How difficult it is to describe what came over me right after hooking a hard right at the North Pleasant Street rotary onto Governors Drive, heading for Commonwealth Avenue, the UMass Parking Garage and an afternoon lecture at Bartlett 61. Yes, tough indeed to describe, uncomfortable, too. The place just isn’t for me. Never was or will be. Too big, too high, too congested and too windy, the air stifling when pulled into my lungs.

There I was, in the blink of an eye traveling back 40 years and, frankly, it made me shudder in an involuntary reaction not unlike a chronic asthmatic breaking into hives while racing through a dry autumn ragweed field. This allergic response started, really, with all the commotion, backpacked pedestrians walking both sides of the road, just past the old Wysocki-House home of University Without Walls, my last official campus stop in the early 1980s. It got worse when I took that hard right — gray concrete Grad Research Center staring me right in the face — and drove toward Lorden Field and the Mullins Center, off Commonwealth. Headed west on that busy, winding road, it whaled me like a sucker-punch upside the head in a dark alley. Of course, it didn’t help that I was running a little late after overstaying an entertaining visit at a Leverett home on the edge. In a rush, anxiety building, I panicked on Commonwealth, took the wrong left to the parking garage and was immediately confronted with one-way streets, crosswalks, stop signs, people hurrying willy-nilly, Walkman entranced, walking every which way, tow-zone signs everywhere, not a word about a parking garage in sight. Finally, dead-ended along a narrow road atop the gentle hill, I slid  down my window and asked a young, expressionless hipster with an iPod plugged into his right ear where the garage was. He pointed in the direction he was headed, south. I knew that.

“Can I get there from here?”

“No, you must go around.”

“Great, just what I wanted to hear!”

At least I then had my bearings and knew how to get there. I turned around in a jammed parking lot, retraced my path back down to Commonwealth Ave. and took the next left to the ugly hilltop garage, which three hours later cost me a tidy six bucks for the privilege of not getting towed. I backed into a slot on the lowest level, grabbed my old chestnut crook cane, and sped to my destination, racing up that familiar sidewalk passing right through campus, past the Student Union, the sky-scraping library and stone chapel to Bartlett Hall, home of the English Department, where I attended many a class, some special, most not, back in the day.

I walked through the double glass doors and down the central staircase to an overstuffed lecture hall, where I asked a young woman for directions to Room 61. More than helpful, she shocked me (must have been the cane) by popping to her feet, stepping into the hallway, walking me a short distance around the corner and pointing to a door with a plaque reading Room 61 above it. I peeked through the window to a class in session, timidly opened the door and was immediately invited in by the anthropology teacher, who had invited guest speaker Doug Harris, preservationist for ceremonial landscapes from the Narragansett Indian Tribal Historic Preservation Office in Rhode Island. He was there to speak to  undergrads and show a film everyone in Franklin County ought to see: “Great Falls: Discovery, Destruction and Preservation in a Massachusetts Town.” His goal was to introduce the students to the perilous path of awareness to ancient, sacred Indian landscapes. The film, produced by Smithsonian filmmaker Ted Timreck, focuses on a National Register of Historic Places sacred landscape overlooking Barton Cove from the sandy Turners Falls Airport bluff.

Yeah, that one! But get this: New interpretation of that ancient site goes in a straight line all the way from high ground called Blue Hills overlooking Boston Harbor to the Burnt Hill standing stones in Heath. Yup, no lie. That Turners Falls site you’ve seen ridiculed by almighty Mammon, god of greed, and the press as an activist-Indian hoax discovered to obstruct progress and profit and development is, go figure, real indeed. That according to none other than the U.S. Department of the Interior’s National Park Service. Talk about verification, the folks who fought hardest to stop airport expansion and preserve antiquity got it in bold, black letters. Maybe someone ought to fly around the county with a banner boasting of the long-shot victory.

It’s amazing where this recent discovery mission I stumbled into last summer has taken me — the correspondence immense, the enticing new concepts overwhelming and quite contagious. Since publishing pictures of a balanced rock and a related ancient prayer seat buried high and deep at the top of our western horizon, I have met and spoken to lecturers, authors, professors, antiquarians, conspiracy theorists, Gaia-Matrix devotees, and even a Shutesbury man who claims he’s being abducted weekly by space aliens, then trailed by U.S. Department of Defense shadows who want him silenced. Talk about wild, it’s like nothing I’ve ever encountered. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking, but I’m way past dismissing everything new and unusual as insane. So here I sit,  listening, pondering and reading whatever comes my way in an effort to learn as much as I can about our continent’s Native past and related topics, even when they send me off on surreal little detours. A closed mind is one that’s easily controlled and manipulated. I don’t want to go there.

But wait. Now this: word that two local history buffs are, as we speak, “working to establish the true name of the local Indians who lived in Deerfield between 1600 and 1700.” They say these Indians, known for centuries as Pocumtucks, were actually “Horikans,” which I have seen elsewhere, and they promise to prove it in the near future. Who knows where that will go, or how “the authorities” will react to such blasphemy? For sure it could rattle some sensitive cages, given the honorable plight of the Abenakis to gain official national tribal recognition like the Narragansetts, both of whom would love to call the Pocumtuck homeland their own. So stay tuned, the fur could fly.

Trying to make sense of the ancient stone structures and ritualistic landscapes I discovered in the book “Manitou,” still a popular read after 24 years in print, I’ve moved on to a related work I have often seen footnoted and in bibliographies of scholarly works. Written by University of California-Berkeley Anthropologist William S. Simmons, “Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore, 1620-1984” explores Native-American spirituality, which must be understood to conceptualize ancient ceremonial landscapes and burial grounds. When stone structures, stone ruins, solstice chambers and connected, sacred, geological sites like Great Falls began coming into focus, even Narragansett tribal elders warned their people to deny their existence out of fear they’d be destroyed. Young tribal leaders like Harris disagreed, insisting that the stones had begun to speak and must be heeded because they were being destroyed anyway.

An hour or two before Harris told us of that little tribal dispute from the recent past, I had learned of a special site in our own eastern hills that fit the mold before it was long-ago demolished. Said to be located on a Shutesbury or Wendell hilltop with a stunning view in many directions, I had heard nothing about the site before it was brought to my attention by a spry, outspoken octogenarian, scholar and cultural critic who was way ahead of the curve on the subject of ancient stone structures. Interested  in Native landscapes for 30 or more years, the man tells of a multi-million dollar hilltop development many years back on this site, where six massive rectangular stone structures stood head-high in two parallel rows of three before they were leveled to build stately McMansions overlooking Amherst and beyond. I will learn more about this site after the snow melts; it sounds interesting, and was probably a component of the vast sacred landscape surrounding the ancient Great Falls landmark, where many New England tribes assembled each spring to harvest anadromous fish, feast, play games and build acquaintances. According to Harris, that site, now named for the colonial captain who slaughtered Indians there in 1676, was one of perhaps five in the Northeast used as an annual ceremonial gathering place for diverse, faraway tribes. He, I presume quite intentionally, did not name the other four.

Well, although quickly running out of space, why not one last tidbit from that Thursday UMass trip? On the second or third question of the post-film Q&A, a pretty, dimpled, 20-year-old girl sitting at the back of the class expressed her sincerest gratitude to Harris for exposing her to a new subject that had touched her deeply. She said she had been “blown away” by what she had seen because her father owned some 200 acres surrounding their Virginia country estate, where the upland stonewalls were tightly constructed works of fine art. Her father had for years extolled the expert stonework of our colonial ancestors, who she had always without question accepted as the builders. Now, she told Harris, he had opened a new window. She couldn’t wait to revisit the property and re-examine the walls with a new perspective that perhaps they were the work of prehistoric Middle-Atlantic indigenous people. I knew precisely what she was feeling and later told her so, explaining that I too had experienced a revelation about familiar woods while reading “Manitou” last summer.

It was obvious that the Virginian girl was not alone in awe. Her class seemed fully engaged during the film and quite responsive during the Q&A. Harris was pleased. “That’s why I’m here today,” he said in response to the girl’s comments. “We must familiarize young people like you with our ceremonial landscapes and culture. Who knows? I may have to deal with you as state or town officials in future negotiations. If so, it’ll be helpful if you understand our ceremonial landscapes.”

And, although he didn’t mention it, one or two of them could even become reporters willing to challenge knee-jerk objections from copy editors, who are uninformed, unaware, unimpressed and unlikely to pursue any wave-making stories that shake conventional pillars and bring shoot-the-messenger cries from the frothy rabble.

Have you ever noticed that those who scream the loudest tend to have the most to hide? It’s true. Even fools know that. No scholarly research needed.

It always starts in slow-motion, like someone squeezing lightly on an eyedropper full of sweet wildflower honey.

Drip … drip … drip. Tediously slow. Like Chinese water torture.

Then all hell breaks loose.

I always know when it’s coming, the bright sun heating frigid air and warming the black Guilford slates under a deep roof snow blanket preparing one thunderous winter sermon. The slow dripping steadily increases to a flowing sound through gutter downspouts before the crashing crescendo falls to the ground, the sidewalk, the driveway, the flagstone terrace out front. Then it’s over, just like that an eerie silence, the gray, skeletal, mock-orange standing along the border trembling in fear.

Following a big storm like last week’s, the first melt triggers chain-reaction avalanches that create mini-earthquakes which shake my buildings’ sturdy chestnut frames with unrestrained fury. Although I’ve seen it many times before, the snow surge that roared down like a spring waterfall this week really got my creative juices flowing. I was reading staid Edward Hitchcock’s “Final Report on the Geology of Massachusetts” (1841) in a La-Z-Boy recliner by the sunny window when I heard the tell-tale “whoosh” of snow launching from above. I looked outside, caught the dump, pondered a moment, looked at my wife and told her that what we had just witnessed reminded me a lot of the recent archaeological swell I’ve navigated. The information’s been buzzing at me from all directions like black swarms of pesky no see ’ems, a few of them slanderous little buggers indeed, their hot sting unbearable to the victims. I continued, told her that, to me, it felt like this gushing geyser of information, much of it fascinating and politically sensitive, was ready to burst with similar force that may shake the brass candlesticks on the mantles, the paintings on the wall, perhaps even topple the upper section of a large, overstuffed, two-piece Federal-style bookcase consuming the north wall of the study where I spend so much time. If so, I told her, I’d just have to collect the pieces and place them, along with the snow piles outside, into a giant metal sifter — the kind with the handle you squeeze toward you — for repeated sifting, the goal being to meld the diverse mix of ingredients into a tasty and truthful puddling so difficult to procure.

How do you make sense of it all? That’s the question nagging me during idle, pensive moments and following conversation, some of it testy, even insulting. They’re coming at me from all angles — some from one perspective, others from the polar opposite, all jaded by personal bias and manicured narrow-mindedness. Take for instance the Mackin lot under so much scrutiny in recent years as the site of a potential big-box store rumored to be Walmart. Sitting on the only lightly developed quadrant of the ancient Indian fishing site known as Peskeomskut (now Turners Falls dam), activists have attempted to derail development there for many years and various reasons, including wetland and sacred burial-site issues. The activists claim the site was an important burial ground for local indigenous peoples dating back more than 10,000 years, and they say they have the bones to prove it. On the other hand, those in favor of development have accused the activists of “planting” human remains in a last-ditch effort to derail the project. Complicating matters was the supervising UMass professor’s opinion way back when that some human remains found there had been transported to the site in a duffel bag and dumped, a charge that has been repeated often in news accounts the past 20 years.

George Nelson of Northfield gets a kick out of that charge. A week short of his 83rd birthday, Mr. Nelson is perplexed as to just exactly where such a haywire conclusion could have come from, especially given the source, an esteemed, highly trained professional anthropologist/archaeologist. When asked about it this week, the man just grunted out a bemused little chuckle, shook his head wearing a wry grin and quipped, “There were no bags of bones. I picked those bones up right there. They were everywhere among stumps and rubble dumped in a swamp between Routes 2 and 2A, when they were taking fill out of the gravel bank for Route 2.”

Newspaper accounts of July 7, 1964 in the Greenfield Recorder-Gazette and Springfield Union bear him out, one of the Recorder-Gazette’s front-page stories accompanied by John Senior photographs of 34-year-old Nelson displaying a human jawbone extracted from the tangled stump dump. Nelson has saved a collection of the  press clippings in two scrapbooks chronicling the period between 1964 and today. The fact is that no one in 1964, not a lonely suspicious soul, questioned the veracity of the site as an ancient Indian burial ground. Nelson was artifact hunting with permission from late owner Peter Mackin, who had no reason to hide his property’s rich Indian antiquity. He was simply selling clean, sandy fill to construction crews and Nelson, an active amateur archaeologist, was the beneficiary, collecting many artifacts while picking through the refuse after work for a Three Rivers tree-service contractor. But the number of bones he was finding in the rubble finally unnerved him and he didn’t know where to turn. That’s when he took some of them to the Greenfield Police Station and officer Edward J. Powers brought in a county medical examiner named Howard M. Kemp to examine them. Kemp identified the bones as human and 200 or 300 years old before Nelson was allowed to depart with them. In subsequent days, Nelson, curious about the source of the bones, went to the sand-bank location where fill was being removed and discovered many oval dark spots in the clear, tan sand. Then, lo and behold, right there he spotted something unusual and carefully dug at it to uncover the shocking discovery of an incredibly intact human skeleton, later identified by UMass authorities as a young female. Somehow, it acquired the name “Herman.”

Nelson can now only chuckle now when looking back at the whole skeleton caper, marveling that, “It was in remarkable condition for its age, and all in one piece until I broke it in half while driving around with it in the back of my pickup.” He said he then kept it in his cellar for a long time before delivering it to UMass, where it somehow disappeared. “They were supposedly looking for it,” he recalled, “but I never did find out exactly what happened to it.”

Also missing is the letter he received identifying it as the skeleton of a young female. “To be honest, it’s about the only document I can’t find, and I’m still looking for it, did so just the other day. I must have hidden it in a too good a place, so good that even I can’t find it.”

I guess we’ve all been there at some point in our lives, huh?

As I write this rushed piece — delayed for an hour or more by an insightful telephone conversation with Dr. Elizabeth Chilton, a UMass anthropologist who wanted the clear the air about what she viewed as unfair accusations aimed at her department in this space — I await a personal visit from Nelson and wife Betty. On their way home from a neighborhood veterinarian, they’ll drop off their press clippings for my perusal. “I told George you looked honest,” said Betty, “why not just leave the stuff with you?” Mrs. Nelson vouched for the bones and dark oval stains her husband described in Mackin’s fine tan sand. She too saw the evidence when accompanying her spouse to the site he spent so much time at, perhaps even too much for her liking.

Mr. Nelson is not hesitant to predict there are many more grave sites near where he discovered the ones in 1964, but at least they’re safe for now because that section of the parcel is out of play for development, thanks to the purchase of it by the state and Friends of Wissatinnewag, a Native American activist group that ponied up a significant fee to preserve it.

As for Chilton, she vehemently defending local archaeological digs she’s led and said there was nothing secret about them, offering to share artifacts collected and reports written about local sites. She said she is protective of the artifacts because they belong to site landowners, and she conceals locations “out of respect for the landowner and all stakeholders who are working together to better understand and preserve archaeological sites.” I can’t say I fault her there, and will look forward to meeting her.

But now I must go, with new material on its way from the Nelsons and additional material likely coming from untapped sources. This inquiry project has proven cumulative and quite intriguing. Fun, too.

Stay tuned. I love a good chase.

Whew! What a day, week, month, fresh new year. Freakin’ incredible!

Information’s been flying at me like angry white-faced hornets, all of it interrelated, interesting, dynamic and highly contagious. I told my wife the other day that all the details bombarding me have created such a bizarre, glistening labyrinth that I fear I’m going to at any moment awaken and realize it’s all been a wild dream. If it’s all accurate, I will probably have to take this discussion out of the playpen and into a big-boy section of the newspaper. No lie. But it must wait for another day, another week. I’ve got other items to deal with today, easy subjects (I won’t say simple), starting with old friend Joe Judd of Shelburne, soon to be the recipient of a prestigious award from the National Wild Turkey Federation, which he’s been affiliated with for decades; also, a little Vermont deer-hunting caper good ole boys who still peruse this space may find to their liking.

But first a quick rundown of my local travels, home visitors, emails, readings, telephone conversations and what have you. It’s amazing, all focused on ritualistic Native landscapes, sacred stones, archaeology, anthropology and an alleged, deeply-ingrained bureaucratic ivory-tower mentality that’s not at all helpful when attempting to piece together a fascinating puzzle of random clues strewn about the region. In the past week I’ve toured Montague, Turners Falls, Gill, Millers Falls, Wendell, New Salem, Shutesbury, Leverett, Colrain, Shelburne, Ashfield and Conway, attended a Connecticut River dam re-licensing meeting run by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, received a written bombshell of damning accusations against professional archaeologists overseeing ongoing and past Pioneer Valley excavations, entertained officers from respected archaeological organizations who echo many of the letter-writer’s criticisms, all the while fielding several long, detailed phone conversations concerning the above topics, all related, all alluring. Fact is I know much more than I’ve been writing, and there are supportive documents for back up; more observations and opinions arriving daily, very much connected, entangled and, yes, fascinating indeed. But that’s all I’ve got for now. Lots of time-consuming legwork remains. I want to give the authorities an opportunity to respond to the criticism aimed at them but suspect there will be many “no comments” and intimidating threats. Yeah, right! Always a great way to hold the weak-willed at bay. Count me out. I want answers and pray that by prying them out into the open I will eventually clear a path to future interactive discovery by a diverse crowd stitched together by a common thread of intellectual curiosity, all with the common goal of uncovering unwritten history that government and church officials have tried quite successfully for centuries to obliterate. These folks are still determined to complete the destruction of sacred grounds surrounding Peskeomskut, where they want to bulldoze what little may be left on the northwest corner, a site to which struggling geriatric indigenous tribesmen and women pathetically trudged through corn snow to die and be buried at a special place. But enough of that for now. Back to Mr. Judd, an old friend who more than 30 years ago introduced me to the sound of daybreak turkey gobbles on a bucolic hillside now within earshot of my residence.

A semi-retired insurance man and longtime Shelburne selectmen, Judd will be honored as one of five Roger Latham Award winners at the NWTF’s 37th annual National Convention and Sport Show on Feb. 14-17 at the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center in Nashville, TN. The awards, which will be presented during the Feb. 16 banquet, recognize outstanding volunteers who have given their personal time, energy and money to wild-turkey conservation and management. Judd is known to some local folks as the host of “On The Ridge,” which airs on local TV stations like GCTV and Falls Cablevision, and also as a longtime columnist for the likes of the West County News and currently the Shelburne Falls Independent. Other folks will know him from various NWTF seminars and events sponsored by the local Pioneer Valley Longbeards chapter, which Judd had a hand in founding.

“It was great being nominated,” said Judd in correspondence with another man he forwarded to me. “I will always be grateful and humbled for this opportunity.”

Moving to southern Vermont, how about that rascal James Smith, 47, from the Vermont/Massachusetts border town of Stamford, which touches the Monroe and Clarksburg lines, sitting between the Vermont towns of Whitingham and of Pownal? Sounds like this determined hunter got so caught up in the chase of a humongous Green Mountain State racker that he got disoriented and, lo and behold, shot it a day after the season ended. Yes, that’s right, the man was caught dragging his trophy buck out of the woods on Nov. 26, 2012, and will be prosecuted for “taking deer in closed season.” I guess the infraction is worth mentioning because, had he not shot the monster buck, it may well have been available to Massachusetts hunters during the shotgun and/or blackpowder seasons. With the case due to be heard in Bennington District Court next week, I was unable to get the weight of the 10-pointer, but it probably tipped the scales at way over 200 pounds. Described in a Vermont Fish & Wildlife press release as “one of the largest deer taken in Vermont in more than 20 years,” its antlers were impressive indeed, grossing out at 165 2/8 Boone and Crockett.

Back for a moment to the ongoing information bombardment I’ve thus far endured and survived; yes, you guessed it, cougars are back in my inbox, with several photos coming my way from a Pioneer Valley organization committed to searching for the four-legged felines. One photo suspected of being a spotted cougar kitten was not convincing to my eyes, which immediately screamed “bobcat,” or maybe even Canada lynx, which are acknowledged by New Hampshire Fish & Game to be back in the Granite State. Imagine that! This cougar chase just won’t die like that 170-pound mountain lion that met it’s maker on a coastal Connecticut highway less than an hour northeast of the Big Apple.

Reading? Oh yeah, just a quick rundown: more on Indian myth and folklore, a lot by this Leverett author who’s reached out to me about stone structures and much, much more, some of it wild indeed. I have now read four of his books (the latest “Our Human Destiny,” a humdinger) about some pretty new-age concepts that are new to me and will need further research. Plus, how about this one: just Tuesday night an email arrived from local stone-structures researcher/lecturer/writer Jim Vieira. I expect to sit down and chat someday soon. Why not? I think he wants to make his case for a giant race of North American human beings in ancient times, back when the plants and animals were also large. I’m not sure I really want to go there right now with so many other topics on my plate. I’m focused on Pioneer Valley archaeology, much of it very local, and a certain wooded lot in New Salem that I visited Friday and must revisit. I am still in awe of what I saw or didn’t see, and must say I have not seen enough.

I’m beginning to think I may be getting in over my head. No problem. I’ve always been a strong swimmer with no fear of deep, turbulent water.

Off I go. See you next week.

It’s truly difficult coming to grips with rare occasions when I wear conservative stripes in an argument.

Yeah, I know. Fancy that! Me conservative? Well, in this case, yes. That’s right, the very same man who’s probed the principals of anarchy and individual sovereignty for 40 years, ever since those formative, seed-planting lectures by Robert Paul Wolff, a political-philosophy professor who landed at UMass after leaving Columbia University following the historic Spring 1968 student takeover of Hamilton Hall. It seems to me he was fired for openly defending the protestors’ rights, but I may be wrong because I could find nothing to confirm that distant memory. So, maybe he just left on his own. It doesn’t matter. Out of that watershed New York City event in Wolff’s then young career (he’s still going strong) came two short books “In Defense of Anarchism” and “The Ideal of the University,” which are still in print. I read them both during courses I took with the man, one of far too few teachers I connected with.

But I’m not here to address anarchy, a fashionable subject in the Sixties and early Seventies and, for that matter, even today among the Occupy crowd. And, yes, I myself do occasionally traipse back into that radical realm, most recently with the reading of Eunice Minette Schuster’s “Native American Anarchism,” published by Smith College in 1932. Actually, what drew my interest was the title. Then, despite discovering that it had nothing to do with Indians, the reviews interested me. I hunted down an “as-new” 1970 hardcover reprint online for 15 bucks and figured, why not? It was a good decision and better read, even though I really ought to be thinking about my taxes this time of year. Anyhow, I would recommend the still-relevant book to anyone trying to grasp the pure, pre-Haymarket/Sacco & Vanzetti definition of American anarchy, a flavor not the least bit threatening to thinkers. Yes, of course Thoreau’s in there. But enough diversion! Back to the task at hand, that being my role as a conservative in a local issue that’s recently found its way to my inner sanctum: Native American sacred landscapes and contact-period history of our upper Pioneer Valley.

Judging from the lively email traffic that’s been swooping at me ever since I ventured into this discussion, it’s a hot subject indeed. These ancient altars built to worship the sun, stars, moon and earthen spirits fascinate me. I do believe they’re real, and realize the Indians’ holistic, Pantheistic world view is much more compatible with mine than anything Christianity has to offer. I’m talking about ritualistic landscapes with components such as cairns (pictured above), stacked boulders, balanced rocks, stone rows and stone piles, maybe even stone beehive chambers designed to accept the first rays of a solstice sunrise. I know that these structures exist right here in our valley’s gentle hills. I’ve seen them with my own eyes and (now you’re really going to think I’m nuts) have even felt their magnetic spiritual pull long before I had a clue why. A case in point is the photo of that little-known balanced rock which has twice accompanied this column. I vividly recall the first time I laid eyes on that odd glacial-erratic boulder many years ago while poking around on a solitary deer hunt. I could feel the spiritual energy emanating from the massive round stone standing on edge. Don’t ask me how but I somehow recognized its supernatural aura, probably similar to the first primitive human beings who found it while gathering berries through the upland tundra. They may have believed it was a marker of some sort left by a mythical creator/transformer like Gluskap of Western Abenaki myth. It finally all came into crisp, clear focus for me after stumbling onto and reading a book called “Manitou” at the Bookmill. I read it, several other books on the same subject and am now a ritualistic-landscape believer.

What I find myself questioning these days is why some folks similarly intrigued by the subject must flitter off into the ozone of giants and Vikings and Celtic Culdee Monks? Which is not to say it’s impossible these people were here long before Columbus, possibly even diffused with natives, leaving behind stone and linguistic hints of their presence. But, still, why must we go there before thoroughly exploring exactly what our native people were capable of building and believing. Why assume these people were too ignorant to come up with such advanced stuff on their own? Isn’t that just perpetuating annoying misinformation spawned by our Puritan forefathers? I refuse to go there, even if I must suffer the indignity of a “revisionist” label, which seems to cast a pejorative hue from most who use it. Not me. I’d proudly display that contrarian feather in my cap any day, even if I am a Puritan descendant from a long line of deacons and church elders.

Although it’s true that Native Americans left no written records, it’s not their fault that their history has vanished. It was intentionally erased by their conquerors. Eighteenth-century preacher/scholar Ezra Stiles was not one of them. President of Yale from 1778 to his 1795 death, the man had roots in the earliest Connecticut Valley town of Windsor, Conn., and knew plenty about Indian culture and beliefs, even the significance of some sacred landscapes, secret caves, ritualistic rocks and stone piles. It is, however, believed that his successor to the Yale throne, bitter rival Timothy Dwight, removed many of Stiles’ Indian records from the Yale archives, if indeed they were there and not at a friend’s at the time of his death. Petty jealously is never a good thing for history and posterity, and this is just another sad, glittering example. Despite never publishing a book in his lifetime, Stiles left thousands of pages of valuable journals that read like a newspaper, displaying throughout his stark-naked, rare brand of eclectic curiosity. A focus of his happened to be Indian culture and religion, and he pursued the subject at a time when language barriers were not the obstruction they had been for much of the 17th-century. Still, his valuable documentation of Indian history is likely gone forever unless it miraculously surfaces in the secret drawer of a Queen Anne highboy or some dusty attic box that could exist right here in Franklin County. Stiles’ daughter Emilia and son-in-law Jonathan Leavitt Jr., Esq., (a Yale grad) lived and died in Greenfield. Ultimately the executors of Ezra Stiles’ estate due to the death of male heirs, the Leavitt’s stately Main Street “mansion house” is today Greenfield’s public library. So, antique pickers beware, some long-lost, valuable “Stiles Papers” could still be hiding in the neighborhood.

Something interesting about Stiles fits snugly into our narrative. Though he wrote little about it, he believed in a North American race of giants, basing his belief on Indian legend he had heard in his travels and read in correspondence. It seems that pioneers were constantly writing him about the discoveries of giant man-made mounds of Ohio and West Virginia as well as fossils, large bones and teeth of mammoth prehistoric beasts, and huge human skulls and skeletons. Plus, an Iroquois chief Stiles had met was adamant that prehistoric giant human beings existed in the Hudson, Mohawk and Champlain valleys. It seems Stiles took the bait and became a true-believer. He’s wasn’t alone. A hundred years later, historians right here in the Pioneer Valley, including Deerfield’s George Sheldon, were still floating the wild tales, printing in newspapers and town histories the discovery of seven- and eight-foot skeletons unearthed from Indian grave sites. There’s even local tales about mid-20th century farmers uncovering massive skulls in fields they cultivated up and down the valley, including right here in Deerfield and Northfield. The question is not whether large, Wilt Chamberlain-like human beings could have existed here in ancient times. There seems to be proof of that. But how many? That’s the question. The most likely answer is few.

Of course, that’s just a personal opinion from my minuscule, rarely displayed conservative side. Frankly, I’m not ready to chase the far-out stuff. I’d like to pin down the prehistoric Indian history first. But wait a minute. Now this: a recent twist from Leverett, correspondence that’s interesting indeed, even other-worldly. A former UMass Registrar octogenarian who typically ignores sports and sports pages, was attracted a couple of weeks ago by a different photo of the same stone cairn planted out front on this sports section. A few days later, a large, overstuffed brown envelope greeted me on my work desk. Inside was a book, the copy of a chapter from another book, and a provocative, even insulting, cover letter. A thin-skinned newspaperman would have read the first sentence and tossed the whole package in the waste basket. Not me. I loved it. No fan of newspapers or the mainstream media, the man has in less than 10 years published 11 books, three of which I have now read and enjoyed. Two of them were about Leverett, the other a risqué memoir that only swelled my interest. The Leverett stuff delves into what he thinks are important prehistoric archaeological sites, not to mention old roads, prehistoric lakes, stone rows, cellar holes, Cranberry Pond, even bits and pieces about the late, great Walter Jones, an Amherst icon I once called friend. All of it’s right up my alley. So, yeah, I’ll try to meet this dude face to face. I hope to take a ride through the countryside and chat. How can I resist? One never knows where such a discussion will lead. The late Bill Hubbard’s advice that “our hills are honeycombed with interesting people” rings clear. Yes sir, and yet another example from that sweetest of hives has found his way to my front door.

Stay tuned.

I’m outa here.

Standing lonely in its black cardboard slipcase to the right of the monitor on my cluttered mahogany desk is the Folio Society edition of what may well be late American scribe Ambrose Bierce’s finest literary contribution, “The Devil’s Dictionary,” which came into play this week.

Hopelessly mired of late in the greasy mud of archaeology, anthropology and prehistory, I decided on a whim to search for Bierce’s definition of those three words and went 0-for-3. Damn! Undeterred, I took a shot at the word history and — Yes! — there it was: “An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.” Above it was Bierce’s succinct definition of historian as “a broad-gauge gossip.” That’s what I love about that old Civil War vet who wandered off to the Mexican Revolution and vanished. He can keep you grounded, cautious to look before leaping, careful to employ humility in debate. But, still, this disconnect between amateur and professional archaeologists, anthropologists and local historians is starting to gnaw away at me. Why can’t these people of good intentions combine their expertise and energy toward cooperative discovery? Must the professionals insist upon leaning toward threadbare official policy and stances, even those that have twisted the truth for centuries? It’s mind-boggling, not to mention counter-productive. Shouldn’t scholars with gilt-framed degrees behind their desks know better, even if they did earn these fancy documents from some online five and dime?

So what exactly is it that I’m tugging at, you ask? OK. Again, those sacred landscapes, natural altars worshiped by ancient New England aborigines, primitive people who were no different than contemporaries in Asia or Africa, South America or East Bum Chuck. Fact is that they all had to explain phenomena beyond human capabilities while understanding their universe — the sun, the moon, the stars and the four related seasons they depended upon for hunting, gathering and survival under a holistic world view. How difficult is that to comprehend? You’d think quite difficult when exploring some of the petty disputes between card-carrying archaeologists and what they refer to, perhaps pejoratively, as “avocational” researchers. It’s interesting. First you’re discussing stone tools, rock shelters and ritualistic landscapes. Then, before you know what hits you, it’s off the rails to theories about pre-Columbian Culdee Monks, Celts, Norsemen, Northern Africans and Portuguese sailors here on our shore. I guess it’s not unimaginable but why must we try to attribute these mysterious stone structures to foreigners and space aliens? Why couldn’t Native Americans have built amazing stone structures similar to those made contemporaneously in faraway lands? The biggest problem as I see it is that since the very beginning, the goal of colonial historians, many of them clergymen, was to erase all North American history that occurred before European ships dropped anchor. And from what I’ve seen in recent months, state and federal officials are still locked into that flawed historical perception.

What sent me tumbling back down this steep ravine of inquiry was a quick revisit to the book that got my hunt started: “Manitou: The Sacred Landscape of New England’s Native Civilization.” Monday, I traveled through central Vermont’s familiar White River Valley along Route 89 to deliver grandsons Jordan and Arie home. Around Bethel I remarked to my wife how, similar to our own Pioneer Valley, the manageable hills lent themselves to ritualistic landscapes. The next day I decided to reread “Manitou” Chapter 1 about the site in that area known as “Calendar One.” I had forgotten the exact town but knew we were right in the neighborhood when I spoke to my wife on the road, the peaks of Killington and Ascutney looming in the distant south. So, after running the dogs through invigorating, wind-swept cold Tuesday, I took a hot shower, sat down to read and came away all stirred up. Isn’t it interesting how you often gain new perspective from rereadings? This was an example. Despite what the widow of one of “Manitou’s” authors had in front of my own hot fireplace hinted about her husband and his partner butting heads with official archaeologists who routinely dismissed their theories and speculations, I hadn’t focused on that angle my first time through their book. I was at the time more interested in concepts than bureaucratic obstacles. Then, on my second reading — Bingo! — there it was in bold black and white. After spending countless hours exploring and excavating the site, not to mention poring over primary records and oral traditions pertaining to it, “amateur” archaeologist Byron E. Dix alerted the proper authorities to his findings and, you guessed it, a team of top regional experts visited it and concluded, yeeee-up, that a subterranean stone chamber, hilltop stone rows, a notched standing stone, and other related features were all the work of 18th and 19th century settlers.

Hmmmm?

Most disturbing to me, personally, is what I view as the intentional institutional erasure of ancient history that is and has been going on much closer to home for centuries, with a noticeable recent surge related to development. A man who sat in my front parlor a couple of weeks ago to discuss the buried indigenous history underfoot here in the upper Pioneer Valley brought with him an overstuffed loose-leaf binder of letters between him and state and town officials. His goal is simple and altruistic. He wants to preserve crucial archaeological sites and study them before they are destroyed. Asked how long it had taken him to accumulate such an impressive stack of correspondence, probably 10 inches thick, he answered, “Oh, this is all from the past year about one site (in a northern Franklin County town I won’t name).” And that is just one site and one “avocational” researcher. There are other sites and other researchers, two of whom have also paid me a visit to discuss what they perceive to be state-sanctioned destruction of precious sites. Well, that is if you value Paleo, Archaic and Woodland  artifacts as precious. These folks claim that despite being paid favorable lip service, this is not and has not been the case with state archaeologists, who the people I’ve spoken to view as friends of development. To back up this charge, these passionate folks point to nearby sites that have been rubber-stamped to approval, places like Six Flags in Agawam, WMECO in West Springfield and Walmart in Greenfield. Another site likely soon to be in conservationists’ cross-hairs is a potential downtown Springfield casino on a site they’ll probably want explored before flushing yet another invaluable Connecticut Valley historical site down the toilet, carting away artifacts, maybe even human remains, in dump-truck loads of dirt.

There’s no denying that this is a difficult dilemma. You can’t put a halt to all riverside Pioneer Valley development in an effort to protect potential archaeological sites. That’s unrealistic. But we can’t just say that it’s too late now, either, that there has already been way too much destruction to ever piece it all back together. How can the archaeological watchdogs not be scrambling at every turn to recover whatever they can, document it, collect artifacts, inventory everything and move forward.

Despite what the history books tell you, the United States did not start at Roanoke and Jamestown and Plymouth Rock. No, the fact is that indigenous human beings were here to greet and in some cases ensure survival of those first settlers. Shouldn’t we be committed to learning as much as possible about the lost civilization that existed here before Columbus?

To me, the answer is yes. I think I’m a minority. Sad, because history does matter — all of it.

Old Ambrose Bierce, the fightn’ man who never feared truth or hate mail, understood. He condemned the messengers.

Friends of Wissatinnewag, Jehovah’s Witnesses, orange flames dancing, firewood popping, gasping, even emitting soft screams from the toasty Rumford fireplace. Just a little tease to an interesting weekend. Interesting indeed.

It started early. A Friday-morning visit from three experts, among them the widow of the co-author of “Manitou: The Sacred Landscape of New England’s Native Civilization,” a bible of sorts. Published in 1989, authors James Mavor and Byron Dix cast somber light on a topic that has stirred interest, spawned new interpretations for familiar sites and created quite a buzz in local coffee shops. If you don’t believe it, check out a Jim Vieira stone-structures presentation. Popular? You betcha, judging from the local lecture halls he fills. Yeah, yeah, I know the guy’s gone a little off the rails with his tales of double-molared giants and the alleged hush-hush Smithsonian conspiracy to conceal them. Still, his slide shows of balanced rocks, pedestal boulders, rocking boulders, stone piles, stone beehives, prayer seats, Manitou stones, mounds, trenches and solstice markers are very real indeed; not only that but they’re “out there” for all to see in the hills that frame our Pioneer Valley.

My guests were drawn by a column I wrote a few weeks back describing and showing photos of a site I believe to be an ancient sacred landscape. Well, those photos of a balanced rock and its companion mountain-top prayer seat buried deep in our western hills created quite a commotion, emails swarming like Northwoods black flies. My suspicion that the site fits a ritualistic-landscape profile had been quickly confirmed by stonestructures.org experts who viewed photos. After a lively string of Q&A’s, these two experts were convinced I was onto something important and told me what else to search for on future visits. Soon after that column hit the street, an email arrived from the woman who arranged our enlightening Friday gathering. She would bring two men with whom she’s currently developing the interactive “Nolumbeka Project” website, where future sacred-landscape researchers will be able to trade pictures, theories and observations. Also, she said, one of the men was eager for a field trip to the site I had photographed, if that was OK with me. Yes, I told her, I was game, would like to share the site with an expert. I have learned from other discovery missions that you can never have enough eyes evaluating a subject. Everyone seems to see something different, has an enticing little tidbit to add, and every shred of information is important when trying to piece together a difficult puzzle … which segues straight into a related topic, that of a welcome surprise our Friday visit deposited on my lap.

I was pleased to discover early in our four-way discussion that both of my male, 60-something visitors carried Indian blood. Even more intriguing was the fact that they were both “Friends of Wissetinnewag,” an activist group some local folks will recall being vocally opposed the controversial Greenfield’s Walmart project. Their contention was that the proposed site was a prehistoric, sacred, indigenous burial ground overlooking an important seasonal fishing site that annually attracted Indians from miles away. According to one of the men, various archaeological digs at that “Mackin site” have unearthed artifacts dating from Paleo points to colonial musket balls, ancient clues spanning some 13,000 years. It’s amazing. Who would have ever dreamed that sitting right there in the comforts of home, warm fire crackling, was the man, a well-known “avocational archaeologist” and Native American historian, who had allegedly uncovered Paleo and/or Early Archaic human remains on Canada Hill only to be accused by a venerable, now-retired UMass archaeologist of planting evidence from a Vermont site. Hmmmm? Interesting indeed. Way more than I had bargained for.

More important than meeting this intriguing man was the fact that I had then communicated at length with both the man who discovered the grave site and the archaeologist who called him a liar. I do recall reading the planted-evidence charge in the paper and immediately harboring a healthy dose of skepticism. I do not, however, recall the source of the accusation being named. Well, now I know who it was, and have better insight, which isn’t to say I don’t respect her. I do, very much. But, wait, get a load of this: In recent months another well-known local “avocational archaeologist” — this one a town official and officer of a respected regional archaeological organization — has been bending my ear about deceptive state and academic archaeologists who are more concerned with secrecy than interactive discovery at rare, important, ancient sites in the upper half of our Pioneer Valley. My source is irked that the findings are inaccessible to him after he pinpointing the sites that have been professionally excavated and explored. “They’ll tell you they keep everything secret to protect valuable sites from looters,” he said. “But, trust me, they’re the only looters, and they’re doing it with the state’s blessing. Shouldn’t the towns and/or landowners of the sites they’re removing artifacts from know what they’re taking? When I asked a high-ranking state official that question, I had to hold the phone three feet from my ear during a loud, 10-minute tirade.”

Although I admit knowing little about archaeological protocol and regulations, this informed source hadn’t introduced me to a new realm of local history. I have for many years been interested in contact-period Pioneer Valley Indian village sites, including the so-called “Pocumtuck Fort” said to be sacked by Mohawks in 1664 or 1665, leaving the defeated local tribe scattered, its fertile croplands at the confluence of the Deerfield, Green and Connecticut rivers wide open for Massachusetts Bay Colony settlement. Then this man, out of the blue, contacts me around Thanksgiving to put a bug in my ear and bring me “up to speed” on recent developments, doing so by delivering a pile of recent scholarly articles along with a stack of state regulations enacted to keep archaeological discovery secret. And now, lo and behold, with that project under way, me poring over his and related data — Bingo! — into my path leaps a sacred-landscape triumvirate to substantiate accusations which, unbeknownst to them, I already knew of. It seemed too good to be true.

“Some would call this a coincidence,” I told my one of my three Friday visitors. “Not me. I believe stuff like this happens for a reason.”

It’s difficult for me to get my head around archaeological scholars who give lip service to public teamwork and invite community assistance for their projects, then hide the artifacts and discoveries in dark university vaults that are inaccessible to folks who could possibly be helpful. I do understand keeping important, artifact-rich archaeological sites secret to eliminate looting, but I cannot comprehend hiding artifacts and keeping reports confidential. If people knew what to look for, they may bring to light new  exploratory sites. I’m making progress on this investigation and will continue to feed out my discoveries piecemeal, similar to the Atlantic salmon and cougar inquiries I have pursued in the past. Believe me when I say I’m on it. I love this stuff.

But enough of that. Before I wrap this up and return to reading about Algonkian creator and transformer myths and folklore, let’s jump back to my two Jehovah’s Witness pals, bibles and pamphlets in hand. Yes, they pulled their gray Kia SUV into my driveway Saturday morning at 11, just as I was heading out the door to run the dogs. I’ve known one of them for many years, met him as the co-coach of a local baseball team. They stop to chat from time to time on Saturdays, and I must admit they seem to have a sixth sense for arriving at appropriate times. On this occasion, they had somehow sniffed out a horrific suicide that had rocked my family only a few days earlier.

“I don’t know how you fellas do it,” I grinned. “It’s almost like you’ve been sent from heaven. But don’t get your hopes up. You ain’t converting me. I’m destined for the fires of hell.”

They took it in stride, warm smiles, have grown to expect it. Then the unexpected.

“Would you boys care to come in for a minute?” I asked. “I’ve got a nice fire going in the front parlor.”

“Why not?”

And in we went.

I think the boys keep returning because they never know where our conversation will traipse off to. Oh, it could be a theological discussion about the works-and-grace argument of 17th century Boston, perhaps evangelism or corrupt evangelical con men like Jim Baker or Jimmy Swaggart; hey, maybe even an old diamond tale that the former coach seems to enjoy. The one he seems to favor occurred on a 1976 road trip to Half Moon, N.Y., where it seems a local bad boy six weeks removed from his first knee-surgery got himself into quite a tangle during his first at-bat against some highly-touted Sienna College righty who’d drawn  a flock of scouts and a retinue of fans to the opener of a sunny Sunday twin-bill. The old coach claims the jabbering between the bad boy and the umpire started right up on the first pitch, a called strike the batter didn’t like. I’m not sure he’s got the facts straight. I was there but can’t say I remember every little detail. It was long ago. What I do know is that, although this ballplayer could be a challenge, I never knew him to be an umpire baiter. That said, if he thought an umpire had missed a pitch and put him in a predicament, he wouldn’t hesitate to say something. Not show him up, mind you, just step out of the batter’s box, pick up a handful of dirt, spit, look out toward the pitcher and quietly inform the ump that, “You missed that one, Blue.” So my guess is that that’s how this one actually got going. The ump had “rabbit ears,” overreacted, didn’t want to hear it. Isn’t it interesting how these memorable ballpark tales tend to improve, not necessarily mellow, with age? This is an example.

Anyway, the way Jehovah’s disciple recalls it, the argument started right away, on that first pitch. The batter thought it was low and away. The ump said it caught the corner. Then, when the second pitch found the same spot and was called the same way, the private “discussion” at the plate escalated. It’s hard to keep the crowd out of it when the umpire loudly scolds a hitter, authoritatively tells him to shut up and get back in the batter’s box, then strips his mask and yells, “One more word out of you and you’re gone!” That always brings the crowd into the dispute.

Well, knowing the hitter as I did, I suppose he must have thought the umpire’s instructions sounded far too much like some wimpy grammar-school principal, Boy Scout bully or camp counselor trying to play the tough guy, which was never the way to approach him. Irritated and more determined than ever to salvage the at-bat, he bore down and worked the count even by fouling back some tough pitches. Then, when he got his pitch — fastball, inner half, belt high — he opened his hips and smacked a high-rising moon shot far over the left fielder’s head to a place where few balls in that park landed. As he raced triumphantly around first base and knew he was going to touch ’em all, he hollered out to the plate umpire.

“Hey Blue, did you see that one? That’s what a strike looks like. Get in the game.”

Well, that was it. The umpire had had enough. He removed his mask, raced onto the grass in front of the plate, and gave his antagonist the old heave-ho, shouting and motioning with his hand and arm that, “You’re out of here!”

That’s when the coach, Jehovah’s disciple, ran out toward the plate to plead his case.

“Hey, Ump,” he begged. “You can’t throw a man out of a game when he’s still running the bases.”

The umpire looked at him, strolled back to his little white box behind the plate and waited silently for the hitter to finish his home-run trot. As he crossed the plate, the ump followed him toward the dugout, mask in hand by his hip, did a little three- or four-step shuffle, wound his free hand up behind his head, aggressively dropped it forward and pointed to the parking lot.

“OK, now you’re outta here!” he hollered. “Leave the ballpark.”

The banished ballplayer didn’t get into it, just calmly walked to the dugout, collected his bat, glove and hat and sauntered to his car, where the pitcher’s gray-haired Sienna coach approached him.

“Hey, Kid, who do you play for? Never seen anyone hit one like that off my pitcher. That was quite a shot.”

“Blame the umpire,” the ballplayer answered. “He sharpened my focus.”

You know, I forgot to ask my Jehovah buddy what ever happened to that guy who got tossed. A wild one, his detractors always said he’d end dead or in jail. Maybe he’s still kickin’. If so, probably stationed nightly at the local watering hole, reminiscing with gray teammates back to the glory days, their best, before he bangs down one last Jack and passes out in his hands on the bar in the hokey one-cop town he grew up in.

I gotta give those Jehovahs credit. They sure can spin a yarn. I suppose that’s why I ask ’em in … every now and again.

Whew! A wild Wednesday morning indeed. No complaints. But the craziness kept on coming in the afternoon: the phone, a visit, all stacked atop a disorienting head cold.

Oh well, how can a man in my line of work complain when you don’t have to leave the house for nourishing column fodder? I guess it helps when you stumble onto a hot topic. Apparently, I’ve done that. Yes, it seems I’ve riled a hornets’ nest and it’s attacking like a swarm of white-faced assassins with bad attitude.

That’s OK. “Bring it on,” is all I can say. “Bring it freakin’ on!”

But, first, a little confession. I admit to arriving at this familiar walnut chair with selfish intent, purring space-heater exhaling warmth on the back of my neck. The plan was to write about the preliminary Massachusetts deer-harvest numbers minus blackpowder season and leave it at that. I figured it would be fast and easy, then back to other stuff that’s recently seized me with an enraged-lumberjack grip. The MassWildlife press release publicizing 2012 deer numbers arrived last week, a day late, of course, to use as fresh news here. So, yeah, I know it’s probably old by now. But what the heck, I convinced myself, why not just throw it out there and return to a far more captivating topic that seems to be gaining speed these days, like bald tires sliding down an icy mountain pass?

Well, at least that was the strategy I had developed while running the dogs in bitter-cold, refreshing morning air. Then, with that daily chore complete, the dogs content, tails wagging for more as I departed, I sat down in the study to begin a weekly task and — Bingo! — an enticing email from Montague to huff the bellows on a current subject of interest. Reacting to last week’s column about a hidden balanced rock and sacred landscape in our western hills, a woman wrote to say she thinks she’s discovered an ancient ritualistic site in woods near her home and would like me to take a look. I do intend to take that field trip, the sooner the better, and told her so in my reply. Hey, why not? Sure beats sitting home before a toasty,  crackling, whispering Rumford fireplace and convincing yourself it’s too cold for outdoor activity? Plus, I understand how magic stark winter woodlands can be once you get there. I will get there with this new potential sacred landscape pulling like a stormy riptide.

But wait. No sooner had I fired off that email response than my desk phone rang. I vaguely recognized the caller-ID, couldn’t place it but answered nonetheless, confident it wasn’t some annoying solicitor reading a monotonous sales pitch. Nope, a welcome intrusion instead — a so-called “avocational-archaeologist” who’s all wound up about a forgotten Paleo site on Sugarloaf’s front lap, and the alleged secret UMass excavations at Deerfield’s Fort and Pine hills. The man hadn’t seen my last week’s column until somebody at the Post Office questioned him and handed it to him Wednesday morning on his daily rounds. He went home, read it and promptly gave me a ring. Not only that but he wanted to stop by with a pile of documents he thought might entice me to keep chasing a subject he thinks ought to be pursued.

Yes, I told him, bring it by.

So here I sit, pondering this and that after blowing through that book I mentioned last week here: “In the Maelstrom of Change: The Indian River Trade and Cultural Process in the Middle Connecticut Valley, 1635-1665,” by South Deerfield native and UVM anthropologist/archaeologist Peter A Thomas. A great read, I would recommended it to anyone interested in the contact-period Indians that called our Pioneer Valley home. No, not a word about sacred landscapes, but not far off, either. Same bolt of cloth, so to speak; much better, from my perspective, than any freakin’ deer-harvest numbers from week-old press releases. But this is a newspaper so, first, those week-old numbers. Then, who knows where we’ll meander  off to? Potentially dangerous territory.

I’ll keep the deer discussion brief. After all, the numbers are preliminary and do not include those from the primitive-firearm season. The numbers will be much more meaningful once complete, digested and professionally analyzed, but it’s anyone’s guess when they’ll arrive, hopefully before the shad run and the turkeys gobble. Anyway, the early, incomplete deer-harvest is 8,912. Broken down, that includes 4,945 shotgun kills, 3,879 archery kills, 84 Quabbin kills and four successes during the paraplegic season. A quick glance reveals a troubling development that remains blatantly persistent: a harvest dominated by the eastern half of the state. Excluding the Quabbin kill because the state reservation overlaps the western/central region, and the paraplegic harvest, which gives no kill locations, a measly 24 percent of 8,824 deer taken statewide during the archery and shotgun seasons came from the Western and Connecticut Valley wildlife districts. Yup, that’s right, 76 percent of the deer were killed in the eastern half of the state. If the blackpowder harvest stays consistent with others in recent years, we’ll be looking at about 2,000 additional kills, most from the eastern half, producing an all-weapon harvest in the familiar neighborhood of 11,000.

But enough of that for now, back for a moment to sacred landscapes from New England’s prehistoric past. Wednesday’s email correspondent apologized for her delayed response. What she didn’t know was that hers was just one of many queries and comments I received by email and telephone after that column hit the street. One correspondent was none other than the widow of Byron E. Dix, co-author of “Mainitou: The Sacred Landscape of New England’s Native Civilization.” She too wanted to meet and talk. The meeting is coming, trust me. Ancient ritualistic landscapes seem to be a torrid topic here in Franklin County at the moment. I’m basing my opinion on the crowds I have witnessed at a couple of local presentations. The most recent, a Pioneer Valley Institute-sponsored lecture by Connecticut archaeologist Dr. Kenneth Feder on a rainy Monday night before Christmas at Greenfield High School, drew an audience of 100 or more. The other, held on a Saturday night in October and delivered by Ashfield stone mason Jim Vieira, attracted twice that number to Ashfield Town Hall. Some of Vieira’s wilder claims about a race of giants and Smithsonian deception are now under fire from the archaeological community, but he is standing his ground, defends some of his wilder speculations based on local town histories and 19th century newspaper clippings. Google the arguments if you don’t believe it. It’s all there.

Well, that’s all I’ve got this week. I’m out of time, too many distractions. Stay tuned. I’ll get through that pile of documents on my dining-room table, make a few calls, take a field trip, meet Ms. Dix and associates and see where it leads me.

I love it when this kind of stuff jumps into my path on a slick winter trail. Who knows? It may just get me through the winter doldrums. They say you won’t catch the fever if you flee the cabin.