Baker's Branch

                   To me the best part of a turkey hunt has always been the long walk between daylight and dark. There is an adventure ahead of you, where or when is anybody's guess. Maybe right over there in that long string of cottonwoods lining the creek where the night before a whole drove flew up to roost, hens clucking, gobblers gobbling, marking the evening's first coyote opening up way out yonder.          This guy, you may or may not have known a long time, squats in the dirt in front of the pickup with a short stick in his right hand, his truck keys in his left and begins to draw a map in the dirt with a flashlight gripped in his teeth to make things "perfectly clear".        "Right here", he says, making the first line in dirt the texture of flour and the color of ocher, "is the creek, where the turkeys is 'bout three hunnert yards yonder. There's a small herd of Angus using the pasture between us and the creek, and its go

              Yeah, we're here today, but our winter birds are leaving as they do every year about this time. We feed and watch birds out here on the branch all winter, looking forward in September, even, for northern species that won't arrive until around the beginning of archery season. The summer birds, the ones that arrive every year to feed out of the same feeders, arrive around May 5 in a journey that brings them all the way north from Central America.        Earlier than that, almost exactly April 15 every year, the warblers (dozens of different species) arrive from even further south, the Caribbean, and also Central America, all part of a fantastic ticking ecological clock wound, maybe, at about the same time we were, who knows. Snakes? Lizards? Oh, yeah, almost exactly April 15 every year, about the time the turkeys are gobbling real well.        It'd be hard for me to guess how many times I've been working a turkey to the call and nearly stepped on

                                                                                                                                                         There's a reason we live way out here on Baker's Branch, Pam and me. We wanted to "get away", and we did. Back in those days she trusted me, and saw things pretty much all my way for no apparent reason. We were both young and foolish. She matured, I didn't.         When it came time about 1976 that we started thinking about building a house of our own, she let me choose the place and the type of home. The lot I selected on Lake Keystone was enclosed on three sides by extensive woodlands, all Corps of Engineers property where no other houses could be built to interfere with the view of the lake, The Baker's Branch arm of it, which through the trees was literally a stone's throw from what would become our front driveway. The house was to be a two-story log home, aesthetically fit for the surroundings