With more than two weeks remaining in the annual four-week season, there’s still plenty of time to bag a nice gobbler, even for hunters who prefer bankers’ hours. Not me. It’s first light or nothing in my world, and I know when the time is right that my grandsons will rise and shine in darkness with eager smiles.

The Full Corn-Planting Moon is building as the landscape greens, turkeys gobble and shotguns roar from distant hills. Yes, it’s spring turkey season, a fine time of year for a man so inclined. And, word out of Montville, Maine, indicates the time is ripe.

But first a brief diversion — the first of two little housecleaning chores from last week, thanks to longtime reader Wild Bill the forester, who did well to catch an inaccuracy he suspected to be a slip of pen, which it was. I inadvertently identified the Green River as a Connecticut River tributary, which ain’t far off. But the fact remains that the Green flows into the Deerfield River across from Old Deerfield’s North Meadows and Pine Hill, and the Deerfield joins the Connecticut a mile or so below.

Enough said. It was an innocent overlooked personal error spotted by an astute reader. Call it citizen editing if you will, because he caught me red-handed. Fact is I’ve been on both sides of the Deerfield River where the Green meets it, and on both sides of the Green along the Deerfield’s north bank at Cheapside. Yet still misinformation crept into my column like a mischievous attic spirit entering the bedchamber through a crack in the narrow door leading into the closet beside the fireplace. As for the other clarification point, patience please. It’s coming. Promise.

Back to turkeys, my scholarly brother-in-law, a retired college professor always fascinated by birds, chimed in from his gentleman’s farm peacefully nestled into hilly Waldo County, Maine, where wild turkeys are a relatively new comeback phenomenon that disappeared years ago. Some wild birds spilled over on their own from southern New Hampshire, while others were captured elsewhere and transplanted by state fish and wildlife crews. I clearly remember reports of the first sightings in Maine, when they were rare indeed and being tracked by a Brattleboro native I know named Stu Bristol, now a veteran Maine Guide. These days, the big birds have repopulated the central and southern part of the state, where flocks are commonly seen on the road.

Most interesting about my Sunday conversation with a trusted in-law was his disclosure that the birds on his farm have been breeding for some time. That surprised me, given that he’s a good two weeks behind us after enduring a winter that dumped 10 to 12 feet of snow. There, it’s mud season, with snow remaining in shady, north-facing forest depressions and under north-side right-angle junctions of barn roofs. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised by early mating. This week a New Hampshire press release from state turkey guru Ted Walski arrived and he claimed his state’s turkeys have been breeding since March. So, fellas, take it to the bank: gobblers in this neck of the woods are already henned-up to a point — which can be bad news. But relax, they’re still gathering more mates to hoard and protect, and are jacked up in pursuit of their spring harems.

Walski is confident Granite State hunters will find an abundance of birds despite the difficult winter, and the same should be true here as well. He pinned his optimism to availability of a plentiful acorn crop entering winter, and favorable early-winter conditions, when crusty snow allowed the big birds to walk comfortably atop without expending precious energy almost into February. Then came the deep powdery snow that can do a number on turkeys, which must work hard to maneuver through deep snow if they don’t get trapped in a death grip following fly-down from a tree perch. Which isn’t to say they don’t find suitable survival options. Walski said that when the going got tough, New Hampshire’s turkeys closed in on civilization, congregating around barnyards, backyard bird feeders and plowed driveways and parking lots near food sources.

Although I didn’t personally witness such winter flocks here in the Happy Valley, I wouldn’t hesitate to say it was no different; however, I must admit I’m a little concerned about the disappearance of turkeys I’m accustomed to seeing in my neighborhood. I have yet to see so much as a turkey track in my springtime travels, which has never before happened in 18 years living at my current Greenfield address. Yet, still, I’m supremely confident I wouldn’t have to travel far to find them. Thus I’m predicting another state record by the time all the cards are counted after this year’s four-week season.

As for the other housecleaning project, I give thanks to MassWildlife Turkey Project Leader David Scarpitti, with whom I traded emails and spoke on the phone this week about a subject I covered a month or so back about a turkey disease experts are tracking in the East. The column, titled “Scabby mess,” was based on Internet research of many articles written about a virus with the acronym LPDV, which, apparently, I confused with another turkey disease known as Avian Pox. According to Scarpitti, “Some birds with LPDV also are contracting Avian Pox, which is often the scaly, scabby lesions you are seeing. LPDV more commonly presents with internal issues.”

So, what I wrote a while back may have been a little misleading. This should set the record straight.

Meanwhile, Scarpitti added that, despite the fact that the diseases have infiltrated Massachusetts and been detected in all our neighboring states: “Without any definitive proof, it’s tough to say how meaningful they are to the turkey population. It seems that they are strong and thriving in most places, suggesting that these diseases are not greatly influencing abundance. I’d say the outlook at this point across all the Northeast is that it’s something biologists are aware and watchful of, but at this point it doesn’t seem to be of great concern. Of course, there is substantial research being conducted on the topic. So more is being learned every year.”

I guess it’s no wonder that the folks I’ve polled in Franklin/Hampshire County hot spots are reporting only healthy turkeys displaying no signs of illness. But consider this little disclaimer from my observant, cerebral Maine brother-in-law, who has seen scabby turkeys on his acreage, but not this spring.

“I’m assuming that any birds which went into the winter sick didn’t survive,” he speculated.
So I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens come summer and fall.”

Stay tuned.

There’s something about flowing water that I find liberating, metaphorical to human thought and emotion — be it the rattle or roar, foaming riffles descending into roily runs and step pools, the gentle swirl of frothy eddies.

All of the above are likely spots for lurking trout when you understand water and know how to use the natural flow to trigger aggressive strikes by dead-drifting lively bait through the fish’s feeding lair in a natural, drag-free presentation. Yes, mountain streams produce a certain damp, shady, wild solitude that places me in the grip of nature, away from it all, governed by forest law.

When teaching youngsters to fasten a pair of hip boots through their belts for fish-hunting on such a stream, it’s important to start small on manageable water you can hop across in spots yet holds all the components of larger streams that will eventually be mastered using small-stream skills honed by trial and error. Fact is, once you understand flowing water and how fish feed in it, the same rules apply everywhere, big or small. But there’s always one key difference pertaining to large, deep streams, such as the Deerfield or Millers rivers, which become much easier to read and fish once they’ve settled down to their summer level. Then the runs, riffles, eddies and corner pools with overhanging roots become accessible in chest waders.

The natural evolution of an angler typically starts with live bait and a closed-face, push-button reel before advancing to open-face spinning tackle and delicate pendulum casts, long-casting of lures and spinners, flyfishing with dry and wet flies and weighted nymphs, plus streamers bright and drab that simulate bait fish.

One of the first little trout streams I learned to fish flowed out of Clapp’s Pond in the forest off Stage Road in Deerfield, feeding the Connecticut River just upstream of the Hillside/River roads intersection. There it crossed under River Road near the gate to what we originally called Kahle’s, then University Pasture, before racing through a steep ravine on the other side to a polluted Connecticut. We’d start at River Road, fish our favorite pools upstream, then pick away at the entire brook on the way back out, focusing on all the sites where we had rolled little pan trout that escaped. We’d fill a couple of fern-lined wicker creels, flea-market collectors’ items today, and bring them home for a sweet, tasty breakfast, the fingerling brookies battered and pan-fried in hot, spitting bacon fat that quickly curled up the tails in a black Griswold skillet.

Once we had it down on that little stream meandering through a steep hollow carved into the southeast terminus of Deerfield Mountain, we graduated to bigger streams like Mill River on the other side of town and Whately’s West Brook, which led us straight to the old Northampton reservoir near the chapel snuggled up to the earthen dike. There, many a large squaretail in the two- to three-pound class were caught — ah, how clear are the memories of those oven bakers of the sweetest, moistest, most succulent pinkish-orange meat. But that came later, discovered as teenagers before the new Hamp Reservoir’s spillway was built in the late Sixties, holding the water back far too long to save the big brookies we savored and have not seen since. Well, I suppose there are still some around for the taking. But let’s just say we were young back then, much more daring and capable of outrunning just about anyone giving chase through the wilds.

The hot-spot was a narrow neck that flowed under the iron bridge on the south end of the slim reservoir where I learned to take trout on Thomas Buoyant spoons, Mepps spinners and later flies. We had Steve Zayach’s dad to thank for our introduction to flies. The man was a wildlife biologist and fly-fisherman, had his equipment hanging neatly inside his Eastern Avenue garage, and he must have been OK with us borrowing it because use it we did, there and at another sweet little squaretail pond on the other side of the Connecticut River. We knew nothing about flycasting, presentation or matching the hatch, just that, according to The Count, Mr. Zayach’s son, trout preferred tiny midges enticingly twitched on the surface to draw a strike. Whether true that they preferred those tiny little artificials to larger mayflies or caddis flies or streamers from different compartments in the same flybox, we took heed and the midges seemed to do the trick over and over again at both of our favorite sneak-in sites, both reserved only for the first hour or two of light. Once lights started showing inside neighborhood homes, we were packed up and long gone in the proud Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn tradition.

By then, we had our drivers licenses and had graduated to the productive Conway streams, the South and Bear rivers and Poland Brook, and even fished the Sawmill River in Montague and Leverett now and again, particularly the lower end, sometimes as high as the base of the dam at Martin Machine (now the The Montague Bookmill), but most often in the wild, winding sanctuary that meets the Connecticut below Meadow Road. We also hunted there in the fall for pheasant, grouse and woodcock, plus jump-shot many a duck back in the day when lead shot was legal for waterfowling. To be honest, since the day lead was outlawed, I have not killed a duck. Just one of my many idiosyncrasies, I guess. But I was never much of a duck hunter, just a bird hunter who bought an annual waterfowl stamp just in case my dog flushed ducks out of small, muddy streams running through swamps I was hunting for pheasants, among them Hopewell Swamp between Christian Lane and Mount Sugarloaf.

Once we graduated to flyfishing the Deerfield, we had honed our skills and knowledge, applying what we had learned on smaller streams’ to a larger, more dangerous microcosm that from high above looked no different than those first narrow, shallow mountain streams where we learned to hunt trout. But now, instead of pendulum casts, we were using roll casts, the double-haul and shooting line through stiff winds, quickly mending it as soon as it hit the surface to produce a natural, realistic drift that fooled many a big trout, even a few big, early-morning Deerfield River browns, foolish gluttons that remained in their feeding lanes a few minutes longer than they should have.

Such rare trophy fish were always worth the harrowing hike in, negotiating a steep, switchback deer run to the river’s edge in the black of night, always hoping to drop the first cast into the river well before the birds sang their first note. Talk about magical. It was all of that and then some to be there when the river and surrounding woods awakened, the first ray of thin yellow sunlight peering over the eastern horizon still an hour or more away.

Mention in last week’s “Fish tales” column of a haggard roadside hermit familiar to travelers earlier in my lifetime along Route 5 and 10 between Greenfield and South Deerfield drew additional anecdotal information from near and far that’s worth reporting.

The feedback started right off last Thursday morning, when waiting for me on my first email adventure was a comment from an angler who, like me, fished a section of Mill River containing the site of Deerfield’s first grist mill (1693) on Sawmill Plain, not far from Pekarski’s Sausage on Route 116. He said he, too, always did his best to skirt that peculiar roadside recluse who lived just downstream. The note came from Michigan, where South Deerfield native Scott Farrick, a faithful faraway reader and intermittent correspondent over the years, now resides.

The Michigan correspondent and another emailer who chimed in later corrected me on the hermit’s name as well. They grew up in his neighborhood and said it was Victor, not Henry Kisloski, as I had speculated. Henry Kisloski was Victor’s brother. They both apparently grew up on a Sawmill Plain farm near the brook.

Anyway, Farrick’s quick Thursday-morning note read: “Sure is/was a great little stretch of water to grow up on. We knew the ‘hermit’ as Victor Kisloski. We steered clear, too. One day, when we were kids, there he was at our front door, dressed as he always was, in 19th-century style, with that snow-white beard. We were freaked but my mom answered the door. As I recall he was as polite as could be, asking if the Clark family still lived there (they were long gone). Plus he had two stray dogs and was looking for the owner. Like you guessed, surely he was odd, but he surprised us that day with a glimpse that wasn’t so scary.”

Later that afternoon came another, longer email from Scott Healey, a Sawmill Plain lad and neighbor of Farrick’s who was about the same age and often fished for trout on the stream where I had honed my skills before they found their way there. Most interesting was that, without a clue that Scott Farrick had already touched base, Healey wrote: “My best friend Jim Jobst and I would fish that brook all the time, and it was tough going if the Farrick boys had been there first.”

Healey also recalled the hermit’s name as Victor, not Henry.

Like me, Healey and friends “loved the stretch of brook between Pekarski’s and Victor’s land, especially the (old mill) waterfall.”
Now that we’ve made this man Victor Kisloski a passing fancy, a little more on the man, who was still walking the highway between Greenfield and Deerfield after I married in 1979. Following the rush of email traffic last week, I queried my wife to see if she could remember me pointing the hermit out along the road. Yes, she vividly recalled him trudging along Routes 5 and 10 and even described his distinctive attire.

Healey, a neighbor who saw much more of the eccentric chap than me, offered additional insight, writing, “Victor would walk weekly or biweekly to Greenfield for food and supplies. He was basically self-sufficient, with his gardens and his brook. Real story — he did chase Jim and me up the trail behind his shack with a hatchet one day because we both had maple twigs strung with nice trout. Although he probably was just trying to scare us and having a lot of fun doing it, we were scared and had quite a tale to tell.”

Over time, Healey’s mother, in the holiday spirit, helped soothe her son’s fears of the man by giving him an entirely different view of a character who was easily misunderstand. “Yep,” wrote Healey, “this was the same man to whom I later delivered my mom’s homemade Christmas brownies and tollhouse cookies. When I finally got the nerve to knock on the door, scared, he would open it with big, happy eyes you could barely make out through his big beard. … He also once offered Jim and me some of his garden if we wanted to try our hand at growing food.”

Plus one other Healey anecdote about a man many southern Franklin County travelers recognized on the side of the road in the Sixties and Seventies, and probably earlier, before my time: “I once watched him (Jim and I were hiding in the woods) saw down a tree by himself with a two-man bucksaw. I’m telling you, Gary, this guy was tougher than a mountain goat.”

I wouldn’t question that depiction one iota. A person must be strong to be as “different” in a non-conformist way as he was.

And to think that all this new information about an old character from days of my distant past arose from one innocent little mention of fishing an old boyhood stream I was quite fond of, and where the presence of the hermit’s humble abode scared the bejesus out of us each time we passed.

Oh yeah. One more time: he was Victor, not brother Henry.

Sorry ’bout that.