Finally, my bird-hunting gear is hanging in the open carriage shed. I pulled it out Tuesday morning, under cool sunny skies, white clouds, a blustery wind sweeping yellow maple leaves across the yard. By the time I sat here to get started, a ladybug invasion had bloomed. Looks like a banner year for those little critters farmers are so fond of. Honestly, I’d be chill with them were it not for part-time innkeeping.

They say ladybugs are helpful because they devour aphids. In the process of buying my home more than 15 years ago, a home inspector found many of the red turtle-like bugs crawling on the front upstairs windows on a sunny winter day and told me they were the sign of a healthy home. Now, even when I can’t see them, I know their odor, nothing unpleasant or overwhelming, but I recognize it immediately. I really enjoy ribbing farmer friend, neighbor and Recorder colleague Jay Butynski early each spring by inquiring as to whether his dad might want to stop by with a cardboard box to gather the little critters as they emerge en masse from under the upstairs picture rails on a sunny day. The Big Boiczyk just grunts a half-chuckle, never has taken me up on the offer.

But that’s neither here nor there. Bird-hunting season has arrived — archery deer season, too — and I finally got out Tuesday for my first pheasant hunt with Lily and Chubby. It was a pleasant yet unproductive push through a familiar wetland that seems to get wetter, thicker and thornier every year now that beavers have free reign of our bottomlands. I picked my way through the productive covert that’s indelibly stained with ancient family DNA and enjoyed every tangled step despite never raising my side-by-side, anticipating a flush or hearing even a distant blast. That’ll soon change. Maybe even this week. Actually, I wasn’t overly enthused about the trip, just had to go when I felt the cool fall air and stiff breeze. I had to run the dogs anyway, so why not do so toting a shotgun? On my way back to the truck after braving thorns along the edge of tall alders, bag empty, I bumped into an old friend arriving. He recently received the unwelcome news that he’s carrying aggressive prostate cancer that must be dealt with, sort of piling on for a guy riding out an ugly divorce, young kids, no fun. It will, I’m sure, be a recurring subject when we hunt together through the season. We’re as compatible in the field and we were on the Florence softball diamond where we met decades ago.

Tuesday’s slim pickings were not to be unexpected to start the annual put-and-take pheasant season. The flushes always increase as the season progresses, the stocked birds accumulating and acclimating to their new wild habitat, acquiring feeding patterns and learning escape routes. Apparently the state put for opening-day and weekend hunters took, because Lily or Chubby never once “made game” during a robust hour-plus romp. I was astonished by the number of hunters I saw on a Monday. It was precisely what I intentionally avoided on Saturday’s opener, when I begged off, choosing instead to putter around home, finish a Chief Joseph Brant biography, and attend an evening Jim Vieira lecture on the stone monuments and chambers of New England’s prehistoric ritual landscape. I’d guess Vieira drew 150 people, which, frankly, surprised me. I was anticipating maybe 20 or 30. It was, in my opinion, a home run, enhanced by a historic building that greeted me with a warm familial embrace. I had never before been inside Ashfield’s handsome Town Hall, originally the First Congregational Church before getting rolled down to Main Street from nearby Norton Hill. The building oozes with family spirits, it being the church where fourth great-granduncle Rev. Alvan Sanderson preached to brothers Asa and Chester during the first quarter of the 19th century. Not only that but fourth great-grandfather Col. David Snow of Heath had a hand in creating the proud hilltown edifice as an apprentice for famed Buckland architect Col. John Ames, who, depressed in deep debt, committed hideous suicide outside the church … more on that later. Snow apparently learned the carpentry trade well from Ames, because some 20 years after helping to build the Ashfield church, he himself was contracted to build the Heath church in 1833. A daredevil of sorts, legend has it that Snow celebrated the church-raising by climbing the frame to the ridgepole, tight-roping it to the middle, taking off his hat and standing on his head upon it. The man was 54 at the time, and weighed more than 220 pounds. As for the infamous Ames suicide, it occurred on Sept. 4, 1813. With his Ashfield project near completion, a despondent Ames sat along the church-side Norton Hill burial ground fence in broad daylight and sliced open his jugular with a chisel. Say what you will. No denying Ames was a man.

Back to the present, though, I must admit I’m happy to have my bird-hunting garb airing out on familiar nails and hooks and pegs on the westernmost carriage shed wall. I had quite a time of it Tuesday morning wiping my Filson oilcloth bibs and shooting vest free of the mildew it had collected while hanging on a wooden peg protruding on a 45-degree angle from a heavy vertical post separating two of the four open stalls in the stable. It’s funny. Just Monday my neighbor was bemoaning his home’s mildew problem, claiming it’s a new Meadows plague, that he can’t remember mildew as a kid. He suspects global warming to be the culprit, which is good news. The man’s a dyed-in-the-wool Republican. Well, lo and behold on the very next day, I myself had a major mildew issue, one of my own making, I might add. My labor-intensive cleaning project set me back an hour, and I can’t say the garments were totally mildew-free when done. What a fool. Had I hung my hunting clothes in the attic as usual, I would have eliminated the problem. But I had a lot going on at the end of pheasant season last year and got distracted. So now, until it fade, I’ll have to carry a mildew stench into gas stations and convenience stores. If the problem doesn’t soon resolve itself by aggressive brushing through heavy cover, I’ll probably have to wipe the clothes down again, maybe Sunday, using a sponge saturated in a diluted mix of bleach and warm water. The bibs are tattered and on their way out, anyway, but I’d like to save the vest — comfortable and functional, with a lot of good years left if properly cared for, which obviously wasn’t the case this year. Oh well. Live and learn. The story of my life.

One more thing before I go. I would be remiss were I not to give a quick plug to loyal reader Ned James of Ashfield. We have become email friends, corresponding often, and we finally met by chance at Saturday’s Vieira talk. James, a humble artist or craftsman (is there a difference?), found me seated inconspicuously at the back, introduced himself and sat down. Speculating beforehand that I may be in attendance, he brought along a small box of reading material he wanted to share. After the talk, he accompanied me back to my truck and I drove him to his car, parked off Main Street in the opposite direction. Two of the books he wanted me to read were by an author I had heard of but not read. His name is Jack Weatherford. On Monday, I opened “Native Roots: How the Indians Enriched America” and honestly can’t put it down, a fascinating read on the heels of my immersion into the colonial history of New York State’s Mohawk Valley, an early gateway to the west then ruled by Sir William Johnson and the Iroquois Nation. I recommend Weatherford to anyone interested in Native American history and how prehistoric peoples shaped our continent. Weatherford’s right up there with the likes of Francis Jennings, James Axtell and William Cronon as a Native American scholar.

Yes, what a fascinating civilization it was that we destroyed; sadder still the prehistoric Native history we continue to obliterate and deny. That was the precise subject addressed Saturday night before an overflow crowd in that stately Ashfield meeting house where, for me, the air was thick with smiling kindred spirits, the hall stuffed with interesting, engaging folks of all ages. I must say I love the hilltown feel. I guess my ancestors did, too.

I’m upbeat on a gray morn, steaming Tom White cup of black coffee on the Queen Anne stand beside me, killing time in front of the boob tube before my daily morning walk with the dogs. The phone rings. It’s a dear old friend who’s had a tough go the past year. We share a special friendship, one formed on the softball diamond, where, if the guy making out the lineup was worth his salt, he’d pencil us in back to back, the big guy before me. That way, I could coach him through the hitter’s checklist from the on-deck circle.

“Relax, Kid,” I’d soothe with confident aggression. “Hands loose, eye on the ball, give it a ride.”

My big buddy was a great listener. Sad he never had the luxury of good coaching. His independent streak made it difficult to live by public-school rules and regs, one of many fine country ballplayers to fall through the cracks in a system that didn’t recognize his gifts. Years later, with my diamond skills greatly diminished by age and injury, we fed off each other like only special teammates do. No one will ever break that strong bond between us. We are, even after all these years, still loyal pals, savoring a rare connection worth maintaining.

Fact is I seldom talk or write about my diamond days. I’ve moved on after sticking around far too long. Readers often ask me why I don’t venture back to the diamond. They know I have stories to tell, some that would make crew-cut coaches cringe, maybe even fire off letters to the editor accusing me of irresponsibility for telling the naked truth. That threat doesn’t scare me. No, I guess I just don’t feel like writing about my ballplaying daze. Not now, anyway. I’m sure the day will come. But still, whenever the big guy calls  — not often — our warm conversation always drifts onto the smaller diamond of my twilight years. I’m not hesitant to walk down those gouged dugout steps before breaking free to re-enter the real world of daily routine. Always entertaining, our conversations are apt to initiate gut-busting laughs from both ends of the phone. We traipse from one subject to another like hummingbirds challenging each other for Rose of Sharon blossoms, and, yes, many of the tales are unprintable in a family paper. As usual, the big guy hit on three or four subjects that opened a warm geyser of light chatter and, later, profound thought. He revved me up, so to speak. The salient four topics were bears, cougars, presidential politics and over-30 baseball. They got my wheels spinning, none more than the political seed that germinated into risqué reflection capable of raising some readers’ ire — the price you pay for sharing introspection. Why hide it? I can handle the blow-back. Dangerous territory. Tell me, who is more defensive than battered women trying to conceal the abuse they silently endure?

But enough of that for now, let’s move to the harmless matter of black bears, and the fact that they’re still pestering my buddy in his Miller River neighborhood. There, they enjoy making mincemeat of his birdfeeders and ripping his trash bags open when given the opportunity. But the big guy is plenty cool with that. He kinda likes bears, would even like to get to know them, was once foolish enough to get up close and personal to an injured bruin, calmly talking to the big limping beast from within spitting distance in his yard before coming to his senses and thinking, “Hey, Man, what are you, freakin’ nuts? You could get hurt.” This, mind you, from a man who’d physically blend nicely into any corner of an NFL locker room reserved for the largest of hogs. Because he touched on bears, I told him I had finally heard from MassWildlife about the preliminary September harvest, which was a record 168. Indeed, that’s less than half the annual total needed to stabilize a burgeoning Bay State bear population. But still, there’s no denying 168 is better than 68, so we’ll take it. According to the email received from an official spokesperson last Thursday, the previous-best September harvest is 142 in 2003 and 2004.

Our bear discussion didn’t linger. No, instead we leapt straight to the historic king of New England predators called cougars or mountain lions or panthers and catamounts, depending on who you’re talking to. Whatever you want to call them, believe it, they’re on the comeback trail. I told him of another sighting reported to me this week, it  right in his neighborhood. It seems one Bill Morris, more than familiar with cougars as a former Southern Californian, drove right up to the long-tailed beast in his Erving driveway just before dark a couple of weeks back. He got a clear, close look before the beast ambled off into the woods in no great hurry and disappeared toward Rattlesnake and Northfield mountains, where other folks have reported seeing cougars. My buddy wasn’t surprised. He’s one of many eastern Franklin County residents who’s seen a cougar, his spotted side of the road while driving through Wendell.

Soon our chat predictably swung from wildlife to the softball diamond. He loves to reminisce about the good old days when we’d pull into a ballpark complex for weekend semi-fast tournaments in Athol or Worcester or Gloucester, Turners Falls, Buckland or Whately. The local semi-fast leagues lasted until about 1990, when they and all other local competitive men’s softball died a sudden death. My buddy tried to hang on by playing over-30 baseball, which he said quickly devolved into a hapless joke because the best players fled in boredom. I admitted to knowing little and caring less about over-30 baseball, then just couldn’t resist sharing with him the hot summer day when I stopped on a whim along the raised shoulder overlooking Herlihy Park in Whately to briefly watch such a game while devouring a tasty large-vanilla waffle cone from Pasiecnik’s adjacent creemee stand. I observed six tedious outs and left wondering how that game could satisfy anyone’s competitive juices. The skill-level was pathetic, a far cry from the days when cars lined that same elevated lip to watch the likes of Eddie Skribiski, Matty Murphy, Mike Perenteau, Bobby Bourbeau, Glen Desjkavich, Raul DeHoyos and many, many other fair country ballplayers strutting their stuff for the annual Frontier Men’s League Tournament. Those players carried themselves like athletes and turned the snappy double plays of grizzled vets, a far cry from what I witnessed that day in Whately. No wonder those coed leagues are the new rage. Must be the fringe benefits justify travel costs. Just an educated guess.

Finally, the big guy and I surprisingly ventured into maiden territory, discussing, of all things, presidential politics, a subject I didn’t anticipate and wouldn’t initiate. He must know where I stand from what he’s read, but I would have never surmised him an outspoken Obama man. In fact, the big guy harbors genuine dislike for Romney, and he didn’t hesitate to label the man a liar. Good news, I guess, for Democratic operatives. Imagine that: a big, white, 50-something, former farm boy and ballplayer repulsed by the thought of a Romney Administration. Trust me, the man is not one of these ivory-tower eggheads pejoratively referred to as “secular progressives” by the likes of Hanitty or O’Reilly or Rush. No, just a simple working man, a rugged individual at that, just the type the Romney machine assumes it can manipulate with ugly, race-baited, guns-God-and-gays rhetoric. Well, I’m proud to say it hasn’t worked with my big, lovable buddy. I do hope there are many others like him. The wild card up Obama’s sleeve is Romney’s low-likability factor. Here we have a president ripe for the plucking and the other side marches out a staid corporate stuffed shirt who’s door-handle dull. Then he has the audacity to pick a right-wing ideologue running mate. Too bad everyone in America couldn’t read Matt Taibbi’s “Rolling Stone” piece from a few weeks back about Romney’s Bain Capital. If widely read, my guess is that even folks totally disenchanted with Obama would choose to sit out the election rather than vote for Romney, depicted by Taibbi as the filthiest of capitalist swine.

With the phone call behind me, walking the dogs through Sunken Meadow, preoccupied with thoughts of an evening talk I’ll lead next Thursday at Ashfield’s Bullitt Reservation, my mind skipped backward, reopening the provoking Romney vein, which bled straight into peripheral reflection about our furious Brown/Warren race. Although I don’t know my buddy’s Warren assessment, I’m not afraid to admit I’m pulling for her. The woman has guts. In his 2010 book “Gritopia,” Taibbi eviscerates Wall Street and the lap-dog government overseeing it while, in the same breath, praising Warren as one of the few honest politicians left in America. My guess is that Warren will ride Obama’s coattails to victory. I can’t foresee many voters selecting Obama and Pretty-Boy Brown in one fell swoop. Just doesn’t make sense. Which pulls me straight into that previously mentioned mischievous though train I entertained. … I get a laugh out of these frustrated, desperate housewives proudly sporting Warren stickers on their bumpers these days. They too admire Warren’s guts, but it’s pure envy. Trapped in bad places, outspoken on community chat boards, Facebook and Twitter, maybe even during parent-teacher conferences, they are, once inside the threshold of home, reduced to voiceless servants dominated and demeaned by half-wit spouses. Behind closed doors, these women can only fanaticize about acquiring guts like Warren’s. Publicly, they deny their husbands’ support for Pretty Boy after he bludgeons Warren with his sarcastic “Professor” moniker, inciting that blue-collar throng to howl the Braves’ chant in the streets outside. Meanwhile, these subservient housewives wear their charming Prozak smiles to the mini-mart counter, take the roundabout route home to bawl their eyes out, and stand outside the polling place defiantly displaying large Warren signs high and proud. It’s all show, a very sad charade.

Enough! Gotta go. Lily and Chubby are waiting at the kennel gate, tails a waggin’.

Whew! What a whirlwind week. I feel like a dark funnel cloud has swept me away. Maybe I’d best just go limp and let it drop me where it pleases, totally at its mercy, hopefully depositing me in a freshly harrowed field. But first, as I brace for the landing from this dizzying spin, a few harmless observations from a meandering mind.

I was hoping to have something on the preliminary September bear harvest and queried the proper person but have heard not a word, about what I’ve grown to expect. That’s just the way it goes nowadays, ever since Gov. Mitt Romney made it impossible to get quick, candid answers from state employees, who by law cannot speak to the press without approval from an inside screening agency. Of course, part of me feels like that rule gives employees every opportunity to drag their feet and work at their own snail’s pace, but what to do? I’ll be curious to find out what, if any, impact the EEE scare had on the hunter participation. I myself knew a hunter who took a town robo-call warning about EEE and would not sit in his stand for fear of being bitten by an infected mosquito, not an unwise decision, I guess. Anyway, it’s no secret that the Bay State bear population continues to grow at a burgeoning rate, one that it’s clear cannot and never will be effectively managed under current hunting regulations that forbid hounds or bait or both while officials refuse to address other potential measures, such as opening the shotgun and primitive-firearm deer seasons to random bear kills when opportunity presents itself. I’m not saying I’m for bear hunting during deer season, only listing it as a potential solution from a limited pool of options. The choices are few if the state wants to rely on hunting as its bear-management tool. Bait and hounds are legal in surrounding states, where the annual bear harvests dwarf ours.

Something else worth mentioning is that the Western and Valley District fall trout-stocking have been out for a week, with, as always, some local waters on the list, including the upper and lower Deerfield River, Millers River, Ashfield Lake, Upper Highland Lake in Goshen, Lake Mattawa in Orange, Lake Wyola in Shutesbury, Laurel Lake in Erving, and Sheomet Pond in Warwick. Although I have not seen the Millers orDeerfield rivers this week, I do observe the Green River daily and it looks prime for angling, flowing at near perfect depth and current. No, the Green won’t receive a fall allotment. Still, there must be many plump spring holdovers that are by now fully acclimated to their new home. The same can be said for most river systems that were generously stocked in April and May.

Meanwhile, woodcock season opened Wednesday, and you should soon start noticing pheasant-stocking trucks on the highways and byways for that season, which opens on Oct. 13, along with the partridge and rabbit seasons. Squirrel season has been open for a couple of weeks. What about waterfowlers, you ask? Well, the Berkshire and Central Zones will open for ducks and geese on Wednesday and the Coastal Zone opens three days later, on Oct. 13. Two days later (Oct. 15) the archery deer season will commence, with the fall turkey (Oct. 29) and second segment of the bear season (Nov. 5-24) on the near horizon.

It’s difficult to assess our wild mast crops because I have not traveled widely but do hope to be out and about soon. Judging from what I have seen in my daily rambles and heard from reliable sources, wild apples can be hard to find. The apple tree in my yard produced not a one that I could find, and I mow. Plus, only one of three wild trees I pass on my daily walks with the dogs produced any fruit, and even that tree dropped less than 10, which my dogs had cleaned up before September. A quick look at that stately riverside tree on Wednesday produced no lonely apple sightings. Acorns and beechnuts are spotty but can be plentiful in some places. There are acorns on the ground where I walk daily, also hickory nuts, but I have not seen a butternut or beechnut on the ground where they were plentiful last year.

On a long, relaxing hike through the woods of South Amherst and northern Granby with a dignified lady last week — following a network of paths connected to the Matacomet/Monadnock Trail behind her home off the old Bay Path — we found many acorns and beechnuts in gorgeous hardwoods marked by distinctive outcroppings of ledge, remarkably similar to Whately/Conway woods I patrol and worship. Among our samples on the ground were what I believed to be white-oak acorns that looked like those oblong commercial green grapes you’d buy at Big Y. The ones that caught my attention were shiny and out of their caps, which for some reason were scarce on the ground next to the nuts. My friend speculated that a windstorm may have been responsible. Although I hadn’t packed my Sibley’s tree-identification guidebook, my thinking was that we were dealing with white-oak acorns that, unlike those from red oaks, germinate in the fall. Upon closer inspection of random oaks here and there for rest of our two-plus-hour hike, we found many white oaks, some of them chestnut oaks, identifiable by their leaves and deep-furrowed bark, similar from afar to black locust. My friend said she often bumps into hunters on her daily fall walks, and I can see why. The woods behind her home are an example of classic Pioneer Valley hardwood forest, the terrain open and manageable afoot, with many ravines and rocky knobs to use as observation decks.

That noontime walk inspired me to find a partner for a trip to a certain balanced rock I know sitting on a high, secludedWilliamsburgridge. A photographer has already approached me about accompanying me there and elsewhere in the same quadrangle. Great news! I want some photos of the large sacred stone that oozes Manitou, which wafts through the dense mountain-top laurel on the east rim. That journey is on my short list, a good excuse to assess the deer sign through familiar but long-neglected woods. First I must escape this disorienting manmade cyclone, definitely not the worst I’ve encountered; in fact, not even close.

I suppose that’s why I’m confident I’ll get through it. Who knows? I may even land in a better place.

Late start, full plate, probably way more than I can handle in one sitting. No problem. I’ll just save the leftovers and nuke ’em next week. Maybe I should start writing two columns a week.

Anyway, the signs of fall that started creeping onto the edges weeks ago are now everywhere. Soon the leaf-peepers will be clogging the highways and bringing fall revenue to our local economy. But similar to the Republicans in Tampa, the irate fella who phoned me noontime Sunday during a beautiful Labor Day Weekend back-lit at night by a seductive blue moon wanted to look back, not ahead. He was still steamed up by irritating summer signals lingering along the lower Deerfield River, where he, his wife and dog camped Thursday for an intended long weekend away from it all. At least, that’s what they hoped for; definitely not what they got.

It seems that the once-tranquil stretch of river between Bardwells Ferry and Stillwater ain’t what it used to be, a disheartening fact that many of us discovered long ago. I know the lower Deerfield well from years of hunting and fishing, and that picturesque gorge is stained throughout with my DNA dating back centuries, starting with the surname worn by the bridge and ferry. The last time I went there, many years ago, to a familiar spot saturated with pleasant fishing memories, I left prematurely and vowed in hot, spicy language never to return; way too much “activity” for me — as it turns out, the same type of annoying activity that necessitated the early exit by the man who called my home Sunday. The name on the caller ID was a blast from the distant past.

“I had to get out of there,” fumed the South Deerfield man and Whately native on the phone with hunter-orange anger. “Those people floating down the river are hard to take. I didn’t know who to call, then thought of you. After 3 o’clock Saturday afternoon, more than a hundred tubers came by riding anything that floats — inner tubes, cheap blow-up prizes from the fair, you name it. I even saw six or seven people having a gay ole time drinking, littering, throwing bottles into the river, off a blow-up queen mattress. No lie. I decided to pack up and leave before I punched someone and got myself into trouble. We were outnumbered. I just wanted to get my Lab out of there before he cut his foot. That riverbed is a freakin’ mess.”

Irritated, the man folded his tent, loaded it into his canoe and headed downstream for his car, which was parked in the riverside lot south and west of Stillwater Bridge. Before turning the final corner to where he could clearly see the entire Stillwater Bridge, he found a disturbing pile of trash that stoked his ire to a red-hot glow.

“There were inner tubes, deflated floating devices, bottles and cans and trash everywhere. It looked like an ugly, stinking dump. Take a ride down there if you don’t believe me and see it for yourself. I’m sure it’s still there. Who should I call to report it? It’s freakin’ disgusting.”

Our source spoke to many of the frolicking folks passing by in the water and described them as outsiders, “not from town,” many from the Springfield and Northampton area, others from Worcester and Rhode Island. The most common question he was asked was, “How far to Stillwater?” That’s where they said their buses were waiting. Apparently, the flotilla gang didn’t feel up to lugging their garbage up the bank to the buses, easier to leave it streamside for someone else to clean up. Pigs!

Honestly, I can’t imagine such unacceptable behavior by customers of trips supervised by our local whitewater companies, although the source — who I decided not to name — claims to often see the local companies’ vehicles parked at Stillwater. It seems more likely that the folks involved in the floating circus he encountered Friday and Saturday were holiday excursions organized far away. Still, the whitewater companies cannot claim zero culpability because there’s no denying they put our Deerfield River “on the map.”

The problem as I see it from this lofty perch along the trestle overlooking the Deerfield’s wild west bank is that the slobs who create the problems will be long gone by the time law-enforcement arrives determined to make a vindictive statement. The “violators” ultimately charged, convicted and made examples of will likely be victims of circumstance and undeserving of what they get. Local lollygaggers will probably be punished for the dirty deeds of outsiders.

“It’s out of control,” said my source. “I usually mind my own business but I want to report these people. Hopefully we can send them back where they came from.”

Good luck!

The days of the Deerfield River as a hidden local gem are long gone. I suppose some think that’s a good thing. Not me. I miss the “old” Deerfield River, especially the inaccessible secluded sections, places Trout Unlimited fought and failed to protect. As usual, money talked, entrepreneurs won and the ecosystem is paying the price.

One of those days, I guess.

Maybe it was the clear, cool air that greeted me at 6 a.m., perhaps the strong, black coffee, possibly even lingering effects from that red-hot, spicy marinara sauce I concocted in a flash Tuesday afternoon, then devoured in the evening over a thick bed of linguine. Whatever the impetus, it was powerful, strapping me into a single-seat gyroscope that got spinning out of control, like a top on polished linoleum. So captivating was it that I extended my daily morning walk, taking a refreshing diversion through the knee-deep Green River before returning to my truck and walking right past it to follow the hayfield cuff to a path descending into a second hidden riverside meadow. There a mowed meandering lane looped me to a large red river rock that I believe harbors Native spirits, happy ones I hope to someday meet.

Truth be told, I’m switching on the fly. I had a column all written before I sat down, but I’m all fired-up by the election chatter that’s abuzz with — go figure — idiotic right-wing lunacy. Anyway, that first column can wait; it’s about the joys of watching Chubby, my young Springer Spaniel, develop before my eyes with pheasant season looming. He’ll be fun. I can’t wait to bust him loose. But I put that story in the freezer, will thaw it out for another day. This time of year is always lean on local sports and, to be honest, I feel guilty when filling pages with wire news that readers have typically seen on TV the previous day. It’s a good excuse, I suppose, to ramble a bit, always dangerous with my wife on the Cape, me “batching” it, not sure what to do with my freedom. Yeah, right! A colleague I call “The Big Boiczek” got a kick out of that playful complaint, reacting like he does whenever I whine about being a victim of small-town gossip. He gets a kick out of that claim, too.

Enough of that, though; onto other stuff, beginning with a quick follow-up on last week’s story about a mother/daughter cougar sighting in East Charlemont, one I hesitated from the start to publish. Why? Because I always shy away from nighttime sightings, potentially risky and unreliable. But those sinister green eyes and that guttural sound from dark woods, eerie indeed, tickled my fancy and I guess more than anything else I am a storyteller, albeit one sporting a thin white scoundrel’s streak down my back. It was a great tale that had to be told. And in my own defense, I did, if you care to check, cast subtle doubt early, a disclaimer, so to speak. Good thing.

After that wild tale hit the street, a few concerned West County sources fired off emails warning me that I may have been snookered. “I wouldn’t say they made up the whole story,” wrote a critic familiar with the witnesses. “I believe they saw eyes, maybe raccoons, and their imaginations ran away to fantasy land.” The source, a gentleman who worked around Western cougars, called it unlikely that any cougar would permit a human to walk within “five or six feet” without fleeing. He also said cougars prey on live animals, not road-kill and garbage, thus wouldn’t be attracted to seafood like the pungent mussel shells the witness described on the ground near a torn plastic rubbish bag. I had honestly tossed that factor around in my head before going forward with the tale but decided to go with it, considering troublesome cougars I had recently read about in LA and Chicago. Maybe urban cats can be temporarily reduced to scavenging, I thought. Oh well. You win some, you lose some.

Whew! With that in the rearview, let’s tippie-toe into a couple of other subjects that had my wheels spinning to a shrill scream during that extended walk through the sunken riverside meadows. I’ll try to be brief, can’t resist, am “Akin” to chime in on a couple of controversies, one from my boyhood home, the other from the national campaign trail that’s heating up for the stretch run to November 6. I’ll start in South Deerfield and jump briefly to Rep. Todd Akin (R-Missouri), who’s taken Romney/Ryan to a forbidden place called the uterus. No, forget “Sowdeerfeel” for a moment. I’m going to stay with Akin and his flat-earth Republicans. The more these Christian-conservative whack jobs talk, the more I like it: indecent exposure for sure, opinions that ought to send any woman in her right mind straight to the polls to vote for any candidate followed by a capital D on the ballot. Oh my! Where do these Neanderthal creeps come from? Is there any way to herd them all onto an ark headed for Timbuktu? Now they’re giving the uterus a brain and conscience to guard against rape pregnancy. Lord have mercy. These folks spew hate and fear of big government in one frothing breath, then ask the very same demon to define “legitimate” rapes and stand sentry to enforce the Christian way in bedrooms. What’s most frightening is that 40-something percent of the voting public will actually vote for these cavemen. Actually, the Cro-Magnons knew better. When they ambushed a female and took her like a buck intercepts a doe, they did so to propagate, not violate. We’ve come a long way since then, with the evolution of courting, engagement, marriage and nuclear families, but there’s little an unprotected, ovulating female can do to prevent rape fertilization, regardless of male intent or day-after prayers. It just don’t work that way.

Before I split, back to my old hometown, where it’s getting pretty wild concerning what appears to be the inevitable hiring of a native-son police chief town officials seem determined to install before thoroughly vetting baggage from Erving, where the man was chief of police for several years. Rumors are swirling, people are buzzing in the coffee shops and taverns, and now a supposed “group” of concerned citizens has appeared at the 11th hour to write an accusatory letter to the town fathers, The Recorder and The Daily Hampshire Gazette in an effort to stall, if not derail, the imminent hiring. Stay tuned. From what I’m hearing, this one is far from over. Problem is that people in Erving and elsewhere are hesitant to talk due to fear of reprisal. Count me among them. I don’t need the hassle. All I can say from my lofty perch in a tall white oak along Sugarloaf’s spine is: Where there’s smoke there’s fire. I see the smoke rising from a place I know well, have taken a deep whiff and it smells fishy — definitely not stinky roadside mussel shells, either.

Enough! I’m outta here. I can clearly read the signs tacked to trees. They say “No Trespassing!”