We are now well into hunting season, a time of passion, pursuit, and memories. Just about anything that happens in the woods is a reminder of something else.

Several years ago, I was bird-hunting an old opening near Clarksville Pond on a beautiful frost-tinged morning when I spotted a spikehorn buck watching me from a patch of raspberries. Steam issued from his nostrils as he stood stock still, certain that he was unseen.

"Hey Bub," I said, and he was gone in a flash.

I shot a deer in that opening when I was in my early teens, and saw my first pileated woodpecker there. "Cock of the woods," the boys back at camp called it.

Not far from there, just down into Deadwater and then up over the ridge, is the Labrador Brook country. It was there one snowy November day that I lost Arnold Shatney, or he lost me, or a combination of the two. We were guiding a couple of sports, and it was not cool to become disoriented, but Labrador is known for its iron deposits affecting compasses, and there was that incredibly thick snow. I hurried to find Arnold's tracks, and dog-trotted fast enough to catch up with him and muddle the situation out.

Arnold's mother was said to have given birth behind a stump at the nearby Hurlbert Opening, and then gotten up to resume helping with the spring planting.

Also not far from where I was hunting was the Jimmy Ricker place, where a one-pie apple tree grew along a back pasture, so named because the apples were so huge that only one was needed for a pie. I can attest to that, because I often picked an apple or two to augment the lunch in the game-pouch of my frock, and one apple from that tree was more than needed.

Not far from where I saw the buck, just down across Deadwater and up the East Branch, a certain tract exhibited signs of once being settled and pastured, signs easily visible to all but the most obtuse, even after lo these hundred years.

One day Arnold's son Rudy and I were trotting by the place, on our way to hunt the swamp between there and Cedar Stream, and I asked him about the remnants of stone walls.

It was a family that tried to make a go of it in this desolate spot, he said, back before the turn of the last century, when all the good land was already taken up and desperate farm families tried desperate things.

One spring the family failed to show up in the village of Pittsburg for supplies, and a search party went out, and found them all dead. "Diphtheria," said Rudy. "They burned everything down."

It is a story almost lost to the ages, the kind carried by many a mind roaming the woods, and only sometimes passed along.

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John Harrigan's address: Box 39, Colebrook, NH 03576. Email: hooligan@ncia.net.