Baker's Branch

  Hunting squirrels in the middle of winter is different than hunting them in the middle of spring; I knew that. Hunting them in the middle of the day is different than hunting them at dawn or dusk, too, and I knew that. But I wanted to go, so I conned Brian Loveland into making a run with me up to our deer camp on the upper Arkansas near Ponca City to shake ‘em up a little just to let ‘em know we’re still alive. A lot of this was just a fight against “old timer’s” boredom, but part of it was Brian’s fault, too, the way I saw it. One night during deer season sitting in the tent and chunking fine burning ash slabs into the woodburner, Brian asked, “Reckon how many squirrels it’d take to equal one deer?” I started to grin at the seeming impossibility of such a guesstimate, until it suddenly occurred to me that, yes, a fairly accurate approximation could be made, and probably in one’s head without a calculator, regarding such a figure, and said so. “If you’ll let me round some numbers...

  It’s not often I go fishing and come home with a dog story, but it happens. It happened a few days back when Leon Mears of Mannford called and asked if I’d like to go crappie fishing up on Skiatook Lake. Well, sure. There are people around here (not many) as good a crappie fisherman as Leon, but none better. The plan was to meet up with a friend of Leon’s, Kevin DeLong of Hominy, and fish an area of the lake where the two of them had located swarms of cold weather, open water crappie feasting on shad in the mid-reaches of the lake. The fish, for no apparent reason, were schooled up great distances from the shoreline, and not near any known brush piles. It was a weird set-up for any crappie fisherman familiar with the mid-winter habits of what people in our country see as the best eating fish there is, walleye and the various catfish species not excluded. Years ago, Dave Hladik and I had stumbled upon an exact duplicate pattern down on Lake Tenkiller when, fishing for “whatever”, ...