Baker's Branch

  I was digging for treasure. I knew where it was. Way down in there. I found it, too. All the way to the bottom.  Pam came out into the garage and looked over my shoulder. “Well?”, she asked.  “Look at this!” I said, holding up my prize for examination. “And more! Two tenderloins and four sirloins. Not a bit of freezer burn anywhere. Like new, even if a year old. Man! I’m charcoaling them tomorrow.”  Maybe yours doesn’t, but our freezer holds treasure from year to year that escapes being eaten, and we eat game and fish out here on The Branch a lot. If you aren’t careful, it escapes to the bottom of the freezer (somehow) uneaten, in perfectly good condition, hidden covertly by new “draftees”.  You must dig for treasure. He who seeks, finds.  I already had a new deer from the recent muzzleloading season, with the prospect of more to come during the high power season. I wasn’t just searching for treasure, but more room as well. You’d think our freezer, a twen...

  During deer season, Brian Loveland of Sand Springs and I eat home cooked meals in a 12 x 14 wall tent. Well, the tent is our home for the duration of the season, and that's where we cook our meals. I really think that TV cook, Emeril, would fit in, in our camp. He's about the only yankee I've ever thought might be able to get his brain wrapped around redneck ways. It's just a feeling. I could be wrong about that, but you watch him throw handfuls of this, and handfuls of that, into a pot and yell, "Bam!" when he does it, and you get a sense of something redneck a slick, New York TV producer can't cover up. Like I said, I could be wrong about that. Certainly, in a good, downhome deer camp, you should not expect to find any measuring spoons, or measuring cups. Meat thermometers? Croutons? A little lemon zest? White wine? Good grief. Call your mommy, will 'ya? All of our food up on the wild Arkansas River is heart horrible, and fried the same as Grandma ...

  I love deer meat as much as the next man or woman, but as I’ve aged (yes, I have) camp itself has become even more important to me. If the wind doesn’t blow right, for my stand, or if rain is drumming the tent roof when I hear the alarm go off at five, I’ll sleep in. Just not as mad at ‘em as I used to be. Getting up to a fresh cup of hot coffee in driving rain, or swirling snow, is never unpleasant, but it’s even better when you know you don’t have to go; when you smell bacon frying, and the toughest decision of the day is whether the eggs need to be over easy, or scrambled. Will there be one cup of coffee, or two? So and so got a bigger buck than anybody has seen around here in years? Well, good for him. Pass that apple butter, would you please? Hey, these biscuits are still hot. Pass the butter. The last free place in this country, never mind the world, is deer camp. Turn your cell phone off, you fool. Brian Loveland got to ours up on the Big Bend of the Arkansas before me thi...

  I hadn't caught a sand bass in a dust storm in years, spring break early 1960s, but I caught one the other day. Actually, one of several, so ferociously were the white bass charging the shad up onto the shallow points in the back of Keystone's Salt Creek arm. I was wadefishing there early in the afternoon. I had the whole place to myself. A fine, brown haze smoked the sky everywhere you looked, but more particularly north, towards Ponca City. The air smelled like fresh dirt turned by a plow. So terrified were the shad that several times they shot like hot, melted silver splashed from a crucible right up onto the brown sand where they flopped gasping for air. I didn't feel sorry for them. They had made a choice. Like Jerry Clower's coonhunter, they could crawl out onto that sandbar and die dehydrated, or they could jump right back out into that water and kick every sandbass'--they could find. Some of them jumped back in. All of the others got eaten by a persistent ...

  I don’t know how many walleye there are in Kenoji Lake and its tributaries way up north in Ontario. What, millions? Hundreds? Certainly hundreds of thousands, wouldn’t you think? So little fishing pressure does it get in any one short season.  These fish swarm in water where the “catching season” is cancelled out by nearly eight months of winter, and two hours flying time between points “A” and “B”. Civilization? There is none, unless you count the single cabin you are in for your stay. There is a radio phone. Hello. You can use that in case of an emergency, or try a smoke signal.  Isolation: It’s one of the main reasons we go there. Well, that and the cool weather, and the fishing. Go there and you are going to catch some fish, and some more fish, and some more fish, and ..... well, you might eat a few of those golden walleye fillets, too. Maybe. You didn’t pack along any frozen pizzas, did you?  No, we did not, although we could have. Mike and Renae Henry’s Pipes...

  We mark time in different ways out here on Baker's Branch. Here's one: scorpions. When I lived near Capistrano, it was the swallows in the spring. In Pacific Grove it was the monarchs in the fall on the way to Mexico clustering orange in the seaside pines. Out here on Baker's Branch it's the little honey-colored scorpions in the dangdest places imaginable all over the house, and usually two weeks to the day before the first real cold weather of autumn. I don't know how the little "jabbers" mark their seasons so accurately; all I know is that they do. Everybody who has lived in this house has been stung by the little %$#&*^**! except my son Rode and me, and we've had our close calls. Pam and Sarah have been nailed, twice. Apiece. When they were little, getting Sarah and Rode ready for the drive to town and school was a daily exercise in chaos with Pam in charge. Super Mom, but she couldn't be at all places all the time. I always told her she w...