Baker's Branch

  The wall tent is up, tucked snugly into an old corral about 500 yards off the main channel of the Arkansas River just south of Ponca City. The cots are set, mattresses laid, and the good cold weather sleeping bags unrolled for the mice to play in when we’re not there. The tent is fine, tight against the wind, and easy to warm with the sheepherder. The old sheet metal wood burner is leveled, a stack of fine white ash cut to stove specs, split, and stacked just inside the tent flap away from the rain and snow. We hope it snows, we hope it rains, just to let the world know Brian Loveland and Conrad are on their own hook, warm, dry, and ready for Osama. The food supply, enough for Cox’s army, takes up two pretty good-sized ice chests and has in it deer meat from last year’s hunt, the makings for ham, eggs, biscuits, two or three different kinds of stew, cinnamon rolls to heat on the wood burner with tin foil, potatoes, onions, you name it, and jugs of milk so cold it will make your teeth

  There’s something big and hairy roaming that country down yonder between Wister and Broken Bow along the Kiamichi River and State Highway 259, alright. One day this past week it was Stacy Gibson, Brian Loveland, and me.  Well, I’m not as hairy as I used to be, and you couldn’t count Brian as such, either, except he sports a pretty good beard to make up for that which he used to carry topside. And Stacy… well, Stacy is as wild and hairy as he ever has been, born and raised in a country, LeFlore County, full of mountains, myths and muscadine grapes, all of which is what we had come for.   Mountains are geological upheavals of the earth’s crust, often placed in inconvenient locations where travel is concerned. Myths are stories that are… well, maybe true, maybe not. Muscadines are wild grapes that ripen all over that country at this time of the year, make the best jelly imaginable, and in the early days of this country’s history saved the colonists from total “tee-totalry” by provid

  I collect what I call “lost and found” stories like some people collect old coins, pocket knives, or antiques. They’re not all that common. Generally, you lose something, and it stays lost. But not always. The retrieval of something dear, causes poor rednecks (I am one) to shout with joy; maybe even shed a tear of happiness, so sparse are their personal belongings. Rich people can afford to lose things of value, so easily can they replace them. There’s more where that came from, right? Not out here on Baker’s Branch. Alan Karstetter gave me another lost and found story to add to my collection the other day at daylight out underneath the Highway 64 bridge on Lake Keystone. Alan, Snook Pollard, David Campbell and I were fishing for stripers just as a peach-colored sunrise was topping the The Keystone Ancient Forest to the east of us. It went sorta’ like this: “Conrad, you won’t believe what happened right here about a week ago.” “What.” “Snook hung a nice fish, maybe a ten