Last Thursday night, I went out to dinner with classmate and boyhood friend Greg Keazer (not his real name — no, wait, his real name) and later, while bar-hopping, met two bow-hunters, Shawn and Joe (their real names).

“Hey,” Shawn said, having scrutinized me from across the bar’s well, “aren’t you the guy who …”, and I said yup, that’s me, and again I considered buying a Groucho disguise (just kidding, because I relish the give and take of these encounters).

We had a nice visit with these two guys, who were engaged in what I consider the epitome of good hunters and good hunting — archery-hunting, which is just a shade above muzzle-loading, in which you have to work extra hard in scouting your territory and being stealthy and unseen, because when it comes right down to it, you get that one shot, just as all of the other predators are pretty much limited to one try at their quarry and are always weighing time and energy expended versus the likelihood of energy obtained.

They owned around 200 acres on Holden Hill in Stewartstown, all of it open to others to respect and enjoy, and were pondering ranging a bit farther again from home base (their camp) to try another territory, in this case Deadwater Stream. “Oh, Deadwater,” I said, memories flooding back. “That’s where I hunted in my teens, just across the ridge from Clarksville Pond. The deer like to hide where it’s the most miserable hunting, in the swamps and beaver dams on the fingers near Hedgehog Nubble,” and I drew them a crude map on a paper place mat, thinking “Search and Rescue is going to hate me for this.”

Two reasons for them being up far north in the Great North Woods were the tremendous expanse of territory open to hunting and the possibility of encountering truly huge deer, which is why hunters from all over the Northeast come to hunt the swamps and ridges of the headwaters of the Connecticut River — the upper reaches of Hall’s Stream, Indian Stream, Perry Stream, Cedar Stream, Labrador Brook, Deadwater (unfittingly named, for there is precious little actual dead water in its basin, mostly in the form of little beaver ponds on its headwaters far to the south) and the upper reaches of the Connecticut itself, on the ridges surrounding the Perry Ponds and Boundary Pond, smack on the Canadian border.

“This is so great, hunting up here with hardly any of it posted,” one of them, I think it was Joe, said with a sweep of an arm. “You can go just about anywhere and not see any no-trespassing signs. It’s not like that down home” (the Windham-Pelham-Salem area).

He’s right. It’s not like that in the far North Country, but, believe me, it’s a line of demarcation creeping steadily northward and has crested the notches and spilled over into the likes of Shelburne, Randolph and Jefferson on the northeastern slopes of the White Mountains and Franconia, Easton, Bethlehem and Landaff to the west.

This is a region rapidly undergoing a change of ownership by people with no background, culture or tradition of hunting, or in the case of descendants of original owners, don’t even share any of the attachments to the land and traditions and culture that moved their ancestors to purchase the land to begin with. They are on the far side of the growing gulf that separates Asphalt America from Small-town, Rural America, a gulf born of a society that favors new shopping malls and ever-more turnpike lanes over open land devoid of nary a rooftop or all-night light.

But this scenario contains sweeping statements that paint with a too-broad brush, and the caveat is that I receive a good deal of mail from well-meaning landowners who wanted to or have tried to keep their lands open for hunting and all other manner of nonmotorized use. But they have chosen to or been forced to post their land, particularly to hunting, because of abuse and lack of respect, or stories about this from publicized incidents or word-of-mouth accounts about other landowners who have put their best foot forward and had their toes stepped on and received a slap in the face in return.

I receive letters from such well-meaning landowners all too often, and they are like a stab to the heart for hunters who appreciate the privilege of access to other people’s land and are fully aware of what a fragile thing it is. These are accounts of loutish, callous, uncaring and disrespectful hunters (and to be fair, other recreational users) who park in bar ways, leave livestock gates open, litter the ground around their stands and vehicles, shoot too close to buildings, curse at landowners who have been forced to exercise their perfect right to close their lands and, in general, give all hunters a bad name.

“You should write more often about these morons,” readers often tell me. “They’re giving all hunters a bad name.” To which I reply that probably such idiots are too stupid to read, which is another sweeping generalization, but one I fear that, just as it is with idiots who throw trash out their vehicles’ windows, sadly true.

As our newfound friends left to return to camp, they asked if my land is open, and I said “You bet.” Greg, a landowner too, nodded in assent.

We left for South Hill, and on the way home I couldn’t help thinking about the precious privilege of access to other people’s land and how hard we all must work to protect and perpetuate this unique and delicate tradition.

John Harrigan’s column appears weekly in the New Hampshire Sunday News. His address is Box 39, Colebrook 03576. His email is hooligan@ncia.net.