Baker's Branch

                  I don't know if ol' Cliff was a witch, a "diviner", or just plain lucky, but what he did down yonder that afternoon on the campus of East Central University spooked me plenty. I was a kid, barely eighteen, working my way through college with a summer job on the school maintenance crew, and already had more on my plate of a natural sort than I could understand.          I didn't need anything supernatural cluttering up thought processes still in the early stages of development, but," it was", as they say," what it was", or was it? You tell me.        Out of all the people on The ECU campus Cliff was by far and away the least "educated", even less than me. I had at least graduated from high school. Cliff? I'm pretty sure he never got much past the eighth grade, if that far, yet he knew things that nobody else on campus knew, even the maintenance crew boss, a scrawny little whiny ass that loved his power

                          Grandma Howell bought two hundred leghorn chicks a year knowing that in a good year only a hundred or so would survive. Then we ate them. One at a time, spaced out over the better part of a year doing it.          Fried chicken dinners down at grandma's in Little Dixie did not come in succession, they came in well spaced intervals making them all the more gratifying. Garden green beans with cream sauce and pearl onions, mashed potatoes and cream gravy, fried okra, pickled beets and butter milk biscuits. Sweetened iced tea so cold it made your teeth hurt washed it all down.        Dessert? Well, yes. Peach cobbler from her small grove, or maybe a blackberry cobbler picked from vines growing wild down where her one cow, a Guernsey, grazed making milk, cream and butter without even realizing it.        Grandma raised ten kids, lost three others in childbirth, and raised me until I was four years old. The "pandemic" of her time was The

                David Campbell called me the other day to let me know that he'd placed a hog trap of some sort on his deer lease with the expectations of catching a porker (he had seen plenty of signs lately while searching for morels) and did I have any ideas on how to butcher and prepare same for a meal. Well, yes I did.        Back in the 80's and 90's I spent nearly every weekend in season guiding goose and crane hunters on a giant cattle ranch in West Texas. It was a six hour drive from my home here on the Branch for which I began counting the hours for my Friday getaway about every Wednesday. In a place where the buffalo once thronged, I now guided city boys for morning waterfowl hunts so that I could have the afternoons to myself. It was like handing a box of Blue Diamond Strike-Anywhere-Matches to a pyromaniac.        I hunted everything except deer, the rancher's favorite, and soon found the wild hogs overrunning the place to be my favorite as they