Not complaining, just one of those weeks, I guess. Yes, one of those stretches when weird stuff requiring immediate attention comes at you like bugs at a hot muggy windshield.

It all started with irritating gun woes late last week. First, while pursuing a wild flush — it a long-tailed, vociferous ring-neck rooster whose landing I had marked — I was astonished to come up empty in a dense thicket and decided to expand the search over an old, tree-bordered fence line into a shin-high hayfield. I whistled for the dogs and Lily appeared first, poking out into the hayfield maybe 50 yards away and following the outer tree line at me. Maybe 20 yards away, she stopped, picked up her nose above her shoulders into a north wind and spun 90 degrees right. I knew she smelled that rooster, which I could not see, and — Bingo! — a low, loud flush burst from the short cover. The bird flew straightaway for a wet brown field t’other side of the brook. I shouldered my gun, found the bird, swung on it, squeezed the back trigger as it approaching 40 yards out and was greeted by an empty misfire click. Hmmmmm? Maybe I hadn’t pushed the safe all the way through. Although I didn’t get a chance to test my theory that day there, I did oil the safety at home, manipulating it back and forth until it was gliding smoothly.

Next day, I figured I’d give it a shot hunting with old pal Cooker in a twisted, tangled Hadley covert I had avoided because in consecutive years my dogs had been caught in traps there — first Chubby in a dry-set leg-hold, then Lily an evil wire-cable snare that lassoed her tightly around the waist. I still wear a scar where her panicked canine tooth brushed my forearm that day, and have since learned that the kind neighbor who helped me release her now carries heavy-duty clippers in case his dog ever finds such a devil’s loop.

Anyway, not long into the hunt, with Lily and Chubby jacked up by scent through young, thorn-laced alders and poplars, I heard the tell-tale “cuck, cuck, cuck, cuck, cuck” and soon saw a rooster clearing the young tree tops. I mounted, pointed, swung and squeezed the front trigger and again just a click, then silence as the bird escaped. Hmmmmm? I knew it wasn’t the safe, but something wasn’t right and I suspected the triggers. The wise old gunsmith who repaired the stock just before the season had warned me not to over-oil the triggers. With the stock removed, he found the hidden walnut tongue saturated with oil and cleaned it up before wrapping it in fiberglass tape and resetting it snuggly into the receiver.

“Try not to over-oil it,” he cautioned, and since that bit of fatherly advice I hadn’t placed so much as a drop into the trigger mechanism, not even after hunting in the rain and drying out the disassembled side-by-side on a table near the wood stove. I had a feeling it needed oil, though, and my suspicion was soon supported, if not confirmed, by another field test, perhaps a half-hour later, when Chubby flushed a hen from a small patch of woods. The bird burst out over the covert and flew right at me like a wind-aided missile. I calmly turned my back to it momentarily and waited for it to show up on the back side. Then, just as I found it going away, mounted and swung, it hooked a sharp left toward a high, deep swamp across the way. I adjusted to the sudden change of direction, caught up with it, swung and squeezed the front trigger, a sucker shot, but again just a clicking annoyance. Cooker, not 40 yards away, witnessed the whole thing and sounded amused.

“Again?” he smirked.

“Yup, again. I’ll deal with it when I get home. I don’t care what that guy told me. It needs oil.”

I went home, took the gun apart, cleaned and oiled the barrels, and went to town on the triggers, which required more pressure than I like. I pulled them forward, one at a time, put a couple of drops of my best clock and gun oil in the gaps and wiggled the triggers back and forth to work in the lubricant until they were moving free and easy. When we hunted the next day, I predicted to Cooker that my problem was solved and soon got ample opportunity to prove it. I don’t question that wise old gunsmith’s assessment of the interior mess he found. I’m sure that stock needed a good, thorough cleaning, and I will indeed always limit the oil my triggers receive. But remember, I’ve only owned that gun for about 25 years. Nearly 100 years old, it was cared for by others before me, so what the gun doctor found had accumulated over many years.

Enough of that, though. Chalk it up as a temporary issue, one that will not again happen. But, before I go, allow me to touch on two more problems that reared their ugly heads after the trigger trouble and are now behind me. First, Monday afternoon, I went to my 10-year-old desktop computer, tried to fire it up, and it responded by gurgling briefly and blinking silently at me. It’s dead. Now, if I can just recover the important data I didn’t back up and would hate to lose, I’m comfortable with late-son Rynie’s hand-me-down laptop. It took some getting used to, writing a column away from my desk, even though it was in the warm comfort of my favorite reading chair. I believe I can get used to La-Z-Boy column-writing in rapid fashion. So maybe I’ve purchased my last desktop. But let’s not get carried away. Call me undecided. Remember, you’re dealing with a man who doesn’t carry a cell phone, has never texted or tweeted, and fled from Facebook long, long ago for a variety of reasons. So, I’ll reserve judgment on the laptop/desktop question.

Finally, the last disruptive force to pass through the home front like a mischievous tavern ghost this week appeared right on the heels of that vexing computer problem. With temperatures plummeting below freezing, I tested my thermostat and discovered something was amiss with the furnace. I fiddled with the burner momentarily before calling serviceman Ed MacGray Tuesday morning and greeting him at my door three hours later. After replacing a nozzle and igniter, he was gone with a check and all is well.

So, with that, off I go, nourished dogs sitting patiently in the backyard kennel, standing and wagging enthusiastically every time they hear a sound out front.

They know my triggers are again igniting thunderous roars and are anxious to experience a few.

Saturday morning, after 10, gray, damp, rain holding off, me reading, phone rings. My buddy Cooker’s calling from the field on his cell, hunting over young male springer spaniel, Gizmo.

“Hey, I’m hunting down by Duncan’s and, trust me, it’s your kinda covert. You ought to head down. You’ll like it. I’ve already killed a hen, flushed two roosters and have the place to myself. It’s three times the size of (your favorite covert), and thicker.”

Intending to hunt later, anyway, it was exactly the kind of impetus needed to rouse me from the La-Z-Boy, having already fed the dogs and endured their pathetic, expressive gestures toward the truck, like, “Pretty please, can we go hunting?” So, yeah, I was ready and so were the dogs.

I bookmarked the page I was reading in Gary Snyder’s book of essays, “The Practice of the Wild,” me focused on “Good, Wild, Sacred” — so powerful and dynamic that I was reading it for the second time in two days, and will assuredly return to it someday. Check it out online. This guy Snyder, best known as a West Coast poet, is on a higher plane than bestselling novelists like Cormac McCarthy or Barbara Kingsolver or even, in my humble opinion, heartlander Wendell Berry, himself a cut above. But why digress, back to the phone call from my buddy.

An added enticement to the wetland he was luring me to was the fact that many years ago I had lived in a then brand new condominium complex along its eastern perimeter, so I knew it held pheasants. I vividly recall seeing them scooting around like roadrunners in the parking lot back then. Plus, Cooker had encouraged me to the site before, but I had begged off — first, because there was no need to travel so far to find enjoyable hunting and, second, because I suspected the hunting pressure would be more than I was willing to travel for.

Call me spoiled if you will but, basically, if I don’t have a covert to myself, I don’t want to be there. Crowded coverts are too hectic, with too many hunters and gun dogs, many of them winded, out-of-control pests. The problem is that in this new era of focused stocking on state Wildlife Management Areas and neglecting the old private coverts I grew up hunting, it’s becoming more and more difficult to find what I consider a quality hunt, especially on Saturdays. So don’t expect me to pinpoint new finds to my liking. Forget that! Maybe I’m selfish, but I’m not looking for company. Pushed away from coverts I hunted regularly five years ago, I’ve been forced to find new ones that fit my tastes. And how did I go about finding them? By revisiting old private coverts I once hunted and upon returning discovered they still held birds and few hunters. Some of these spots are not directly stocked but eventually attract pheasants released into adjacent sites with inferior cover. Even farm-raised pheasants that survive the first few flushes and become acclimated to their new digs have a way of finding thick, wet, thorny cover loaded with seeds and berries to feed on.

Saturday, I arrived on the scene around noontime, and steady rain had begun falling maybe five miles west of my destination. It was not rain that would even tempt me to cancel a hunt, but did indeed require windshield wipers. Fact is I prefer gray, threatening skies and light rain for pheasant hunts, the low pressure driving the scent downward and creating optimal scenting conditions for hunting dogs. Although I would have preferred foggy 40s for temperature, hey, I wasn’t complaining, and I can’t say I was expecting much, either. I just figured I’d check out a new covert and give the dogs a robust, pleasing romp.

I met my friend at a home across the street from the expansive, alluring aquifer we were about to hunt, met the work-at-home, data-processing wife of his friend, sampled a couple of leftover bite-sized Halloween Milky Ways for energy and headed out. Cooker didn’t steer me wrong. After meeting him as a softball teammate in Northampton, we’ve hunted birds for nearly a quarter-century together, and he knows my covert preferences, namely punishing, thorny tangles that are cattail wet and thick with brush, bordered by mixed wetland forest of poplar, soft maple and alders that in places jut out into play as refuge fingers. Well, I must say it was all there and then some. Not only that but pheasants were flying for their lives, the dogs floppy ears flying up out of the brush. Better still, the only shots I heard were ours, and I never saw another hunter or even a hunter’s vehicle anywhere along the road on my way home through a densely populated suburban neighborhood that’s grown since I lived there.

Traveling a familiar road I often take as a shortcut, I checked out a couple of other farms with wetlands known to hold pheasants and never saw a trace of hunters anywhere. Of course, hunters and especially guns are not real popular in this particular town, so I wouldn’t expect a sea of orange and one sharp barrage of gunfire after another. Still, pheasants are not stocked in posted areas closed to hunting, and I know from trusted friends who wouldn’t steer me wrong that the farms I was passing are still stocked.

Hmmmmm? I guess I’ll have to do a little research, poke around a little more when I have time, and see what else develops. I’d call what I discovered on my maiden weekend voyage promising indeed, in a place I briefly called home, no less.

Yes, with coverts I’ve gravitated to for years now annoyingly overcrowded, I may well have found a hidden gem buried in, from a political perspective, the most unlikely of places.

Sometimes a man must branch out in search of something new.

Raw and rainy, ripe for a soggy Wednesday walk, the backdrop bursting with flashy splashes of new fall color each day as drab, premature yellow maple leaves with dirty brown stains fall like feathers to the turf, never to attain their flame-orange splendor. I trust enough leaves will stay aloft to paint the sugarbush radiant orange and add brilliance to sunny landscapes.

Oh, how the dogs love rainy-day rambles, especially when I’m toting a shotgun, which ain’t far away, only a couple of weeks, in fact. Maybe I ought to purchase an online license. Can’t forget. I always used to buy a sporting license around New Year’s. Not anymore. Now I wait for fall to buy just a hunting license, which I may or may not use for deer. My deer-hunting dilemma surrounds the knee brace I must wear to trek the hardwood ridges. Four straps on the light brace made of a space-age alloy line up my worn, tattered, deformed joint to limit swelling and resulting pain. The problem is that the contraption carries body odor from daily use, a no-no when hunting alert animals sniffing the wind at all times. That said, wearing that brace the last time I went to my favorite stand two days before my older son’s death four years ago, twin bucks surprised me by trotting into the wind through noisy dry leaves right into my lap before I had time to shift my position and gun in their direction. There I sat, defeated and helpless, with two handsome antlered twins standing straight and alert nearly within spitting distance. So, true, stranger things have happened than deer presenting themselves to man wearing a sweat-soaked brace. But I like my chances better when scent-free or close to it, impossible wearing that brace necessitated by years of abuse sustained by stubbornly ignoring medical advice favoring conservative left-knee use. Hey, I was only given one left knee and plan to use it limber or lame, pain or no pain till my last day. Sorry.

Enough! What pulled me back to that memorable moment from my deer-hunting past, anyway? There are other things I want to touch upon before calling it a day — stuff like the Meadows moose, which has been spotted once that I know of by a man down the road from me; a deer-foraging shift that’s been quite obvious; and, hey, maybe a little bit about what I’m reading, the most recent of which appeared in my mailbox Tuesday and connected right into a couple of fresh reads vilifying Henry Ford, that poster boy of American industrialism, champion of capitalistic greed, friend of fascism, foe of organized labor and workers’ rights.

Regarding deer, well, they’re into acorns big time these days, leaving tell-tale crumbs everywhere along my crunchy path through waist-high, mellow-yellow timothy, its seed heads aching to explode onto fertile soil between a cornfield and thin woods lining an escarpment lip overlooking Green River floodplain. Yes, the deer have it good these days in the Greenfield Meadows flatlands, where last week I even found that a large moose print accompanying willy-nilly tracks of deer feeding under tall, broad oaks. In addition to the acorns underfoot, the four to six deer feeding there have sumptuous red and white clover, nutritious rye, and from the best I can tell, are devouring a little corn as well.

My first hint that the corn was ripe and ready came from Chubby, my 3-year-old male springer spaniel who began chomping down small ears last week. This week, I investigated further and found that something, presumably deer, was flattening single cornstalks to supplement their diet with an ear of corn here and there. When I discussed this development with a colleague and friend I call “Big Boiczyk” — whose family runs an adjacent produce farm and who will soon surrender his freedom to the holy institution of marriage — he suspected “coydogs,” not deer, an assessment I’m not sure I agree with. The “coydog” damage he described in his sweet corn did not match what I’m seeing in the thin silage cornfield I daily tour. He said coyotes rip down cornstalks and pull them out into the open to eat the cobs. The corn damage I’ve seen that Chubby has taken advantage of displays single rooted stalks lying flat in the field, not uprooted or lugged out of it. It looks like deer damage to me, perhaps coon, though minor, if not insignificant. When I catch Chub-Chub lying down to salvage a leftover cob, I tell him to “Give,” which he does, waiting patiently for me to husk and give it back. He likes that. Lily does, too. But I only take what raiders have left behind. It’s funny. Years back in that same agricultural strip, my dogs were pilfering cantaloupes. They’d roam the weedy field, pick a ripe, fragrant melon from its vine, run out into the hayfield carrying it high, lie down and eat and the whole damn thing, no waste. When I sheepishly apologized to the farmer one day in passing, he told me not to worry, he was too busy to pick them. In a week or two, he cleaned up what was left and everyone was happy.

Before I run out of space and depart, a quick reading recommendation for those of you still undecided about the controversial natural-gas pipeline they’re trying to run through our forests and across our rivers and streams, not to mention straight through Clarkdale Fruit Farm. Pick up the newest Rolling Stone magazine that arrived at my home Tuesday, comic Brit newsman John Oliver on the cover. In it you’ll find a long exposé about the infamous, diabolical, gazillionaire Koch brothers. Because of local connections I won’t mention, I must be careful what I say about the Kochs, but they have owned as many gas and oil pipelines as anyone, and you really ought to read about their negligent maintenance practices aimed at maximizing profit. Is Kinder Morgan any different? Who knows? But do we really want to find out? These folks are cut from the same greedy cloth as old Henry Ford — air, water, croplands and citizen-health be damned.

Could it be simple, random coincidence after more than a week of reading about Ford’s greed, and being just 20 pages from finishing Upton Sinclair’s “The Flivver King,” that into my mailbox was delivered this provocative Koch Brothers piece? No! I don’t believe it, have stopped accepting such developments as coincidence. I think this stuff happens for a reason.

If you hunt truth with an open mind, it can find you in many ways, yet there’s never enough, especially for the fools who arrogantly dismiss it with a smug weak-knee jerk.