Baker's Branch

  Vernon called the other day. Vernon, the brother that puts the blog together. I didn't know what a blog was until he brought it up half a year ago. Still don't. He worries about me all the time. For no apparent reason. "So whatta' you think, would you like to try something new?" "Something new what?" "Well, you know, a new blog entry." "What's wrong with the old ones?" "Nothing, nothing. They're just, well... old." "What's wrong with old stuff. I'm old." "I just thought you might want to spread your wings a little, think of something new. "What, you think thinking is easy? I can't do it much anymore. It bothers me. Never did do it well. You were always the smart one. Mom said so." "Well, okay. I was trying to be helpful. Think about it."  "Leave me alone and I will. Don't hold your breath." We said goodbye (that bothers me a lot nowa

I got in a fight with a greenbriar the opening day of squirrel season. If you had seen me anytime during the next two weeks, you would have spotted a long, black, cruel looking scar slashed diagonally clear across the back of my left hand that looked as if someone had taken a box cutter to me.   Blood went everywhere, exactly what you would expect from someone taking an aspirin a day along with several other blood thinners. “Aw, it ain’t nothin’, Momma,” were the first words out of my mouth to everybody I met during the next two weeks.   The worst thing about the “wound” was that towards the end, I began to like all the attention I was getting, and even began to feel as if it was deserved. I know this because one day I caught myself working into the discussion of same phrases like, “The squirrel attacked me…” and, “It gave a little growl and jumped on me from out of a tree…” the word “greenbriar” never even coming up.   The day I nearly died from the greenbriar/squirrel attack, I

  There’s something about a snake that turns people into liars, Baptist deacons and monastery monks alike. Drop a two-foot long grass snake into anybody’s lap, and inside of an hour it’s a twenty-foot python. Well, there was that very first snake story, right? Eve had to lie about it and, well, here we are. That being said, you know who to blame for whatever follows in the next five minutes, maybe ten if you decide to reread this piece. I was put to thinking about the subject, snakes and liars, by an accidental view of a stick-on calendar on the dash of my pickup, probably the best place to find me during turkey season. Early on in my turkey hunting career, I became aware that, give or take a day or two, you could count on seeing the year’s first snake about April 15th, ditto for the year’s first migrating warblers, but they don’t bite. Were the publishers of this paper to allow it, I could run off about five full pages of turkey season snake stories; some of them more hair raisi