It’s that cabin-fever time of year when, with little to write about, I’m usually searching for something, anything to fill this space. Such a predicament I found myself mired in this week while preoccupied with other pressing, non-work-related issues. Then, out of the blue, like a gift from the heavens, an envelope appeared in my mailbox from longtime friend and colleague Chip Ainsworth, who’s wintering in Florida and bailed me out with a “New Yorker” article he thought I’d enjoy. He was right. Not only did I enjoy it, it brought me back some 35 years to the Leeds Reservoir. There, from the road high above, we kept seeing a large fish nestled up against the edge of a massive flat stone in shallow water along the shore, then finally figured out what it was.

But first the article, titled “The Patch” and written by John McPhee of “The Headmaster” fame. The narrative is about chain pickerel and how his pursuit of them with rod and reel related to the recent passing of his 89-year-old dad, himself a longtime fisherman who taught the author to fish. The piece describes pickerel, their habits and sporting value, and it hit home for me on many levels. Even got me reminiscing about my youthful land-surveying days with Stevie Stange, an old friend from South Deerfield who, at the time, was the party chief of our two-man crew during the summer of 1974. A large parcel of Middlefield property was changing hands that summer, and we were surveying it. As I recall, the property, mostly woodland, exceeded 500 acres, had been in the same family for two centuries and had not been surveyed since George Washington’s days, always a fun project.

To be honest, I never knew the quaint Hampshire County town of Middlefield existed until arriving there to start our little project. We began by finding the corners and establishing the property lines, then went around with a 16-foot rod and a level to pinpoint the details for the mapmaker, a job that kept us busy until the leaves fell. Middlefield had a classic rural center of town straight out of the early 19th century, or maybe one of those little towns in Wyoming’s Red Desert, population 12 or something ridiculous. Downtown consisted of one large, two-piece, two-story building with a porch in front. The place served as a country store, restaurant, Post Office, tavern, liquor store and gas station all in one, a great place to strike up conversation, prit’near any time of day or night.

We’d depart for the job each morning at 7 from my grandfather’s South Deerfield home, where Stange was renting an upstairs apartment. From there, we’d snake our way through Whately, Haydenville, Leeds and Westhampton, have breakfast at a Huntington greasy-spoon and arrive at the Middlefield work site about 9. Each day we’d pass the Leeds Reservoir twice, often stopping on the ride home at a little side-of-the-road pullover overlooking the water to search for fish or fowl or whatever happened to be there. With the water at is lowest midsummer level, we kept noticing that aforementioned large fish snuggled up to the major flat stone and wondered what it was and if we could catch it. If it was a trout, it was a beauty, all of two feet long.

Well, our curiosity finally got the better of us and, one evening, we decided to give it a whirl, see exactly what it was, fishing rod in the cargo space of Stange’s Toyota Landcruiser, dubbed the “Toyotski.” We didn’t have any bait but did have a tackle boxful of lures, mostly for warm-water fish like bass or Northern pike. We figured we’d give it a shot with a floating, broken-back Rapala, maybe four inches long. Even if it was a trout, at that size it would likely hit a Rapala. The trick was to get the lure within striking range on the first cast from a challenging distance above, no easy feat for a rookie.

I don’t remember who actually made the cast, but it was a good one, touching down less than two feet in front of the fish with a loud, showy splash. We let it sit there for a minute or less to settle things down a bit before giving it a twitch with the rod tip, then another. The fish didn’t budge, just laid there as motionless as the stone next to it. Then, on the third little twitch, the fish wheeled 90 degrees in a flash and — whammo! — struck like lightning, furious energy, getting a toothy mouthful of piercing treble hooks before taking off, Mitchell 300 drag whistling a shrill mountain tune. We ran down the elevated bank to the reservoir’s edge and played the fish to shore. Then one of us (again, I can’t recall which) ran back up the hill to the “Yotski” for needle-nosed pliers needed to remove the hooks. With the hooks removed, we released the fish back into the water. It was a pickerel, a beauty, two feet or more in length, razor-sharp, pointy teeth, nothing to handle with bare hands.

The released fish was sluggish at first but soon swam right back to its stone-side feeding lair and remained there for many days thereafter. Like McPhee said in his story, pickerel will stay in the same spot for days, weeks, years, unless removed. Well, I can attest to that because of that Leeds Reservoir pickerel that captured our fancy that summer. I witnessed it with my own two eyes, occasionally impaired. Those were the good old days.

One down, one to go: That’s how Buckland’s Roger Ward sees it.

First, the done deal. Anyone who’s scanned through the 2010 MassWildlife Abstracts may have noticed the $13 youth sporting license that’s available for the first time this year. If so and you wondered where it came from, thank Ward, known to his friends as “Heze,” pronounced Hezzie, short for Hezekiah, an obsolete Biblical name common throughout New England during its first 300 years. “To tell you the truth, my mother wanted to name me Hezekiah but my father wouldn’t hear of it,” said Ward, son and grandson of Hezekiahs. “For some reason, my father didn’t like the name.”

Apparently Ward’s playground pals didn’t give a hoot what his birth certificate read, because as soon as they learned his father’s name, it became his nickname, one that he’s grown fond of. So, over the years, he’s become Heze, a West County political gadfly of sorts.

But let us not digress. Back to the youth sporting license. Working on behalf of the Conway Sportsmen’s Club, Ward was the wind behind the new license’s sails. It saves youth sportsmen ages 15 to 17 a sawbuck. In the past, there was no youth sporting license, necessitating the purchase of separate hunting ($11.50) and fishing ($11.50) licenses, a $23 tab. Now that’s history thanks to Ward’s persistence and, of course, a year and a half of bureaucratic wrangling. In the books, it’s a feather in Ward’s Conway Sportsmen’s Club’s hat.

“Fewer and fewer kids hunt nowadays and we figured a cheap license might encourage them,” explained Ward. “We didn’t want cost to be an obstacle.” So now, thanks the Heze, these inexpensive licenses have become a painless annual Christmas present for parents to consider.

With the license issue behind him, Heze’s all stirred up about another initiative, one that may even convince the longtime, true-blue Democrat to vote for the other party in the next gubernatorial election. He’s upset that Gov. Patrick has laid down strict spending ceilings for state agencies, including the Division of Fisheries and Wildlife. The budget cap will, according to Ward, leave the division with a $17 million surplus this year. He thinks the surplus should be spent, not squirreled away, and supports his argument by pointing out that the DFW has never once run a deficit budget. Nonetheless, the agency has its hands tied from above and is unable to spend money raised exclusively for fish and wildlife expenses.

“It’s akin to someone bringing home $250 a week and the government telling them they can only spend $200 of it,” Ward explained. “It’s wrong because there’s not a penny of taxpayer money in there. It’s all dedicated funds generated from hunting and fishing licenses and fees, permits and stamps.”

The worst fear is that the $17 million surplus could be secretly funneled elsewhere, excluding the Bay State from annual federal funding provided to states that restrict such revenue only to fish and wildlife projects. If the governor decides to dip into the kitty and use even a small portion of the surplus for roads or schools or bridges, then the federal assistance is gone. End of story. Ward believes the dedicated funds should be spent where they’re meant to be spent and fears monkey business down the road in a state where funds are tight and a MassWildlife hiring freeze has been in effect for more than a year. He thinks the freeze should be lifted, the money collected from licenses and fees spent on fish and wildlife projects.

“I talked to a Patrick aide who danced around the issue and wouldn’t commit to anything,” said Ward. “If they won’t cooperate and the Republican candidate promises to leave those dedicated funds alone and spend the surplus on (DFW), I’ll support him.”

That’s coming  from a man who never thinks like a Republican, rarely votes the ticket and is entertaining serious thoughts about starting a petition drive to protect the “sacred” dedicated funds.

Remember, the money in question, when used for habitat improvement, land acquisition, or MassWildlife salaries, contributes to the enjoyment of many outdoor enthusiasts who do not hunt or fish and never will, anti-hunters among them. Included would be bird watchers, photographers, hikers, boaters and many other recreational users of our woods, waters and overgrown farms.

As usual, Ole Heze’s fighting a good fight, one for you and me, fueled by a strong dose of Yankee ethic with a shot of stubborn hill-town determination.

The brittle leaves underfoot were dry and noisy, the day unseasonably warm for early November, approaching 70. The noontime sky was clear, blue and infinite, not a trace of a cloud anywhere, the southern sun big and bright, the air tomb still.

We were walking an abandoned road, me and a man who shares my love of local history, old roads and stone-clad cellar holes marking the sites of long-ago abandoned hilltown dwellings. I had for some time meant to return to this road and these woods containing the historic farmstead of Conway’s first settler, Cyrus Rice. It was as good a day as any, with optimal visibility through bare-boned fall hardwoods; revealing, dusty beams of light filtering through to illuminate patches of the forest floor. We were there as the result of a mid-morning whim and my impulsive phone call had us traipsing through what was once a sparse group of expansive 18th- and early 19th-century farms, now dense forest along the western lip overlooking Deerfield’s Mill River section.

We had met at the Route 116 convenience store, where he left his car before I drove my 4-wheel Tacoma pickup to our destination, there driving a few hundred yards up a snowmobile trail to a location within sight of charred remains from a mid-20th century hunting camp. From there, we walked and talked and studied the lay of the land, stopping here and there to probe beneath the leaves on the forest floor with my walking stick, assessing acorns and other hard mast (hickory nuts everywhere); along the way passing a bittersweet canopy tangled through small trees, a massive wild grapevine wider at its base than my right thigh, and even a twin white birch more than a foot and a half wide along the ridge’s highest spine; your typical, knobby, southern New England upland forest. Beautiful indeed.

At the peak of the first hill we hiked, the old road traveled a short distance downhill and split. We took the right fork down a level, where the road looped us through wide-open forest to a spot where a tidy stonewall abruptly ended, behind it a line of large maples blazed with circular red blotches head-high, behind them a foot-wide spring brook running clean and free through a shallow hollow and toward the Mill River. We stopped and talked and probed and laughed as we discussed our next move, how far we intended to continue our little discovery mission, trying to connect opposite ends of the road. But we were in no great hurry, just enjoying the gorgeous day, the sun, the woods and conversation through breathless dry air.

I mentioned that I thought I knew the small brook as one I used to cross years ago hunting on a friend’s land, perhaps a half-mile below. Down there, I remembered the stream as wider, trickling through a steep, foreboding gorge-like ravine just above its confluence with the Mill River. As we discussed that and the straight, sturdy stonewall, the blazed trees and whatever else came to mind, we heard leaves rustling in the distance. Something was moving toward us from the other side of the stonewall. At first, I assumed it was a squirrel but told my friend it could easily be something we weren’t expecting, even a bear, because there are many bears in those woods, and they would definitely be around with a bountiful nut crop to forage. Then he saw something moving and said it looked like a dog, “right there,” pointing, “Do you see it?”

I didn’t but was expecting a coyote. When the animal cleared the trees screening me and came out into the open, I could see clearly what we were dealing with: a whitetail, spikehorn buck, spikes eight or 10 inches long, probably weighing between 90 and 110 pounds. We continued talking and it kept on its merry way, right at us, walking to within 25 yards before noticing us, freezing, staring for a second or two and taking two or three bounds to the peak of a little knob maybe 50 yards away. It stood there, broadside, to again examine its unexpected guests before vanishing over the top.

How do you explain such a thing? Deer hunters wash their clothes and bodies in special scentless soaps, apply scent masks or cover scents to their clothing, and discipline themselves to remain quiet and motionless for hours on stand. And here we were, midday, bright woods, making absolutely no effort to conceal our presence or be quiet, and the young buck walks right up to us as though deaf. You’ll never convince me that deer was deaf. No way. We just happened to be in the right place at the right time, what it’s all about for such sightings, gun or no gun.

Of course, my pal had another take as we walked back to the truck discussing it. He agreed it was an incredible moment, but asked if I was certain it wasn’t an escaped mule. Uh-uh. A mule it was not. Definitely a spikie.

I guess it’s days like this that bring me to the woods. You never know what you’re going to run into. Perhaps something you’ve never before seen, maybe something you’ve seen many times but never get tired of. This week’s spikehorn was more the former than latter, but still unusual, unexpected, interesting and, on another level, frustrating.

Frustrating? Yes, because I must admit that since the sighting I have more than once during idle moments thought: “Why doesn’t this happen when I’m deer hunting?”

Just because.