The iron bridge connecting Springfield, Vt., and Charlestown, N.H., is straight and narrow, similar indeed to the live-free-or-die creed of rugged individualism and no taxes on the Granite State side.

So, no, I can’t say it’s a bit surprising that this contemporary, libertarian mind-set squares nicely with that of the hardy Massachusetts Bay Colony pioneers who founded Charlestown in the early 1740s with construction of The Fort at No. 4 on the east bank of the Connecticut River as a garrisoned northern outpost protecting isolated settlements in the lower valley.

It was that fort across from the Black River outflow on the Connecticut’s west bank — the mouth of which is a doorway to the ancient natural corridor slicing through the Green Mountains to the Hudson Valley — that indirectly drew my Sanderson ancestors to Whately, and sparked my interest in the historic site. Those two factors pulled me to the reconstructed fort’s annual French & Indian War re-enactment weekend Saturday with my wife and grandsons. It’s never too early to plant seeds of family discovery in a child: my mission.

The Connecticut was swollen, the framing landscape a vibrant green after soaking rains, and we had a blast, all of us, combined or solo, making our rounds about the festive fortress. We meandered through my seventh-great-grandfather Capt. Isaac Parker’s northeast corner home with a cannon in the bedroom, conversed with folks in the bordering encampments, and haggled with an array of interesting bohemian sutlers stationed along the outer palisade perimeter. I later overheard and concurred with my wife’s description of the trip as a home run, especially for little Arie, soon to be 4. The kid was all eyes and full of questions, racing around, enjoying the liberty to do so, learning much, some of it not from his grandfather. It must have seemed like a fanciful dream to the boy, a far cry from the typical, stifling, law-and-order classroom I’m most familiar with, have always objected to. There’s just something liberating about soldiers and settlers, sutlers and Indians and loud, smoky, 18th century battle re-enactments. Try it sometime if you doubt me. You won’t be disappointed.

One campsite that immediately caught Arie’s attention sat outside the fort’s southern gate. Near a sign identifying the small group as Col. Ebenezer Hinsdale’s Garrison, a small pile of round logs burned hot in an open fire. Some two feet above the flames, two whole chickens dangled from wet strings tied to the horizontal bar topping a six-foot-tall, four-legged metal cooking frame. The chickens, a moist, delicious, golden brown, were dripping into the fire, each greasy drop igniting tall, hissing flames that produced a most savory scent. I wanted to talk to the folks there because Col. Hinsdale, Fort Dummer’s chaplain, was from Deerfield and, even better, the older brother of Samuel Hinsdale, an early Greenfield settler who started the historic Meadows tavern I call home. So the site was rich in personal history I believed Arie could get his head around.

I approached the man tending the chickens and immediately initiated one of those spirited conversations I so enjoy inciting.

“I suppose you know Ole Ebenezer was a Haaavaaad man,” I blurted out with faux Ivy formality. “What you may not know, however, is that he was intemperate, possibly the result of being born in captivity and living with the humiliation of community uncertainty about the identity of his father. I suppose his intemperance was a reason they shipped him out of Deerfield to a hinterlands fort out of public view.”

The warm-eyed man flashed a wry grin and quipped, “Yup, I’ve heard that. They say he liked to hit the bottle.”

Little Arie was listening, and clueless.

“What’s ‘intemper,’ Grampy?”

“Drinking too much.”

“Oh.”

I don’t think he grasped it. I hope not. He’ll find out soon enough. Saturday wasn’t the day. Too young. The jesting had gone far enough. But then, as so often seems to happen in this wayward world of mine, not 75 feet away, just around the southeastern corner, lo and behold, a saucy sutler manning the “Geronimo Trading Company” tent, right up my alley, named after the rebel of all Indian rebels, the proudest and most defiant of all Apache warriors. While fellow tribesman Cochise tried to get along, Geronimo was determined to rid his Southwestern homeland of greedy, Caucasian invaders. Plus, the horse-trader who owned the company, one Mark Humpal, a barter-economy devotee, well, he too was right up my alley and soon was digging into a hidden location at the back of his tent for a clear canning jar filled with a most powerful peach moonshine taken in trade somewhere along the trail. How do I find these folks, anyway? I seem to have a knack for it. Must have picked it up in a stupor from the red Woodstock mud and clung to it evermore.

Anyway, this fella Humpal was quite a character from the nearby hills of Cornish, NH, and he drew quite a crowd, obviously a regular at such events, a throwback, to boot. Back in the days of Fort No. 4 and Rogers Rangers, colonial authorities frowned upon such traders because they were too friendly with the Indians and, for a price, willing to supply them with guns and liquor, a deadly combination that often resulted in the most hideous carnage. That isn’t to say the woodsmen they fought against were any better. Many of the frontiersmen went into battle drunk, too, which only complicated matters further. But don’t tell anyone. Conventional wisdom tells you buckskinned militia and cavalry soldiers alike were valiant heroes, and that those who besmirch their reputations today are “revisionist historians,” a pejorative description indeed. Not me. I believe in revisionist history, the mission of which is clearing the dense, manipulative fog borne of “official” government reports.

This too I will someday teach my grandsons, and one path will return straight through The Fort at No. 4, where ancestors learned the Indian way, respected it, used Native battle techniques to defeat a superior British oppressor and, later as disgruntled anti-Federalists, had a way of staying two steps ahead of the government on a western exodus known as manifest destiny, which ended late in the 19th century.

Today, there’s nowhere to run. We’re trapped like rats and forced down conformity’s funnel.

Monday, the morning after, gray and muggy following hard overnight rains. Heavy wet pods topping tall orchard-grass stems droop low, seeds shedding onto my shoe-tops, collecting on the shaft of my tiger-striped chestnut crook cane. My feet are wet, getting wetter with each step as a hidden yet discernible sun fights to penetrate deep cloud cover I sense will vaporize to a warm, powdery, midday blue.

The dogs are drenched and covered with tiny light-green seeds as they bounce joyfully through tall, dense cover they were born for, lingering scents clinging to the sodden turf, even more enticing for gun dogs bred for the sporting chase. God, how I wish I could still bounce and dart and leap and sprint like them. Then again, back when I could, I was clueless. So I guess I’m now better off, lame but sentient, aware of what life’s about, who I am and where I fit into this place called Happy Valley.

The dogs break through the tall hayfield into a scalped rye field burnt a shredded-wheat tan. A flock of maybe 20 turkey vultures is standing right there, 100 yards ahead, enjoying a ripe carrion breakfast, the smell of which had first drawn the dogs a couple days earlier. In such fields, Lily and Chubby tend to chow down a little but prefer dropping onto their backs and rolling in the stench with forbidden carnal glee, eventually returning with the most unpleasant odor and streaks of slimy, stinky flesh smeared like grease deep into their necks and ears. I always get a passing downwind whiff here and there along our walk, but the rancid odor of that violent mechanized carnage is most intense after I’ve crated the pets, closed the black fiberglass cap, driven a short distance home and opened the tailgate to a hot flatulent release that could gag and bring tears to the eyes of a weak-stomached man, which I am not. I typically remedy the problem with a hardy, green, braided lasso leash and the nozzled front-yard hose, which never takes long but is inconvenient.

Chubby spotted the flock first. He froze momentarily, silently proclaimed, “Oh boy!”, and sprinted at the birds, quickly scattered every last one into an airborne wheel of circling scavengers waiting for our rude intrusion to pass so they could touch down for another round of savory breakfast buffet. “Be my guest,” I quipped under my breath. “The sooner that decomposing slop vanishes from the field, the better.”

The prelude behind us, we dropped into Sunken Meadow, where, as so often happens, I quickly spun off into captivating introspection that started humming like a tuning fork wedged deep between my ears, swollen Green River’s rattle elevated from purl to growl. Yes, that again, my cranial wheels awhirl. Schoolmarms used to call it daydreaming when a warm April breeze or ray of bright sunlight pierced a stifling classroom’s window to pull young inquisitive minds off task and into liberating fancy. Not me. Such metaphysical adventures can be creative indeed, even productive, maybe therapeutic, and likely far more interesting than the subject scratched on the blackboard or the droning instructor repeating a lesson delivered many times before. Like most contemplations, the one at Sunken Meadow was ignited by the senses, a pleasing scent in heavy air, sweetest of sweet, so alluring, even seductive, a harbinger of summer — the fragrant white wild rose. I knew that soon the uplifting scent will fill the meadow like a scent bomb, signaling: the arrival of swooping field swallows and flittering, scolding bobolinks; the migration of turtles seeking sandy riverside soil in which to deposit eggs; the subtle scent of native strawberries bleeding a salubrious red tint into morning cereal’s almond milk or maple-sweetened oatmeal. Yes, there it was, the first welcome whiff of the wild white rose, a scourge to those managing meadows, but not to me. It walloped me at the far corner of a small riverside woodlot leading to a secluded swimming hole graced by a tall, solitary apple-tree sentry. God, I can only imagine what that tree which also blossoms white has witnessed over the years at such a a peaceful, secluded spot along by the water’s edge. To me, no church mouse, it’s a comforting thought related to human frailties.

The powerful yet delicate scent of those tiny riverside roses filled my nostrils and immediately for some reason got me thinking back to the charming home concert I had attended the previous afternoon. With work looming, I knew it would be tight but found my way to that little slice of Franklin County paradise high atop a majestic Colrain hill. Owned for generations by the Stowe family, Bill Cole now owns it and is building an eco-village called Katywil, which is, from the best I can tell, an upscale, new-age version of the small cooperative communities encouraged by Ivy League outcast Scott Nearing, that radical Wharton School professor and “Good Life” advocate who had the audacity to take a public stance against World War I. The man defended himself and miraculously kept himself out of prison back in the Palmer-Raid days, then  withdrew forever from conventional society.

If Cole is following Nearing’s path, I’m totally cool with it. I believe in “localism,” local economy and finding a way to live “off the grid” even though that lifestyle-change has probably passed me by; too independent at this point, I think. But who knows? I met Cole briefly before the concert overlooking Catamount and may even seek him out again someday. Sunday he was on my periphery. I was at his home to get a little taste of singer-songwriter Erica Wheeler’s music and leave it at that. I do hope it wasn’t rude to leave before the last chord was struck. But what can I say? Work beckoned from the distant shire town mired in dysfunction. No choice.

What immediately attracted me to this green, hillside Sunday service was the Pioneer Valley Institute’s email notice a month or two back. Titled “Sense of Place,” it immediately piqued my curiosity, pulled me in like a Venus fly-trap. I flagged the message. Sense of place is important to me. I live it, do believe it to be my strongest sense, that proverbial sixth one. As the other five fade with age, my sense of place only sharpens, strengthens and deepens, hardens as bedrock. So, yes, I think I hold a profound understanding of the concept. In fact, I’d take it a step further and admit I worship it, an airborne inhalant that inflates my consciousness with each breath. I feel it wherever I am, be it reading a book on the warm flagstone terrace, engaged in marketplace chatter, pecking away at a keyboard here or at work, challenging an arogant authority figure who deserves no respect, walking Sunken Meadow’s perimeter, swimming the Picomegan, chasing the dogs through a thorny, mucky alder swamp, following a ridge-top stonewall through regal shagbark hickories, or strolling the isles of ancient, lichen-layered graveyards soaked with family DNA.

I suppose a man can live in many places and have a sense of them all. Not me. This is my place. That’s why I’m here, why I came back, will die here. Where else can I walk in the woods, any woods, sit on a stonewall, any stonewall, swim in a river or lake, any river or lake, breathe the air, thick or thin, high or low, and know it contains my DNA? Even there at that bucolic Sunday site visited, it was comforting to know that if I researched it I’d surely find Colrain ancestors who once walked that property and left indelible stains which still live in the budding trees, the greening pastures, the springs trickling from stern black ledge. I wonder what the Indians think? They were here before us and must feel a smilar, even deeper, attachment to place. I think people are born with place but must discover it within. Lucky ones are successful. Fools and unfortunates pass it undetected.

It’s gratifying to be capable of attending a short event in a strange place, looking around, listening, speaking to a few people and departing with enough information absorbed to continue processing it internally for days. That pondering was still there when I passed the wild rose bush at the river’s edge, and it reappeared later, carrying me back to younger, wilder days. I vividly, even fondly, recall my road daze, touring the country lost in an intoxicated fog while fund-raising for cops in faraway spots like Colorado, Delaware, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio and, worst of all, “Joysie,” all places where I didn’t belong or want to stay. I felt like a foreigner. Even swimming in that gorgeous northern-Illinois lake named Wauconda, 60 or 70 miles south of my mom’s natal Wauwatosa, Wis., I could not, no matter how hard I tried, feel like I belonged or had anything in common with those folks in the land of fascist Joe McCarthy and his Red-Scare shame. I guess it’s all about perception, but that was mine and I returned home, to the place of my ancestors, and have remained without regret, constantly exploring new concepts to fine-tune understanding.

I pray I live long enough to instill in my grandsons this passion for place. They may not know it but it’s their place, too, which I hope to teach them. I think I can connect the dots if they listen.

In closing, I must say it’s difficult to understand those who seem bemused when I claim to be spiritual, not religious. My religion is a sense of place, the chapel an open, mature oak grove bordering a ridge-top shagbark alter overlooking a bloated aquifer shimmering through skeletal forest in bright noontime sun. There’s no golden glitter, no incense, no leaf, vine and rosette-carved walnut pulpit from which to brainwash a bulging congregation of crown-of-thorn cookies punched out of flattened, ghostly dough by a portly prophet.

I guess some will call me blasphemous.

Be my guest.

I’ve been tempted lately to jump back into the anadromous fish fray, for which local gadfly Karl Meyer has so capably taken the baton and sprinted off toward a distant, cluttered finish line. But first things first — specifically closure on the location of Greenfield’s Bull Head Pond, which I know much more about since last addressing it here a month or so back.

Since then, it’s been a phone call here, email there, questions, reading, personal observation and visits, conversations, interpretations, pensive pondering, evaluation and re-evaluation, all of it critical to discovery and a conclusion, which I have.

“How’d you get onto this subject, anyway,” wry-grinned key source Peter Conway during his Tuesday-night Recorder visit, Dave Allen’s multi-bookmarked “Historic Greenfield Maps” booklet in hand. The third in a four-generation string of family ownership on the hidden “downtown” site where the original Bull Head Pond rests, Conway was the strongest thread stitching it all together for me. In fact, I think he became my equal for enthusiasm.

Oh yes, there were others, many others who played important roles, but Conway had personal reasons for exploration, just as I expected when I first focused on his hideaway farm at the base of a steep hill descending from Main Street, past one “Jungle” and into another, t’other side the Green River from River Street.

First, let me remind you that I quite innocently happened upon this topic of a long-forgotten pond and Greenfield’s last Indian, whose inconspicuous wigwam was said to have stood near it, probably early to mid 18th century, “next to a fine spring.” This whole search and recovery mission just sprang up by accident as I picked my way through home bookshelves searching for descriptions of local Indian graves, especially surrounding Turners Falls’ dam, east of which stands the infamous Mackin site still in the never-ending Walmart-dispute’s crosshairs. I was at the time confused about ancient burials I had for years read about. Most descriptions I recalled situated interred bodies sitting upright to greet sunrise at the base of east-facing hills. Having read of several burials which fit that mold in various Pioneer Valley town histories, I accepted it as the preferred method for regional indigenous burials. But that ingrained perception changed dramatically after accepting an invitation to UMass/Amherst for an Anthropology Department showing of “Great Falls: Discovery, Destruction and Preservation in a Massachusetts Town.” There, in an untidy Bartlett Hall-basement classroom, eloquent Narragansett Tribal spokesman Doug Harris introduced the film and afterward answered questions that helped spawn more in me. Most confusing was his description of Eastern Algonkian burials oriented toward the setting southwestern sun, facing the happy hunting grounds of Cautantowwit’s House.

Determined to clear my confusion, I purchased and read William S. Simmons’ scholarly 1970 book “Cautantowwit’s House: An Indian Burial Ground of the Island on Conanicut in Narragansett Bay,” which chronicles the archaeological excavation led there by the esteemed anthropologist in the Sixties. With that information digested, I started reviewing indexes of local town histories searching for mention of burials with a southwestern orientation. I found none and was later told by a Lenape Indian and former Friends of Wissatinnewag president that most of the Mackin-site burials face east, overlooking the sacred Connecticut River elbow called Peskeomskut and the morning sun. Then, while flipping pages for the listed “Indian Skeletons” in Lucy Cutler Kellogg’s “History of Greenfield 1900-1929” I discovered a short entry titled “The Last Indian,” read it, and it immediately captured my fancy. The chase was on.

To briefly summarize what has been previously written here in three installments, Kellogg claimed that during a 1914 Women’s Club presentation by famed Greenfield children’s author Mary Prudence Wells Smith — known for her popular “Boy Captive,” “Young Puritans” and “Jolly Good Times” historical novels — she “related many anecdotes of the Indian times told her by her father, and which were related to him in his boyhood by Asa Childs, an old Indian fighter of Deerfield. Among other things brought out was that the last Indian in Greenfield lived in a wigwam in the west part of the meadows on the edge of Bull Head Pond and near a fine spring.”

That tidbit to me implied that the pond cited sat in the Lower Meadows somewhere out by Greenfield Community College, and, being myself an Upper Meadows resident since 1997, I knew precisely who to query. Well, when my captive-audience source phoned his father to ask if he had heard of Bull Head Pond, his dad answered yes, it sat along the southwest corner of their farm, right about where I figured. When I published that discovery and invited reader feedback in an effort to substantiate the location for posterity, well, let’s just say it opened a can of worms. Yes, my trusted source was quickly challenged by none other than his older brother, then, lo, his 86-year-old mother, not to mention several 60- and 70-somethings who grew up in Greenfield and identified a Bull Head Pond at the corner of Woodard Road and Colrain Street, roughly where Davenport Trucking today stands. They all remembered Davenport filling it in with gravel some 50 years ago for the truck yard.

But it doesn’t stop there. No. In fact, we’re just getting started. Octogenarian Bill Allen — a former selectman and, as retired county engineer, perhaps the authority on local roads — decided to throw in his two cents worth. He phoned me at home to inform me that Woodard Road was a very early county road leading from Colrain Street to Wisdom, Shelburne and beyond. He wasn’t sure when it had been designated a (then-Hampshire) county road but was certain it occurred in the 18th century, perhaps even before the Revolution. More new perspective added to old, always helpful to historical investigation. Before Allen’s call, I had known that Colrain Street and the Green River crossing at Smead’s Bridge (Davenport’s) were early, and that the road itself was likely an old Indian trail leading from the downtown plateau to the fertile meadows and beyond. I had thus speculated in print that in my mind it was an unlikely place for a solitary Indian to hide out. But sandwiched between the Green River and the junction of two busy roads? Uh-uh. That made no sense at all to me, seemed more unlikely than ever, despite credible testimony that the pond there in the mid 20th century was called Bull Head by those who fished and skated it.

At that point, I had totally accepted that the pond identified by those sources as Bull Head had indeed been known by that name in the day. But, still, I was not so confident it was the same pond known by that name two and more centuries earlier, and I hinted skepticism in print. Then came a breakthrough tip by late-night weekend email from a Bernardston woman who, curiosity piqued, had embarked on her own Bull-Head-Pond  research. It just so happened that one of her Internet keyword searches dropped her straight into the Google Books edition of David “Willard’s History of Greenfield,” the town’s earliest published history (1838). Near the end of the book she found a biography of William Coleman, a prosperous transplant lawyer who built the historic McCarthy Funeral Home off Bank Row before departing for New York around 1800. The location of his stately new Asher Benjamin home made Coleman the downtown neighbor of Willard (1790-1855), who lived west of the town common. So Willard knew Coleman’s promontory point well and penned a description of the pastoral western prospect from Coleman’s backyard, which reads: “The very fertile and beautiful meadow west of these buildings was, within memory, covered with many lofty walnuts sprinkled over the soil like an orchard, excepting the western part that was covered with alders, among which and near the margin of Bull Head Pond, where is a fine spring of water, once stood the hut or wigwam of a solitary Indian.”

Aha! I rose from my chair and went straight to the bookcase for Willard, reading the Coleman bio, rereading the short segment about the solitary Indian and immediately focusing on Power Court and Power Square off Mill Street. That’s when I thought of contacting Conway, if needed. But first I went through my Dave Allen Maps CD and found little on my maiden journey; then, early the next week on my way to work, pulled into Mowry & Schmidt to see if there were any ponds there. Sure enough, I found one along the western border of the parking lot. Intrigued, I drove around to the top of Bank Row and pulled through McCarthy’s driveway to orient myself with Willard’s view. Once at work, I hunted down Conway’s phone number, called him and got the wheels spinning in a new direction. Willard could not, in my opinion, have been talking about the Bull Head Pond of 20th century fame in the written picture he paints. The Greenfield native would have known the view well, and the scene he sketched just doesn’t fit the Bull-Head-Pond site near Davenport’s. His description implies that the pond, or at least the alder swamp fronting it, was visible as he looked over the open meadow (later the first fairgrounds) that is now a congested Power Square and Power Court. So that would place the site between Mowry & Schmidt and the railroad trestle behind Dunkin Donuts. The Colrain Street Bull Head Pond identified by several living sources is around a sweeping bend and far out of view. Also, that pond would have been on the other side of Green River. Wouldn’t Willard have noted that in his description?

Truthfully, soon as I ruled out the faraway Bull Head site near GCC, my intuition told me that the old pond at Davenport’s was too far away and out of Willard’s Bank-Row world. That’s why I took that first field trip to Mowry & Schmidt, discovered the pond and spoke to Conway about his son’s property under Main Street on dead-end Conway Drive. When I spoke to him on the phone that night from work, I was rushing on deadline, scribbling illegible notes, and ultimately made a key mistake when writing my column the next day. Conway had told me that the small pond with the island I spotted just west of Power Court was known as The Donut, and that there was another, not far west of it, called Horse Shoe Pond. I mistakenly remembered him telling me they were both man-made sometime around 1900. The truth is that Horse Shoe Pond, called “Old Channel” on the earliest map I could find naming it, was not man-made. No, it’s an old oxbow that was long ago separated from the main Green River stem and still holds water, though much less than years ago. Conway remembers Horse Shoe as bigger, deeper and better defined as a kid when he fondly recalls catching — his hands spread apart a foot or better — fat bullheads. He also remembers a marshy spring hole between the Horse Shoe arch and the base of the steep escarpment, where a thin stream bed ran out of it to the river. He says the marsh and stream bed are still discernible but have been filled in by erosion triggered by railroad vibration over the years.

“I think you’ve put the Bull Head Pond mystery to rest,” predicted Conway. “Horse Shoe pond was once called Bull Head. There is no question in my mind.”

I agree. In fact, I do believe the names Bull Head Pond and Old Channel appear in the earliest deeds related to that fertile, secluded hollow between Power Court and the railroad trestle. I tried to research it and cried uncle after two unsuccessful visits totaling up to three hours at the Franklin County Registry of Deeds. There were just too many transactions and legal maneuverings to plow through, starting with an insolvent Coombs estate that got tangled up and remained that way from just after the Civil War until the dawning of the 20th century, when Conway’s grandfather purchased it. I am thoroughly convinced that due diligence by a capable researcher will bear me out.

In closing, I must say I love the symbolism of that last Indian choosing to live buried deep in the lowest fringe of downtown Greenfield along a sparkling escarpment spring passing an ancient, detached piece of Green River bed that became a pond where fat, tasty bullhead lurked. It all just fits snug as a skullcap.

A rattler it wasn’t, but still, how would like to find one in your lingerie drawer?

Yes, it seems dangerous-looking reptiles are lurking in my neighborhood. That’s what I’m chasing this week. Just another interesting little tale that piqued my interest after arriving as an email tip from a friend and neighbor. Why? For one thing because of a recent personal encounter, with what I’m not certain, just up the road. You can’t make it up. How is it that this stuff just seems to find its way to my doorstep? No complaints. Stories like this write themselves.

I’ll start with the email, which arrived Monday afternoon and went like this (names and locations excluded): “Info came my way today that three timber rattlers were taken by Fish & Game personnel recently at (a neighborhood) estate. Workers found them while fixing a foundation around a shed/barn? Did you know? Check it out.”

Hmmmmm? I knew the estate. Pass it daily. But what’s really interesting, probably just a coincidence if you believe in such things, is that historical research on an unrelated subject had led me straight to that old farm recently. Now this.

Intrigued by the spicy rumor, I figured I’d swing through the driveway on the way into work to see if the visit drew or caught the owner outside. No such luck, just a tabby cat on the porch and a happy pappy dog trotting down to greet me, friendly tail wagging. I stopped my truck, opened the door just long enough to pet the dog between the ears, noticed no activity in the house and departed unfulfilled. Oh well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. I didn’t want to be a supper-time pest, had time to pursue it in the morning. But, just out of curiosity, I from afar scanned the stone foundation of an outbuilding on the way out and found it tidy indeed for stonework of its age. Yes, a likely candidate for recent renovation.

At that point, having noticed the neat, clean facing of that exposed stone foundation, my wheels started spinning to a low hum. Perhaps the rattlesnake rumor was true. Plus I kept mentally traipsing back a few days to that personal encounter with something I never saw but knew for sure was there. Young Springer Spaniel pal Chubby had alerted me to its presence during our daily walk down a familiar game trail at the point of an escarpment that leads down to a narrow marsh flooded by beavers. It was Friday or Saturday, I can’t recall which, hot and sunny, late morning. About a third of the way down the brushy path, getting thicker by the day due to fresh spring growth, Chuby-Chub, maybe 20 feet ahead of me, stopped, froze statuesque — nose elevated, ears perked — and chose to skirt whatever it was he smelled, heard or both by walking a tight little five-foot detour loop to the left. Whatever it was, he wanted no part of it. Me neither. But, curious, I carefully approached the site and used my chestnut crook cane to investigate the ground by pushing small, leafy, infant beech seedlings to the side, Chubby already standing chest-deep, drinking beaver-dam overflow below as foot-free mother Lily trotted down to join him. Although my quick probe  revealed nothing, I was convinced it was a snake. Because animals have a sixth sense for danger, I pay attention. So, when I heard this neighborhood rattlesnake rumor, that’s why it really grabbed a hold of me. Maybe a rattler had persuaded young Chubby to change his path down that natural, constricted earthen ramp.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I was a little skittish upon returning to the site the next few days, walking down through the small marsh between two agricultural plots with my four-legged friends, me crossing the water over a large fallen tree trunk. I don’t believe an observer would have noticed caution in my gait, but let’s just say that minor tangles and sapling slaps across the back of my naked calves startled me a little more than usual, not to mention the sight of thin, dead, fallen limbs dangling in the sumacs. Yes, those dangling particles attracted closer inspection than usual as I snaked (no pun intended) my way through that familiar little wetland strip. Once I poked through the marsh into open Sunken Meadow, it was always clear sailing, no more heebie-jeebies for the remainder of my circuitous riverside ramble back to the truck.

Although I can’t say I’ve have ever considered owning a pet snake, I wouldn’t call myself ophidiophobic. I remember handling garden snakes as a kid before witnessing a friend getting bitten by a big ornery one. That instilled in me a healthy respect for snakes, which still give me the creeps. My youthful fears only intensified as I wandered out and discovered more threatening-looking serpents on my travels up and down the Indian trails scaling the red North Sugarloaf cliffs. It was worse on the way up, when I’d reach for a scrub-oak or an outcropping a ledge to pull myself up only to meet face-to-face with an unfriendly-looking outstretched snake adorned in colorful geometric bands baking in the summer sun. To this day I can’t say what kind of snakes they were, but like Chubby-Chub-Chub, I never pestered them. No, I always did my best to avoid them. Yet I can honestly say that such close encounters never discouraged me from returning to the scene, just taught me to be aware. Never in my recollection did one of those snakes act aggressively toward me, though, which makes sense because I never bothered them. But let’s not digress, back to the present.

When I returned home from a Tuesday walk, wanting to chase the rumor, I immediately called the neighbor who, rumor had it, discovered those rattlesnakes at her historic Greenfield Meadows home. When I told her why I was calling and admitted skepticism, she chuckled and said that, in fact, what I had heard was pretty accurate. Yes, as it turns out, the three snakes were not discovered by contractors working on an outbuilding but instead by the woman herself on April 10 and 11. First, upon walking into her office, she found one critter right out in the open, coiled neatly on a printer shelf. When she and a colleague witnessed the snake rattling its tail, she phoned police and a temporary animal-control officer was dispatched as she waited, snapping off photos with her cell phone. When the public servant arrived on the scene, he observed the four-foot snake and, yup, identified it as a rattlesnake before removing it from the building and releasing it over the bank into the woods, because, you know, rattlesnakes are a protected endangered species.

It gets better. Next day, with the harrowing experience sort of behind her, lo, upon opening a desk drawer in the same office, there lay an identical three-foot snake stretched out among the contents. Convinced she was dealing with yet another rattler, the woman was brave indeed, eventually removing it from the drawer with long-handled pruning shears (I call them loppers) and taking it outside. Concerned that there may be more big, menacing reptiles lurking, she called the contractor who had performed the carriage-house-to-office transition and asked if he’d please investigate further. He arrived on the scene the next day and, sure enough, removed a third snake from a warm place near a pilot light to a gas fireplace, end of story. Well, except that the property owner says she had seen a large snake colored and marked the same as those in her office while doing yard-work last fall. She figures it and others must have hibernated in a stone-foundation pocket and found a way inside upon awaking from their long winter nap.

After recounting the tale and checking for dates in her email messages, the proprietor emailed me two photos she had taken, the first titled “office visitor,” the second “in the drawer.” I promptly forwarded “in the drawer” to Ralph Taylor, MassWildlife’s Connecticut Valley District manager, who viewed it and quickly replied that it was a harmless Eastern milk snake.

“That’s typical milk-snake behavior,” he chortled. “They seem to like people’s homes and are often confused with rattlesnakes because they, and black water snakes, will shake their tails like a rattler when nervous.”

Taylor says his office answers calls from concerned citizens who find milk snakes on cellar rafters of their homes and barns. He said the snakes are docile creatures that eat rats and mice and are thus attracted to cellars, crawl spaces and woodsheds. Taylor said the loamy bottomland location of the Greenfield incidents makes it an unlikely place to find rattlesnakes, but not milk snakes. Which isn’t to suggest there are no Franklin County rattlesnakes. Anyone who’s studied local history dating back to the first two centuries of settlement knows New England Indians tribes used ominous rattlesnake skins ceremoniously and displayed their fangs in jewelry. Accounts of early settlers depict rattlesnakes as quite common dating from the colonial period well into the 19th century, their range extending far north of here, into the Green, White and Adirondack Mountains, and deep across upper New York State. Given the factors of global warming and Northeastern reforestation, rattlesnakes could indeed be on the comeback trail locally. In fact, if you went hunting for them tomorrow, you could find them with little effort. Taylor identified the Holyoke, Mt. Tom and Tekoa ranges as local hot-spot sites, saying the most likely place to find them is on sun-splashed talus slopes composed of stone, ledge and shale. Rattlers also seek out the warm, manmade concrete floors and platforms poured to anchor mountaintop cell towers and windmills. Although humans are likely to survive rattlesnake bites, Taylor said their venom is a protein destroyer that initiates a flesh-eating process and causes permanent damage. Rattlesnakes and copperheads are nothing to fool with.

My guess is that Chubby was skirting a Milk Snake that day and, even though they’re harmless, I can’t say I blame him. In fact, on my way into bed after work Tuesday night, I’ll admit to having an extra little hop in my step upon jumping into bed after midnight. I’m sure that temporary phobia will pass. It’s just that the images and discussion were very fresh and creepy, our homes close and similarly constructed.

Milk snakes may be harmless, but I’d rather not crawl onto a heated mattress pad with one, thank you.

Peter Mallett can be a feisty devil, which comes as no surprise to me after years of entertaining phone conversations.

Yes, affable Pete Mallet — president and founder of the Millers River Fishermen’s Association — is a man of principle, not a bit timid about voicing an opinion on important matters, particularly hunting and fishing, thus, sure, an occasional dust-up. But this man of fiery French-Canadian plasma means well. No question about it. Still, let’s just say he’s not always, uhm, diplomatic. Yeah, that’s it. Diplomatic. Not always so. Thus he’s made enemies here and there. No big deal.

It just so happens that he kicked that temper of his into gear last week on the shores of Orange’s Lake Mattawa, a popular spot for pond anglers and boaters alike, what some may call sedentary anglers … or worse. Well, count Mallet out when it comes to that kind of fishing. He calls himself a fish hunter — that is, one who straps on a pair of hip boats and follows a stream through tangled woods, fields and swamps, hunting trout. Which doesn’t mean he’s never fished Mattawa. Indeed he has, but long, long ago. In fact, he’d venture a guess it’s been 40-some years since he last wet a line there; just not his kinda spot. Of course, that doesn’t stop him from checking it out on a spring whim, which, it seems, unfolded last week, when it didn’t take long for old Pete to get a hair across his ass. Why? Well, it seems he objected to a fella’s catch-and-release routine and wasn’t the least bit hesitant to correct him with a sharp rebuke at the water’s edge.

What brought Mallett to the Mattawa scene was a state stocking truck departing the boat ramp. Figuring he’d check things out, sure enough, a truck-follower was having quite a day for himself, nailing one dazed, disoriented and hungry trout after another and releasing them back into the lake, which seemed perfectly OK until closer inspection. Problem was that the guy was using sharp, lethal, barbed treble hooks and creating a gory crimson mess.

“He was catching beautiful football rainbows, all of them a pound-and-a-half, unhooking them and throwing them back in bleeding like stuck pigs,” recalled Mallett. “After the third or fourth fish, I had had enough, couldn’t take a second more. I went right down to him and said, ‘Why are you throwing those fish back? They aren’t going to live bleeding like that.’

“He just looks at me and says he likes catching trout, not eating them. He’s a catch-and-release man. I told him catch-and-release men don’t use treble hooks unless they remove the barbs. It’s easy to do with needle-nosed pliers. Either that or you buy barbless hooks to re-rig lures with, because barbed treble hooks are killers.”

Yes sir, classic Mallett. When he has something to say, there’s no holding back; just the way it is, like it or not. Some do. Some don’t. But Mallett doesn’t worry.

Which brings us to three consecutive Saturday-morning kids’-stocking events on the Millers River that he wants to publicize. The first dump will occur a week from Saturday, on April 28, at Alan Rich Park in Athol at 11 a.m. The other two will tale place at the same time at different sites on consecutive Saturdays — May 4 at the Orange Wastewater Treatment Plant, and May 11 at the Birch Hill Dam parking lot in South Royalston. Mixed in with loads of mostly one-pound trout will be some $8-a-pound lunker rainbows weighing four pounds and better, all from the Brewster Hatchery in Plymouth, according to Mallett, the oldest trout hatchery in America.

“Yeah, we plan to put out a couple of the ‘big guys’ at all three of the kids’ stockings, just to raise their eyebrows,” laughed Mallett. “You know what they say: ‘Get a kid hooked young and they’ll fish forever.’ I believe in that. That’s why any kids interested in joining us are invited.”

Those big, 4-plus-pound trout will be part of a 200-pound allotment of lunkers the club plans to secretly stock at special Millers River sites this year. “If you want to know where we put them, then you gotta buy a $5 membership,” said Mallett, always the huckster. “People have been very generous. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to afford these trout.”

And, as old friend Freddie Bender used to say, “you betcha believe it” Mallett will have something to say if he catches any catch-and-release men hooking his big trout with barbed treble hooks and throwing them back to die slow, grueling deaths. He doesn’t put up with such inappropriate, unacceptable behavior. If you don’t believe it, ask the fella he confronted at Mattawa, the one who got a good taste of the Mallett ire.

Love it, or leave it, because Pete’s going nowhere.