It’s pushing toward dusk on a pleasant summer evening and I’m returning from my nightly trip to the top of the hill where I run my dogs. I round the corner and approach the scalped, lime-green hayfield where the bales had been removed earlier in the day. There it stood — a solitary, erect, tawny deer, side profile, head turned and staring me square in the eyes from some 70 yards away. Cruising slowly, I let up on the gas pedal a bit to get a better look and can clearly decipher the three-inch velvet nubs sprouting inside his vertical ears, full alert. Sure enough, a buck soon to be grazing under The Full Buck Moon.

Also called the Full Thunder or Full Hay Moon, the full moon of July is more commonly known as the Buck Moon because bucks’ new antlers typically push through their foreheads coated of velvety fur this month. The antlers will be fully grown by September, when the bucks will rub saplings and larger immature trees in the forest to scrape off the velvet to a rock-hard sheen.

This particular animal, wearing it’s reddish summer coat, didn’t look particularly large, although it’s difficult to tell when it’s standing alone in a scalped hayfield bordering an infant silage cornfield that provide nothing to compare it to visually. But it’ll be interesting to follow the development of this animal, which will be seen again, and again, and again on my twice-daily trips.

I believe I’ve now seen this animal thrice; once crossing the road in front of me at midmorning, again standing behind a thin sumac stand in an open field, again at midmorning, then last week. What drew my attention to him the first time and twice since was the fact that he’s always been alone, not in a small herd as does most often appear. I’ll clearly see him again, probably alone, now that his antlers will allow me to differentiate between him and the does I more often encounter.

He may turn out to be a spikehorn, maybe even a 6- or 8-pointer by the time he becomes fair game. Perhaps he’s the pronghorn I missed with a slug in the blackening woods last December. Who knows? But this much we know for a fact: the animal’s made it through at least one hunting season so far, and the longer he survives, the tougher he’ll be to hunt without the aid of the Rutting Moon, which whittles away at a buck’s innate cautious skills.

An orange dawn crept in over the faraway Belchertown hills, first a faint hue then a bright sliver that, within a half-hour of peeking over the horizon, burst into a blinding orange sphere. Quarter past 7 on a Whately hardwood ridge.

An old idyllic haunt of mine reaching back to my untethered teens, a friend and I had made an exciting discovery there the previous day. Unlike other oak stands we had visited, where only empty caps and wormy, rotten nuts remained, there were meaty acorns everywhere, many more than the resident creatures could ever eat by springtime. And, as the saying goes: Find the feed and you’ll find the deer.

Find the feed we had.

So there we sat on opposite ends of the mature oak grove, maybe 150 yards apart, muzzleloaders primed; he posting a run through the knobby bowls of a five-acre plateau, I watching another trail leading from the fields below to a dense mountain-laurel bedding area canopied by large ridge-top oaks. Between the feed and the deer sign we had discovered, our confidence was as high as it had been since gun season opened.

An avid wingshooter like me always enters deer season handicapped, starting blindly instead of scouting vigorously before the season to increase the probability of early success. It’s a fact of life that won’t change anytime soon. My way: Start focusing on deer during shotgun season and hope you “get into ’em” before muzzleloader ends. Seldom easy, we usually end up with at least a little venison in the freezer; that and many nirvanic trips through the woods, big and small, reading sign and using identifiable landmarks and landscapes to show the way.

Forever a spiritual bonus in the Whately woods for me is my understanding that the stone walls and cart roads were built, the decaying orchards planted by ancestors, which is as close to religion as I dare venture. But indeed I do feel a rooted spiritual attachment to those woods and walls of the hardy Protestant yeomen pulsing through my arteries.

Our plan was to get into our stands early, before first light, and wait for the deer to approach their beds. The previous year, with fresh snow on the ground and no acorns, we had found more than 20 beds on this southern exposure, one more reason for optimism. Isn’t it logical to conclude that if deer bed there when the feed is elsewhere, they’ll surely curl up when surrounded by nourishing, meaty acorns? We thought so. That’s why we were there.

Being more familiar with these woods than my friend, I pointed him toward my closest stand before daylight as we parted ways 50 or 60 yards up an old skidder road. The road would loop me behind him, between two shallow ridges and close to the corner of a stonewall I was aiming for. The run I wanted to post angles up a steep sidehill, past the stonewall corner and follows the wall pointing north to the laurels. I have seen many deer use it over the years; some bucks, many does, dawn and dusk.

Soon after we split, walking softly through damp hardwood leaves, mostly oak, and sparse infant laurel, the tranquility was broken when a turkey burst loudly from his hardwood roost above me. Then four more explosive departures in the quiet gray morning light. Flushed from predawn perches in still air, Turkeys create a startling ruckus, so I knew my buddy had heard and probably seen them fly overhead. I stopped to let the woods relax, listening for heavy movement, then proceeded toward my stonewall, wanting to arrive quickly and quietly as possible before kicking out a spot and blending into the terrain. If nothing came through by 9 or 10, we’d be out of there. But we both liked our chances, always a plus in this game.

As I sat motionless against a massive hemlock rooted along the wall some 20 feet east of the corner, I fine-tuned my senses, looking and especially listening for movement. The key is to see them before they see you. Good ears help.

The first interesting sound that caught my attention was an early-morning squirrel rustling the leaves below, then another fattened gray made a commotion downhill and to my right. At about 8, I was surprised to hear turkey talk behind me, from the general vicinity I had flushed the five big birds, presumably toms, an hour-and-a-half earlier. Had they been hens, I thought after the five tree-top flushes, there would have been many more in their segregated winter flock. It made sense I was listening to those same birds feeding through the oaks from which I had flushed them, but what I heard sounded more like hens and poults, with soft yelps — shuck-suck, shuck-shuck-shuck  — sharp clucks and soothing purrs.

Was it possible I was listening to gobblers? If so, I was hearing my first gobbler yelps, of which I had only heard, never witnessed. My question was soon answered when one of the birds interrupted the soft flock talk with a guttural gobble. Must have heard something it didn’t like.

Within a half-hour or so, five longbeards were no more than 20 yards behind me, feeding on acorns — walking, scratching, chatting, full-alert, beards dragging as they dropped their heads to dig and feed. Turkeys swallow acorns whole, and it has been said you can hear their gizzards grinding them if you’re close enough. I was close, heard nothing.

Theirs was an interesting routine. One would walk as the others stood motionless, eight eyes scanning the landscape for danger. Then another would walk backed up by six eyes, two more in front, heads motionless, alert. They continued to look out for each other as they fed. Never once did all five drop their guards in unison to feed. When a loud crashing noise emanating from the small settlement a half-mile below startled them, one stretched its neck forward and scolded whoever was responsible with a throaty gobble, quite a sight to see.

The big redheads stayed with me at least a half-hour, several times venturing to within spitting distance on the opposite side of the thigh-high wall, before disappearing down the hill to my left. Once they were out of sight and earshot, I rose from my cushy hot seat, clipped the sling back onto my gun and moved several blow-downs in front of my stand for future concealment, maybe even during spring turkey season. Then I strapped my belt and hot seat to my waist underneath my coat, buckled my fanny pack around the outside, slung my rifle over my left shoulder and walked toward my friend’s stand, examining deer sign along the way. Bits and pieces of crunched acorns were scattered everywhere on the forest floor, left behind by foraging deer.

I ascended a small, hardscrabble knob and broke through a cluster of infant hemlocks into the open hardwoods directly across a shallow hollow from my friend. He spotted me, stood and gathered his gear as I approached. When I reached him we walked out together assessing deer sign under a brilliant morning sun. We were surrounded by it. To be sure, deer were not far away. And although we had seen not so much as the flick of a flag, we were both content.

The longbeard flock had made our day and taught us something. The lesson was to hang in there after inadvertently flushing a gobbler from its gray spring roost. In the past when that’s occurred, I’ve always vacated the area to work another bird. In the future I just may sit quietly for an hour or so to settle the bird down, then try to call him. He may come.

Had we not traveled to those Whately woods on that brisk, still December morning, we would not have whittled away this membrane of turkey-hunting wisdom. So, it had been a good day.

Fruitless, yet fulfilling.

There’s nothing like wood heat for my taste. But if the wood isn’t right, well, it’s another story altogether. Then there’s real potential for problems, which is my current predicament, quite annoying.

I’ve just brushed off from a trip to the woodshed, a place where I’ve spent far too much time lately, trying to make the best of a bad situation. I received two loads of bad oak, red and white, knobby, large and wet, too large and too wet to burn, too knotty to split, nightmarish. And even when you get it burning, if you choose to call the dull, glowing smolder a burn, the heat value is poor at best, even with the damper open wide.

From what I gather, this problem is not unique to me. It appears there was a shortage of good cordwood this winter, given the increased demand stimulated by a rush of wood-stove purchases over the summer. When speculators predicted heating oil would climb to more than five bucks a gallon, concerned folks took measures to find money-saving solutions. Thus the run on wood stoves. The problem was that this was the wrong year for that. Last winter’s deep snows kept cordwood suppliers out of the woods between mid-December and mid-February, when trees are traditionally felled, cut and split for the fall market. The inaccessibility factor resulted in a shortage of seasoned hardwood that couldn’t meet the demand, thus a creosote debacle for area chimneys.

Much of the wood sold this fall was either green, wet or both, a problem for anyone trying to heat with it. So all the neophytes heating with their first wood stoves had to be wondering why people so love wood heat, nothing short of a chilly hassle when burning the stuff delivered to me in November from the West Whately woods. What they probably don’t realize is that this same useless wood would have been excellent next winter, whatever good that does at the present time, steam blowing from our ears.

”You say you bought that from a friend?” chortled Blue Sky, owner of Colrain Tree Service, upon delivering a load of black locust and assessing the quality of a large, wet oak mound in my woodshed. ”What kind of friends you got, anyway?”

All I can say is thank the heavens for Blue Sky, my neighbor and friend from the wilds of East Colrain. He’s alternative indeed, just how I like them, and ethical to his country core. Yeah, it’s true he was the beneficiary of my first-ever $200-plus purchase of cord wood. It happened this year. But all I can say in his defense is that at least his wood burns hot and effortlessly. Just toss a chunk atop a bed of hot embers and — bingo! — savor the toasty delight. Not so with the other stuff, about which I had immediate suspicions, as soon as I learned the guy selling it intended to split tops that had been down for two years and deliver it the same day. Never good news.

I told him to drop off a load and I’d see how it burned before I accepted more; said I’d had problems with oak before, that it’s great when seasoned properly, useless when wet. I didn’t want to get stuck with more than one load that wouldn’t burn. But that’s exactly what I got, three cords of unburnable oak, wood that has made a bad winter worse. The minute I handled it, tidying-up the pile he left in my backyard, I knew it wasn’t right, wet and weighty. He told me it would be OK if I left it out in the air for a while. I was skeptical, well aware that cordwood doesn’t season after October, especially oak. Well, my instinct was right, and I regret to admit there were no miracles at 817 Colrain Road.

I could have gotten by with five cords of Blue Sky’s good stuff and one load of the bad. But it was that second bad load that killed me, the one I didn’t want, the one I didn’t even know had been delivered until returning home from bird hunting and being asked by my wife where the wood in the backyard came from. I’ve been battling it ever since, trying to mix it in with the first two loads of Blue Sky’s seasoned stuff, and the wonderful two loads of black locust he later dumped to top the bad with good. Hail, hail Blue Sky, a businessman with a conscience, heart of gold. The man understands wood and wood heat. The stuff he delivers is split to specified length, not too large, burns hot, produces no creosote. And take it to the bank: He dumps an honest load, no fuzzy math from East Colrain.

A rule of thumb with oak cordwood is that it takes two years to season. You can get away with a year split and seasoned if it isn’t green when split, but you’re still better off, even with such a load, to give it two years. Oak is grainy and absorbent, soaking up water like a sponge, even down and in the round. For this reason, it needs time to dry after it’s split, much more time than rock maple, black or yellow birch, beech, cherry and hickory, our most common native firewoods, all of which season sufficiently in a year or less. If you’re lucky enough to find apple or walnut or elm, they’re all good but difficult to find for heating. White ash and black locust are also good, and convenient in a pinch because they burn green and season quickly. Drop any of the aforementioned woods except oak during the dead of winter, before the sugar bush flows, while trees’ water still resides in the base, and it’s perfect for fall if split. Not so with oak, which must be split, left out in the air, both ends open, covered on top, if you plan on producing acceptable BTUs.

I discovered the wonders of locust this year, at Blue Sky’s suggestion. Even he’ll admit it’s not as good as hickory, yet not far behind; and who wants to harvest hickory, anyway, our aristocratic indigenous nut tree? Not so with locust, considered non-native invasive, worthy of thinning, ideal for cordwood, desirable for fence posts because it doesn’t rot. It burns hot green, hotter still when split and seasoned for six months, or harvested standing dead. It throws intense heat, and is equally good for the fireplace. Although I’m not certain about the non-native designation, locust is indeed invasive, and landowners like to get rid of it, favoring the more traditional New England hardwoods to populate their wood lots.

I thought the two cords of locust I bought just before Christmas would get me through my wet-oak issues. I was wrong. Even with additional work, it’s going down to the wire. I tried to get through it at first by filling the bottom half of my stove-side cradle with the wet stuff, hoping the hot locust heat would drive the moisture out and improve the combustibility. It helped slightly but took too long, and now I’m almost out of locust with a mound of damp, smelly oak staring me in the face, annoying me daily. So I’ve taken to splitting the oak small daily, so that it will dry faster stove-side. But that requires work, not to mention a sufficient supply of seasoned wood that’ll burn hot enough to dry the small oak wedges quickly.

Luckily, while searching for the best oak chunks to split this week, I walked to the back of my dense wood pile and, to my euphoria, discovered a honey hole of seasoned stuff that had been buried. I threw much of it out to the front of the pile and will try to stretch it and the locust as far as I can while continuing to split oak a little each day, anger emanating from each thud on my ancient hemlock chopping block. Hopefully, this system will carry me to lilac season without purchasing more dry stuff. We’ll see. It’ll be close.

In the meantime, you’ll find me splitting, piling, sweating, brushing debris from my shirt, and cussing a blue streak under my breath daily. I guess what bothers me most is that my problems came to me directly from Whately, the place where my Sanderson roots lie deep.

All for a buck.

Sold, American!

Taken for a ride.

A pale, yellow, crescent moon cast a wry, toothless grin from the clear, southern, predawn sky, remindful that it wasn’t going to be easy. The message was unnecessary. For me, it seldom is. But there was reason to be optimistic on this, the first Friday of muzzleloader deer season.

A discovery made late the previous afternoon while attempting to push deer past my hunting buddy had brought newfound hope to what had been a difficult season — warm, snowless and tick-infested. With the fruitless walk through an oak grove, then a dense pine bedding area complete and my buddy’s orange in sight from a well-used run across a shallow ravine, I had spotted a bare spot of disturbed earth that wasn’t there the last time I performed the same maneuver; a buck scrape, fresh.

I stopped to investigate, pointed downward and spoke out to my friend, seated some 40 yards away. “There’s a fresh scrape right here,” I said, the first I had found since shotgun season opened.

He signaled with his hand for me to join him and I did just that, meeting at the base of a massive twin red pine I had used dozens of times for cover while posting the intersection of three busy runs. My buddy stood, slipped on his backpack, slung his muzzleloader over his shoulder and started walking.

“Follow me,” he said. “There’s another big scrape I don’t believe was here the last time I came through.”

We walked back toward my truck, eyes focused on the forest floor in search of a pawed patch of earth, and I spotted one, not 30 yards behind the stand.

“Here it is, right here,” I pointed, as he came my way and took a look.

“Nope, that’s not the one,” he said. “There’s a bigger one not far from here.”

He was right. Not 15 yards away, centered on a small, circular carpet of light brown leaves shed by a beech sapling, laid a dominant buck scrape, the kind deer hunters die for. Above it hung a gummy hemlock limb, behind it a four-inch, tine-scarred black birch. Classic.

Following hard overnight rain, it was difficult to assess just how fresh the scrape was but it had definitely been made that week, perhaps only a day ago. There was a good chance the scrape was active, meaning the buck that made it would be back to check it twice daily searching for receptive does. After three days, he’d come no more.

Had I not decided to leave my fanny pack in the truck to lighten the load for my short push, I would have freshened-up the buck’s calling card with the “Tink’s 69 Doe-in-Rut Buck Lure” I always carry. But I could perform that duty the next morning, when it wasn’t going to be difficult to spring out of bed. Fresh optimism is a wonderful feeling during deer season.

With the foreboding moon at my back, I drove up the steep hill in the morning, parked and exited my truck, dropped the tailgate and packed up for the slow twilight march to my stand. The circular beech-leaf mat and scrape were easy to pick up in the gray morning light, and the buck had not returned. I quickly doused the area with Tink’s, saturating the scrape and spraying the hemlock branch and black-birch trunk liberally to create a big stink before taking my stand.

On the way to my stand, 35 yards away, I hung a couple of Tink’s Scent Bombs seven feet high in small hemlocks. When I arrived at my familiar twin red pine, I hung out two more scent bombs for cover scent and kicked out a stand 90 degrees to the right of where I typically sit against the trunk so that I could clearly see the dominant, freshened-up scrape. The wind was perfect, blowing west-northwest, diagonally from me to the scrape. I couldn’t have ordered it up any better. Now all I had to do was sit patiently still and wait to detect movement. I knew my ears would be useless, given the blustery wind and damp forest floor.

Around 8 I caught movement from the opposite direction I was anticipating. Sure enough, a deer, walking quickly, wind at its back; then another, and another, following single file. As they passed through the pines, maybe 75 yards out and angling away, they appeared and faded from view several times, but once I thought I saw one of them hop up on the back of another and my adrenaline raced. Although I had not yet gotten a clear look at any of the three animals and had seen no antlers, I thought the big boy was there and would reverse direction as soon as he got to the downwind side of my Tink’s stink bomb.

Much to my delight, that’s exactly how it played out, as the three deer passed out of my view heading east and soon reappeared heading back toward where they came from. On two occasions I again saw one try to mount another, but when they came into clear view I was certain none of them wore prominent antlers. Hmmmm? Maybe another 4-pointer like the one we took the previous week, or perhaps a spikehorn, but clearly no discernable antlers from my vantage point.

The three deer passed me again, heading west, then angled south onto a run where I have seen many deer pass in 10 years, mostly does. Still searching for horns, rifle shouldered, the three of them came to within 40 yards and were bald. Two passed and disappeared into the slash and the third never showed itself after disappearing behind small hemlocks. Frozen, rifle still mounted, I held out hope that I was dealing with a spikie concealing its antlers behind its ears, and waited fruitlessly for it to reappear. Finally, getting stiff and uncomfortable, I slowly dropped my rifle across my elevated knees and waited. An hour later, still no movement. The third deer had vanished. Must have slipped by screened from my view, I thought. So I slowly spun my head 45 degrees to the right, staring straight at the scrape. Time to focus on what brought me there.

By then it was clear to me that what I had witnessed was the thin-faced doe and her twin fawns I had observed several times near three apple trees in a field above my house. One of the fawns, a button buck, was for the first time “feeling its oats” and playfully mounting either its mother, sister or both on their way to a bedding area below me. When they cut the trail I had taken to my stand, they smelled where I had rubbed up against the low browse, banged a U-ie and bedded on the knoll above me. The nature’s classroom alone was worth the trip, having never before witnessed a buck of any age mount a doe.

I refocused on the buck scrape below and at about 10:15 a.m. I laid my rifle across my lap, dropped my arms to my side and elevated my butt to shift from a resting point that had grown uncomfortable. As I settled into my new position I moved my head and a piercing “whew!” broke the still morning air. I slid my eyeballs uphill, toward the small hemlocks where that third deer had vanished, and scanned the landscape. I could decipher nothing before the startling sound again broke the silence.

“Whew!”

Then I saw her, the thin-faced doe, facing me, ears and body erect, nearly invisible against the brown forest floor and gray-brown undergrowth. She was looking me square in the face hidden behind my Realtree mask. She took two bounds away from me, toward where her fawns had bedded maybe 90 minutes earlier, then stopped, faced me again and blew one more time before disappearing into the woods.

I had once again learned how difficult it is to beat deer in their environment – even when the wind is right and they have no clue you’re there.

It’s a lesson that’ll be repeated many times in a deer hunter’s lifetime.

Too many.

When I think of squaretails, native squaretails, our royal native trout, I always think back to the monster, circa 1970, being lugged up the hill home on a stringer by a boy of 8 or 10, tail dragging on the pavement, hot summer eve, accompanied by his older brother. It was caught in a local unnamed hilltown impoundment by a lad with the surname Dickinson, which does nothing to give away his town, given that Dickinsons are stitched deep into cultural quilt of virtually every Pioneer Valley hamlet. Yeah, a lot like horse manure, those Dickinsons are everywhere here in the valley and its bucolic hills, alive and dead, as were the native squaretails at one time, even my own, which is sadly no longer the case.

But let’s not digress. The reason I bring up the subject of brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis) is that a lunker, one nurtured at Bitzer Hatchery in Montague, was caught Saturday at Ashfield Lake, a stone’s throw from the hollow where fourth great-granduncle Asa Sanderson built his tannery during the first decade of the 19^th century, an enterprise swept from the face of the earth, toward Conway, by a December 1878 freshet. Back in the 19^th century, that pond surely held a native 10-pounder or two similar to the hatchery-grown version taken on a Thomas buoyant spoon Saturday by a man whose positive identity is difficult to come by. Rumor has it that the new state-record holder’s name is Peter Herron of Easthampton, but don’t hold me to it.

“I haven’t been able to confirm the name,” said longtime Ashfield Rod & Gun Club officer Russell Williams. “I was told Peter Herron, with two r’s. That’s all I can tell you. Maybe Dave Warren will have his name. He weighed and measured it at Dave’s Pioneer Sporting Center (in Northampton).”

The Pioneer proprietor had nothing to add.

“Sorry, can’t help you,” he said. “The guy’s a customer of mine, does a lot of archery, but his name escapes me, and he took the paperwork with him. He’s responsible for sending it to MassWildlife.”

Can’t let an minor detail like that get in the way of fresh, breaking news, so we’ll go with the rumor and wait for confirmation down the road. If the man lived in our readership, then I’d chase it with a little more determination. I’ll get it. Stay tuned.

The facts we know are that the fish was 26 inches long and weighed 10 pounds even, bettering the previous state-record brookie by 3 pounds, 7 ounces, a good squaretail in its own right.

The fish had been stocked a day earlier by a MassWildlife crew that had picked up its load in Montague. Knowing it was a special load, including some fish that were going to be tagged for prizes by the Ashfield Rod & Gun Club, Bitzer Hatchery Manager John Williams fattened it up with some display-pool breeders, six fish weighing more than four pounds, two brookies and four rainbows. One of the brookies was the big boy.

“We spiced up the load but that one had to be a fluke, one that had escaped our nets in the past,” said Manager Williams. “Most of our big fish are rainbows. This brookie had to be 6 or 8 years old.”

The Ashfield club tagged 10 fish, including some of the big ones. The biggest of the bunch, the one that had escaped the nets of hatchery personnel for a few years, also apparently escaped the tagging crew at the lake’s edge, because it was not wearing a tag. It did not escape the hook, though, in this case a treble-hook attached to a Thomas lure.

So ends the tale of one state-record brookie that had little time to enjoy Huntstown.