Baker's Branch

  Bait. We need bait. Have you got any? Well, then, if you don’t, then you need some, too.  It’s all about bait. Everything. Not just fishing.  I do not know how much bait I have gathered in my life, starting at about age five. In weight? Time spent? All wasted? It is incalculable. I am still doing it.  The other day when my grandson Lane Webster, and his cousin Ethan Sartin, of Sand Springs, came out to our place to spend the night on the Branch, I promised to take them fishing. That was my end of the deal. Pam’s end of the deal was to feed them better than they deserved.  “I’ve never eaten curry before,” Ethan said.  “Wow!”, Lane said, “It’s my favorite!”  “I thought meatballs were,” Pam said.  “Yes!” Lane said, “Them, too!”  I told them if we were going to go fishing, then they were going to have to gather bait, that was their end of the deal; that I was not going to pay for bait with today’s dollars.  I didn’t care: I told them they ...

It’s light enough, now, to thread a needle outdoors at six in the morning, and cool enough to make you wonder why anyone ever complains about the heat in Oklahoma. Concrete workers, and roofers, know this. So do cat fishermen.   In July, in the hot, hot summertime, in the rocks, you’re going to find the catfish, three species, spawning; no roofers or concrete workers. If you do see the latter, just keep moving, gaze averted.   One cool morning this week, right after a pleasant nighttime shower, you would’ve found me there. I was catching fish, nice, fat channel cats up to about three to four pounds; one bigger that broke me off. Channel? Blue? Flathead? I don’t know. I was using live bait, so it could’ve been any of those three mentioned, the flatheads almost always preferring live bait to dead. It was big, whatever it was.   I say “live bait,” and that would include earthworms and crawdads, wouldn’t it? Over the years I’ve caught more cats in the rocks using what they ca...