Baker's Branch

  It was hot. One of the few times it has been hot this summer and not raining.  Eddie Bostic and his father Hyman and I had found a piece of speckled shade to cool off in next to the truck where we were unloading paving stones the size of door mats. Hyman didn’t need the stones in his yard anymore.  I did, as a mud-free walkway to the storm shelter during tornado season. Hyman, 87, had insisted on being on the receiving end of the stones coming out of the back of Eddie’s truck and into his hands where he stacked them in two, waist high piles just north of the north wall of my house.  Hyman Bostic is a marvel. I have known him since his twin boys, Eddie and Michael, played bluegrass for me at my house. I had them in class at Page somewhere back in the 1960’s. The kids at school laughed at their “hillbilly” music, but the boys knew I liked it and used to bring it over to the house, hoping for an “A” maybe.  Since then, the boys have played that music on stage and in recording st

  There is not a finer sport for those that like the drift of feathers in the air than a good hot dove shoot in the waning days of hot, hot summertime. It’s a different hunt than a duck hunt in December, or a quail hunt in November.   Before the infirmities of age, and its accompanying medical machinery, overtook me, I spent the greater part of my late summer dove days in southwestern Oklahoma, the land of the purple sage, twisted mesquite, shimmering cottonwoods, and no water. Desert country, if the state has any.   The doves love it. Plenty of harvested wheat on the ground to eat, windmill tanks for water, and all those mesquites to nest in and make more doves for Conrad to shoot.   For many years I bunked in the old Nance Hotel in “downtown” Granite. The Nance was a place right off a Hollywood, western movie set, complete with varnished wooden handrails and columns leading up wooden stairs to a series of small, sparsely furnished, but neat-as-a-pin, rooms; spectacularly clean.

  I hunt doves in western Oklahoma because that’s where the doves are. The doves are in western Oklahoma because farmers in that country still grow wheat, milo, and millet. Throw in thousands of acres of naturally occurring nesting cover in the form of mesquite thickets, and you’ve got the place where doves want to be in the first place.  It’s not hard to figure out, just hard for some, not me, to act on.  There are places around here where you can find doves to shoot at (note the choice of words), the problem is everyone else will find the same spot you do. Opening day, likely 100 hunters will surround a 50 acre feed patch. Will someone get shot accidentally? Likely. Will more than one hunter claim to have shot the same bird? Probably. Sooner or later. Will there be an argument? Predictably. I go west, young man, west; every year.  I start “loading up” for doves about a week before the season opens. I run oily rags over oil-slicked guns; clean barrels that haven’t been dirtied since I