PARIS – Maine guide Lawrence Perry of Fryeburg took the stand Wednesday, hoping to persuade the jury that he is innocent of all the hunting charges against him in a 30-count indictment.

The charges include bear hunting with more than four dogs, numerous guide license violations, night hunting, driving deer, hunting wild animals in closed season and having a loaded gun in a vehicle.

Perry was indicted along with 14 others in the three-month undercover operation by the Maine Warden Service. All but one of the others charged have pleaded guilty to the hunting violations, including another Maine guide who received a six-month jail sentence and thousands of dollars in fines.

Closing arguments will be heard this morning in the case, being tried in Oxford County Superior Court.

Perry denied the charge of hunting bear with more than four dogs, saying it is common practice to “rotate” a pack of dogs in and out of the truck to give them practice in the training of “strike, track, trail and tree” used in bear hunting.

He denies shooting at a fox and a bobcat in closed season, saying he stopped to see if the fox was rabid and thought the bobcat was a coyote.

It’s a gray area’

Perry said the charge of crossing state lines with an untagged animal is unfair. In order to get to the nearest tagging station at the Stow Country Store, hunters cannot avoid using the only paved road, Route 113, which veers into New Hampshire for a short distance, he said.

“It’s a gray area. It’s the only way out of here,” Perry said.

Perry denied ever keeping a loaded firearm in his vehicle. He said he kept the bolt action open on his rifle, and held a round in his fingers as he drove around.

Undercover Maine Warden William Livezey had testified that Perry and others routinely kept their guns loaded in the car and that they expected him to do the same.

Several of Perry’s hunting friends also testified Wednesday. April and Ernest Perreault of Brownfield, part of a Thanksgiving deer-hunting outing, denied that they or Perry were driving deer.

Perry said he never considered what he was doing as “driving deer,” since the area in which they were hunting was so large and other hunters not part of their group were also hunting in the same area.

“You can move a deer but they can circle around you. You have to hunt them. I don’t think I was driving deer. I was hunting strips of woods,” Perry said.

Another out-of-stater

When Livezey asked Perry to take him on a bear hunt in the fall of 2003, Perry agreed. He said he thought of Livezey as just another out-of-stater who had never experienced the thrill of a bear hunt.

Perry, 56, said he grew up in Chatham, N.H., a “small, backwoods country town” where hunting was a way of life. He worked in building construction after graduating from Fryeburg Academy and serving in the Air Force. He raised a family. He loved to hunt, and he loved to drink.

He quit drinking for good in April of 1991, he said, after acquiring his first coon dog, a female named Casey. She had a litter of pups, and he named one of them Ruff.

“Me and Ruff, I spent all my time with him in the woods. Since then, my life is my dogs. I’ve been working em for 14 years, and that’s my serenity, is my dogs. Hunting don’t mean a thing to me,” said Perry, except as it served in the training of his dogs.