Baker's Branch

  Of course, I've been thinking about deer season, haven't you? How could you not? By the time you read this, the deer bow season will be at least one day old. I'm fortunate to have Brian Loveland as a deer hunting partner. We're both meat hunters, valuing a nice fat doe as much as a Boone and Crockett buck, maybe more. We'll shoot the big buck (who wouldn't?), but we don't go looking for him. We are both out of style, going by the standards as presented on today's TV outdoor shows, and the hunting clothes we wear are out-of-date, and "of the day," as today's youngsters like to say. I know for a fact that Brian has never bought a piece of camo in his entire life. He has some, given to him by his brother Dave, I think, but that's it. He favors Big Smith overalls (faded blue) to hide his lean, six-four frame, and covers his feet with rough-out Wellingtons I've been looking at for 20 years. If it's not too cold out, say only down i...

  I am so old (83), it’s sometimes hard for me to believe how far down the road has come the success of the annual Oklahoma deer season since I first hunted it as a twenty-one-year-old in November 1966. My grandfather, Austin Howell, never hunted deer in Oklahoma because there were none to hunt, and he was born here in 1896 and lived here all his life. The deer in Oklahoma were essentially gone by the time he was a ten-year-old-boy, with only squirrels and quail left to hunt. There were a few deer left in extreme southeastern Oklahoma, but the annual take was often less than a hundred all through the early Twentieth Century, which was the major portion of Grandpa’s life. Some years there was no season at all. People that saw a deer run across the highway in that time talked about it for years, and the listeners were rapt, wondering what a wild deer might look like, and would they ever see one themselves. Now, the wisest drivers in the state, cross their fingers and hope they do...

  Here’s a dinosaur coming into my yard out here on the Branch everyday around noon. If I had to guess, I’d say it was a velociraptor, the same critter featured in the “Jurassic Park” movies. You might call it a “Roadrunner”. You’d be wrong, looking only at its feathers, disregarding its reptilian scaly feet and legs; its three-toed feet; its desire to get around more on its feet than on its wings, and its absolutely voracious appetite for both meat and vegetables. If they grew to half the size of humans, they would eat you, and then me for dessert. If they grew to the size of a standard poodle, you’d have to pack a sidearm when taking out the trash after dark; probably something along the lines of a .454 Casull firearm cartridge. People ask, “What happened to the dinosaurs?” Come out to my place, and I will show you one. Keep your eyes open if you come. There are more where that one came from, and maybe one right behind you, this creature which the Mexicans call, “paisano”, ...