Baker's Branch

  I may have bought the last gun I am ever going to buy, I'm not sure. I mean, I'm 86 years old, right? There has to be a "Last Gun" in my life, right? The cheap part of me (small) is trying to guess when that time is nigh that I will buy a gun and die before I have time to "powder" it up. It's important. Why leave a bunch of quality tools lying around that my heirs get to use, and I don't? Selfish? Sure, call the cops. Cheap people could never be drug addicts, but they might buy guns. I'm guessing, no experience here, that no crack or heroin addict ever plunked down the Big Green and worried if they would live to use up all of the product. It would seem that gun buying is a mania that filters more through the brain than it does the liver. I have two guns, both rifles, that belonged to two different Great Grandfathers in my family. That would be Grandpa Schaeffer (Augustus) and Grandpa Vollertsen (Fritz). Both guns are well over a hundred years o

  My mountain-hunting days are over. I’m pretty sure of that. Recent back surgery, and its attendant recovery, has pretty much assured me of that. Any big game Conrad takes in the future will of necessity be found in the flattest of country, or in my memory. I have become a “flatlander”, that most dreaded of beings to the old time mountain men. Sometimes flatlanders were referred to as “pork eaters”. Of course: There are no pigs in the Tetons. It’s good that I got to hunt the mountains at all. Doing so was never a sure thing, only an intense desire that I made happen by force of will, not money per se. I hunted, high (no, not that way) in Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, and New Mexico; some of those places several times. It’s something every hunter ought to do at least once, if for no other reason than point of comparison. There are other reasons, of course. There’s that damned, incomparably clean mountain air. My life would have been sensory incomplete without tubfuls of that every mountain

I taught high school English at Charles Page High School in Sand Springs, Oklahoma for 38 years. I was never, ever, the smartest person in the room. I was blessed with students who were ten times smarter than me. Because they were interested in my life and interests, as all students are about their teachers, eventually they found themselves in front of my desk, generally at the end of the hour and a test, with polite questions about those interests. They learned that I was a "bird hunter", and that I kept bird dogs and hunted quail with them with a near fanaticism. Some of them would walk politely away after learning this, but others would not, there being at that time (1966) a bird dog in nearly every backyard in town. I trained my dogs with live pigeons whose heads I would tuck under one wing, grasp the bird firmly with two hands, wave them in circles which dizzies the bird, and then place it in a clump of grass and lead the dog trainee up to the bird on a leash and let