I’ve never landed a salmon. Well, there was this one coho that I manhandled out of the cold case at the grocery store.

But in truth the coho wasn’t all that feisty.

Although I doubt I’d be able to raise much of a ruckus either if I were wrapped like a mummy, only with plastic instead of musty canvas.

And my head and tail cut off besides.

I don’t have any real prospect of filling this yawning gap in my anadromous angling resume.

I don’t own a fishing pole, for one thing.

Or a reel.

We support the rights of Native Americans to hunt wildlife in parts of Northeastern Oregon where their ancestors hunted for millennia.

But those rights have limits — geographical boundaries foremost among them.

Tribal members who ignore those boundaries should be punished just as non-tribal hunters are who stray outside the area where they’re permitted to hunt.

We were pleased, then, when Judge Greg Baxter ruled last week that James Bronson Jr. is guilty of poaching two bighorn sheep rams in eastern Baker County a few years ago.

In concept, I’m all for cramming more corpses into the design of warning labels for carcinogenic consumer products.

And I have no problem, per se, with packages that show a person smoking a cigarette through a hole in his throat.

But I’m not convinced the federal government needed to go to so much trouble — I don’t expect it’s all that easy to arrange corpses for photo shoots — to explain to Americans that tobacco can kill you.

Which notion pretty much epitomizes the term “common knowledge."

We like that more local teenagers are willing to get outside and run around.

But we don’t want them hightailing it through somebody’s backyard.

That might be healthy in a cardiovascular sense.

Unfortunately it’s also trespassing.

The Baker City Council had a chance on Tuesday to forge a compromise in a difficult situation.

Unfortunately, a majority of the councilors let that chance slip away.

The Council instead voted 5-2 to allow the In & Out Drive-In, at the corner of 10th and E streets, to keep three parking spaces on the north side of the restaurant even after the city builds a sidewalk there.

That means customers, when they leave, will back their vehicles across the sidewalk — an inherently dangerous situation for pedestrians.

Longer vehicles could block the sidewalk altogether, possibly forcing walkers to detour onto E Street, the very thing the sidewalk is supposed to prevent.

Dan Van Thiel, the city’s contract attorney, believes the city would be legally vulnerable were a pedestrian to be hit by a car backing out of a parking space.

I barged in on a family of coyotes the other day. I had to grin at the sight of the four pups, scampering away in their clumsy but endearingly cute gait.

I was reminded, except for the fur and the speed, of a toddler wobbling across a lawn.

I have had some experience of coyotes — all of a non-lethal sort — but this was the first time I’ve seen so many young together.

I saw only one adult. Being ignorant of the typical behavior of coyote parents I don’t know whether both raise their offspring or whether the mother is solely responsible.

In any case the dad might have been around too. But the sagebrush was pretty tall and thick, and the coyotes, as I think I mentioned, scurried off with some alacrity.

The site was on the north slope of Bald Mountain.

Specifically, the Bald Mountain that caps the divide between the Powder and Burnt river valleys, a few miles west of Dooley Mountain.

(Bald Mountains are rather common on the landscape, so it’s best to be specific.)

If you’ve driven south on Highway 7 through Bowen Valley, on a day without fog or heavy snow, you’ve seen this Bald Mountain. It’s the vaguely pyramidal peak that dominates the southern horizon. Its upper 500 feet or so, as befits the name, is generally bare of trees.

I had started by driving the Denny Creek Road and then taking the spur that goes up through Hervey Gulch. I parked on the ridge between the gulch and Rancheria Creek and then hiked up the road that intersects with the Skyline Road not far below Bald Mountain’s summit.