Baker's Branch

  Growing up in rural Oklahoma, it was common to hear the old folks in my life, when asked, to refer to winter weather as being so cold, "It brought the birds to the chopping block," which, thinking about it now in a season turned 'to snow and ice, always brings a smile to my face. It still gets cold around here, but there are no chopping blocks left, or darned few of them, and practically no one that knows what they are even when they are standing right next to them. The culture, and the people in it that used chopping blocks, is about gone. Well, not totally.  When I looked out my window this morning, the birds were swarming my chopping block. I still have one. I use it all the time. It's a good one, over 20 years old, now. It's the third I've had, I think, since Pam took me in as a boarder.   Back in the day, most rural homes had a chopping block kept "around back" for the purpose of beheading, de-footing, and de-winging small game and wildf...

  Here in the winter of no winter, one of the three dogs we keep out here on Baker’s Branch is finding out what a dog’s life can be.  Heidi, Too (get it?), the first Heidi’s replacement German shepherd, has started learning a puppy’s life is not all hugs and snicker doodles. I met Bob McFall in front of the post office in Sand Springs one day last week, and one of the first things he asked me was it true we have “all those copperheads” out there on the Branch he reads about in the column.  His question made me hang my head in resignation. It’s a question I get from readers all the time. I know they think I make up this stuff. I told him, and I’m telling you right now, the answer is most definitely yes. Our new Heidi has been bitten twice this year, right in the face, which should tell you a story if you’re paying attention.  In the thirty-five plus years we’ve lived out here, I cannot tell you how many copperheads we’ve killed, nor how many dogs have been bitten by s...

  I need a bigger gun. If not that, then a forklift. A couple days ago I went to pick up my Ford Ranger 4wd at Mike Withrow’s Keystone Garage out on Coyote Trail. A week ago, yet another pack rat attack had wiped out all the under hood wiring doing close to $200 worth of damage.  Late last summer, Mike’s mechanic crew repaired a similar demolition job on the same truck. I’ve been fighting pack rats for a long time out here on Baker’s Branch, years, and losing the fight. Last August, Mike put me onto a method used by his grandfather to fight the same beasts “back in the day,” and it worked. Well, until I slacked off just two nights in a row.   I can’t poison the toothy monsters. That would work, but it would also poison my dogs (three) that would find the fresh meat lying about the property, eat it, and then die by proxy as it were. Trapping is an “iffy” proposition at best, and once near-missed by a trap (it happens), like wild pigs the wild rats become almost impos...

  I am not a very pleasant fellow before the first cup of coffee in the morning. I do not wake up well. I do not like to have my hands cold-nosed, licked, or snuffled in the dark at four o’clock in the morning. Spike The Wonder Dog, the “house lab” and official duck retriever, will do that to me every time on my way to the coffee maker in the kitchen. He will, that is, if I forget to growl at him in the dark before he gets to me. I can growl pretty good. If I growled at you in the dark, you would stop what you were doing, and so does Spike, but sometimes I forget to do it and get cold-nosed, licked, and snuffled before I can get the kitchen light turned on. When it happens, I come about three feet straight up off the floor. I am wide awake and ready, say, for the duck hunt following, but I am not in a good mood about it. I curse about as well as anyone you know before daylight, and hand out lengthy lectures along with the blue language. The expression “hangdog look” was invente...

My deer camp with Brian Loveland of Sand Springs is a two man deal. That’s about all a 12x14 wall tent, plus sleeping, hunting, camping gear, and a wood burner will hold comfortably. We could squeeze another guy in there, but he’d have to stand on his head after the lights went out. The camp is set up along a brushy creek which is bordered on one side by a bean field, and a two-hundred acre Bermuda pasture on the other. Our tent guy lines are tied on one side to an old corral fence which is just at the edge of the pasture. The corral fence helps keep the tent from flying away during a hard south wind. When the wind is high out of the north, we pray, and park the trucks as windbreaks as close to the north side of the tent as we can. The tent door faces east, as any tent door should, and the creek, no more than thirty yards to the west, sometimes has deer in it that blow at us during the night on their way in and out of the bean field, and trips up and down the creek to the riv...