Baker's Branch

  “From little acorns, mighty trees doth grow,” the poet said. He meant oak trees; I mean cottonwoods. Nothing grows quicker, bigger, from a smaller point of origin than my grandchildren, but, still, the poet’s point is well taken. I saved a cottonwood sapling in my yard alongside the driveway, the same diameter as my little finger, from certain death about thirty years ago. I paused to look at it as I rode up on it sitting on my lawnmower. It had not been there the week before, seemingly, but now there it was, no more than two-and-a-half feet tall, maybe three, thrusting proudly towards the sky while leaning its length out over the driveway. I had long wanted a cottonwood in my yard, already choked with oaks, to feed the squirrels leaf buds in May, and attract orioles who like to nest as high as sixty feet above ground. Everybody needs an oriole or two in their yard. Short scrubby oaks won’t bring them. Here I had one, unexpectedly and overnight as it were. I thought God had forgo...

Women are weird. Oh, yes they are. I don’t care what you say, and it’s a personality trait that seems to cross species lines, turkeys to humans, for example, and vice versa. For years, fifty, now, I have had as much fun with hen turkeys during the spring gobbler season as I have had with the gobblers, even. We look at one another and hear music that nobody else does. We dance, maybe, where nobody else can see us. It’s personal. For years I met gobblers like I did belligerent men in the bars of my youth, where I acted an idiot, and somehow kept my name out of the paper. You never heard about it, and family honor shamed me back into “line” before you could have; no credit to myself. In the spring, you better mess with the mail “bar” turkeys only (you will get into some fights) unless you want to go to jail, but the women turkeys are going to mess with you anyway, whether you want them to or not. Think of the Kardashians, and those “Party Girls Down South”. Well, maybe you do want...

  Keystone was high, muddy, and getting higher one day last week when David Campbell of Sand Springs and I put my boat in the water off the Prairie View Ramp in Mannford. We had planned on a black bass/crappie combo until we spotted the rising red line of the wild Cimarron River. We had to re-shuffle the deck and cut the cards, again. When you’re retired, life is full of pleasant options. It was David’s idea to fish the rising water right in front of a tiny waterfall chuckling and gurgling into the back of a little inlet where I had caught many a bass and crappie before. He thought it looked “good”. “Well, yeah,” I said, it looks good, but it’s a bait fishing spot. You got a bucket of minnows or a can of worms on ya’, I didn’t see ‘em when we launched the boat.” “Right here, buddy,” he said tossing me an ancient looking, small jar crammed full of Berkley Gulp artificial bait worms. The jar label was nearly worn gone. I opened the lid. The artificial worms positively looked real, li...

  If you don’t know where the fish are you can’t catch them, right? I bet Edwin Evers would agree to that, as would Jason Christie, the top two finishers in the most recent Bassmasters Classic held on Grand Lake here in northeastern Oklahoma. Evers, the Classic winner from Talala, was quoted in published reports to have relied on insider family fishing knowledge of the lake to “cash his chips” on the final day of the tournament and come from behind to win after trailing several pounds behind Christie going into the final round. Christie as well was reported to have built his early two-day lead of the three-day event from family fishing knowledge of the old lake. Both are excellent bass fishermen, and might’ve won, or placed nearly as high as they did, without the benefit of MRI, what hunters and fishermen call the “most recent information.” My four-year old grandson, Brantley, has to at least be able to hold a rod in his hands (which he can), but once he does that, if I then say to...

  Hunting squirrels in the middle of winter is different than hunting them in the middle of spring; I knew that. Hunting them in the middle of the day is different than hunting them at dawn or dusk, too, and I knew that. But I wanted to go, so I conned Brian Loveland into making a run with me up to our deer camp on the upper Arkansas near Ponca City to shake ‘em up a little just to let ‘em know we’re still alive. A lot of this was just a fight against “old timer’s” boredom, but part of it was Brian’s fault, too, the way I saw it. One night during deer season sitting in the tent and chunking fine burning ash slabs into the woodburner, Brian asked, “Reckon how many squirrels it’d take to equal one deer?” I started to grin at the seeming impossibility of such a guesstimate, until it suddenly occurred to me that, yes, a fairly accurate approximation could be made, and probably in one’s head without a calculator, regarding such a figure, and said so. “If you’ll let me round some numbers...

  It’s not often I go fishing and come home with a dog story, but it happens. It happened a few days back when Leon Mears of Mannford called and asked if I’d like to go crappie fishing up on Skiatook Lake. Well, sure. There are people around here (not many) as good a crappie fisherman as Leon, but none better. The plan was to meet up with a friend of Leon’s, Kevin DeLong of Hominy, and fish an area of the lake where the two of them had located swarms of cold weather, open water crappie feasting on shad in the mid-reaches of the lake. The fish, for no apparent reason, were schooled up great distances from the shoreline, and not near any known brush piles. It was a weird set-up for any crappie fisherman familiar with the mid-winter habits of what people in our country see as the best eating fish there is, walleye and the various catfish species not excluded. Years ago, Dave Hladik and I had stumbled upon an exact duplicate pattern down on Lake Tenkiller when, fishing for “whatever”, ...