Baker's Branch

  In Hemingway's Old Man and The Sea, his fisherman/protagonist uses a handline to bring in the marlin he hopes will secure his life's fortune. It was the way I fished the first several years of my fishing life, buying my "tackle" at a general store, and finding my bait in the backyard in the ground, under logs, and under rocks. It was the easiest method of fishing, short of dynamite and electricity, because it worked. No rod, no reel, just a length of small diameter, green cord wrapped around a red square of wood, and a size eight or ten hook attached. The ones I bought at Bailey's Store in Charlestown, Maryland, cost twenty-five cents. At seven I couldn't afford them, but my mother and father could, and, for no apparent reason, kept me supplied.   I sometimes went through one a week. I was hard on them, but they were good to me. Lordy, lordy: the fish, the fish. Mom cooked them all.   You wonder did it serve any purpose. Who knows. Here I am 62 years...

There had been some sort of explosion in the backyard. Granted it was a natural one, but something had been blown up, somehow. There were bird feathers everywhere. My granddaughter, Alyssa Webster, 13, brought two tail feathers into the house to show me, evidence that a murder had taken place, perhaps, out here on Baker's Branch. "Papa, do you know what kind of bird these come from?" She held the feathers in the palm of her hand in front of my face. One was blue with black velvet bars and a white tip. The other was a bright yellow and black. I knew in an instant what they were. They came from two different kinds of birds, not one. The easiest thing in the world for me to have done would have been just to tell her what birds they came from. Papa doesn't operate that way. Papa believes in research. Papa believes in reading. On your own, with guidance and small nudges. Two feathers from two different birds. Could the pile of evidence (like I said, the feathers we...

  You’ve got to have “what it takes,” is what they say, to push through adversity. Nobody knows that better than this season’s deer hunters, both archery and muzzleloaders. Weather? It’s got to line up for you. Hot, hot, hot; dry, dry, dry, is not going to line up for you. Persistence, only, will beat it. You’ve got to want to succeed more than the weather wants to defeat you. You might win. You might lose. If you think about losing, you will. That’s my take on it. Lane Webster, 14, of Sand Springs, showed up at my house the other day with a monster buck hauled into my yard in the back of his father’s pickup. His father? That would be Adam Webster, also of Sand Springs, who first hauled things into my yard along with his best “bud”, Clay McKinney, also of Sand Springs when they were teens. It seems like yesterday, but it wasn’t. There’s a continuity to small town life that even a knucklehead, like me, with only half the sense God gave a goose, can see and appreciate. We liv...

  I seldom sit down on a deer stand for what could be either a long wait, or a very short one, but always a very cold one, that I don’t think of the first “big game ”  I ever shot. I’d like to say it was a rhino, but it was a rabbit. I could lie to you and bolster my image at least a little bit by telling you it charged me, like the one that charged President Carter while he was on vacation down yonder in Georgia, but it didn’t. It was running the other way. But it was a jackrabbit that probably maxed out pretty close to the top weight for the blacktail subspecies at around seven pounds. I would’ve bet it at nearly 20, but I was only 10 and was only guessing its weight at nearly that of similarly sized dogs I’d slung over my shoulder and carried home for one reason or another. It was a mile back to Grandma and Grandpa’s house. It was a big rabbit, and to me, like I said, it was “big game.” I shot it with Uncle Norm’s gun, a .22 Savage pump with a tubular magazine feed th...